Netflix Employee Review
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Apr 16, 2009
2009-04-16 09:43 PDT
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Netflix – “Like a good drama: A flashy young company in a nice setting, but with lots of tension under the surface”
22 of 28 people found this helpfulPros
Netflix has nice, fancy offices in Los Gatos. They have good snacks. They pay a pretty high cash salary. You get to claim that you're in the movie business.
Cons
Netflix makes a big deal about their hiring policies. They claim that they regularly evaluate employee performance, and let the lowest performers go. To me, this sounded great! In contrast to many other companies where lazy and incompetent people hang around for years, Netflix tried to retain only the best and brightest people.
Unfortunately, that's not what it was like in reality. A week after I started at Netflix, the recruiter who hired me was unceremoniously dismissed. Then the tech support guy in our office was released. Then an engineer on my team. In each of these cases, it wasn't clear what these folks had done wrong. They had all been technically competent, friendly and hard working. This promoted a culture of fear where no one felt that their job was secure.
It turns out that there were several things going on. Managers were given incentives to regularly purge employees. So, managers developed antagonistic relationships with employees. In most normal companies, a key responsibility of a manager is to defend their team in front of senior management. At Netflix, this just doesn't happen.
Additionally, Netflix doesn't have adequate mechanisms for providing feedback and review to employees. (In the year I spent at Netflix, I didn't receive a single review, positive or negative.) Without a formal system for employee evaluation, managers resort to picking favorites: they hire in their friends, and fire people who they aren't friends with. I saw this happen to many different people while I was at Netflix. It's allowable by law (everyone is an "at will" employee), but it does not lead Netflix to hire and retain the best people.
Netflix has had the good fortune to be in an easy business. They moved early into online DVD rentals, and have large cost advantages over potential rivals. Their competitors (Blockbuster, Walmart, etc) took major missteps, and were not really able to compete. Netflix doesn't have to be the best at anything they do: operations, marketing, movie recommendations, etc. They just have to be OK at these things to run a profitable business, and they are only OK at them.
Advice to Senior Management
The key problem with Netflix is in their HR policies. Netflix needs to establish formal job responsibilities for all employees, establish goals for individuals, and measure employee performance against those goals.
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Comments (10)
Quote: "Managers were given incentives to regularly purge employees."
This is absolutely not the case anywhere at Netflix. No manager is incented to let employees go in any way. The reviewer can question the quality of the choice to do so, or the motive, and that is quite fair. However, the suggestion that the company somehow rewards such a choice is factually false.
Quote: "In the year I spent at Netflix, I didn't receive a single review, positive or negative."
Netflix conducts a review process with participation from management, peers and partners across the company more often than once a year. The reviewer is listed as a former employee that was employed into 2009, and the quote suggests they were with the company for one year. Netflix conducted a company-wide review that included every salaried employee in February of 2009. A similar review had happened less than 12 months prior in 2008. It is not possible to have been with Netflix for a year and missed this review process.
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I was there for one year, I never got a performance review, my manager quit a few months after I started.
My termination process consisted of an afternoon meeting entitled, "Planning"
There approximately ten people at that meeting and we were all told we were dismissed that day and had a couple of hours to gather our belongings and turn in all of our company owned equipment.
I've never been at a company that treated its employees so poorly.
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When you have put your heart and soul into a company, believed their lies, and then got gut punched without any warning, recourse, or rationale there is no way to understand. It hurts period. It hurts even more when you are turned out into a job market where there is no place for your talents to go. A lot of Netflix work is proprietary so it is a hard sell to transfer to a new job. Not saying that there isn't hope for the truly gifted and well-connected, but in this market it takes more than gifts - it takes a miracle.
Netflix could choose a radically different path of true excellence - but they have chosen a depraved way of building their company. Human capital at Netflix is routinely spent as if it was worthless. A sad, unimaginative, and repulsive way to do business IMHO.
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