Netflix Reviews

Pros

good pay (not compared to the expectations) . its good ROI for netflix not to employee.
if ur an expert and u r stuck in ur place then netflix can reward u good.
it can allow you to be a mster of everything and allow merit speak than leadership.

Cons

it depends on ur manager's discretion. so if ur gaurded to be urself then its the place to work.
unrefined office culture is prone to exploitation. counter productive culture and fear is developed and growing faster.

Advice to Senior Management

start smacking the time and hear the employees voices to keep the best in the winning side.

Pros

1. Pay is good, and for some tough to fill roles, pay is very good.
2. The stock option plan is a good deal.
3. A number of policies treat people like adults (dress code, attendance, and vacation/holidays). You can take as much time off as you want, as long as you get your job done.
4. A number of smart people get hired.
5. The industry is growing very fast.
6. Well known brand with instant street recognition.
7. Facilities are pretty good.

Cons

1. Look at the comments on this site around turnover, treating people poorly, sick culture, and weak senior leadership. These are all very accurate.
2. No training, management training, or development. The philosophy is if you don’t have what we need, we will replace you (i.e., fire you for not being a “good fit”) with someone from the outside who has that.
3. Hourly jobs in particular have stagnant pay.
4. There are no bonuses or incentives.
5. The culture has serious problems.
  a. You will see countless references on this site to a “culture of fear”. This is widespread in every department and division. Even executives laugh that their time is numbered. A company that functions on fear is not a place for the long term. When everyone in a room is asked do they fear being fired and everyone says yes, that is a big problem.
  b. A culture of watching your back and stabbing others in the back. Many employees, including C level people, participate and have learned that tossing others under the bus, keeps them safe. They see this as a way to protect themselves from scrutiny from above. Employees and managers are all too comfortable talking about what is not working with a person. The 360 review process reinforces this. Those who have been there the longest are almost soulless with regard to firings. They have fired or seen so many people let go that they don’t really care anymore.
6. You can be fired without warning, feedback, or any coaching. Most employees don’t bring any personal belongings to work as they could be let go at any moment. It is often a surprise.
7. Do not move for a job with Netflix. If your partner or spouse doesn’t work, you could be risking your families financial health. There is no job security regardless of how good you are. Performance does not equal security at Netflix.
8. Managers have a 1 year shelf life before they get shown the door. Directors and VPs are constantly evaluating managers, so anytime you make a mistake, are perceived not to be cutting edge, it could be your turn.
9. HR’s job is to hire and show people the door. HR brags about how good they are at firing people. They don’t help employees, nor are they there to help employees become better. Their role is simply to ensure the company doesn’t get sued and headhunt for all the people that are turning over.
10. Managers main role is making their team better through constrantly looking for their weaker employees. Leaders are asked could they hire someone better. Of course the answer will always be yes.
11. No severance package is enough to compensate you for disruption in your career, moving, or the stress that comes without having a job.
12. The recruiting function will hire you fast. The idea is to keep you excited, but if you are reading this don’t get caught up in the Netflix product of movies—look at whether this is actually a place you want to work.
13. It’s incredibly stressful and life-shortening for you and your loved ones. Why work at a place where people, including your hiring managers, treat you as completely disposable?

Advice to Senior Management

1. Change out your HR leadership. They are in love with the culture, but they are creating an unhealthy long term environment. Once the economy picks up you will not be able to treat people as poorly as you do.
2. Change the culture of fear. Install real coaching, feedback, and performance reviews so employees can feel comfortable doing their jobs.
3. Do some employee surveys to learn the real thoughts of your front line team.
4. Stop the turnover that is higher than comparable companies.
5. Reed, if you are not a people person, hire some people who are. You will get better performance from people who are not in constant fear of being fired. You can still remove weak performers, but don’t make even your best employees fear for their jobs.

Pros

High performance culture results in a good mix of competence and reliability. Lots of freedom to direct oneself and have impact outside of your specific role. Nice location (Los Gatos), flexible time off, pretty good pay but not necessarily as top-of-market as it used to be. We are treated like adults.

Cons

Certain groups of the org are marginalized by overall company direction, resulting in a thinning of talent in critical spots. People do seem to get fired almost without warning, and this seems to serve more as a scare tactic to everyone else than a righteous termination sometimes. Salaries are no longer over top-of-market (essentially other companies have stepped up). The ESPP is a joke, and no stock is given to employees...this, plus lack of something as simple as an xmass party, all serves to divest employees.

Reed is a great leader, but he's not infallible and shouldnt surround himself with yes men at the c-level.

Advice to Senior Management

Reed, talk to other CEOs, learn from your peers, listen to your managers/directors/engineers and not just your c-level head nodders...dont let success convince you that you're brilliant and have all the answers.

Pros

-some phenomenally smart people
-great resume builder (if you have the ability to insulate yourself from the cons)
-the opportunity for exposure to leading-edge work
-great communication about strategic direction of the company and understanding -- everyone know what it as stake
-free membership

Cons

-much talk about Netflix 'culture' internally, but few walk the walk. Politics and immaturity are alive and well here, especially at the senior management level despite popular internal belief
-people disappear (are fired) daily, and the excuse is often simply 'not a fit'. You never know when your number is up
-company programs such as benefits changes, SOP etc., which are meant to be leading edge, simple, and innovative are most often poorly communicated and confusing
-unprofessional behavior such as disparaging remarks, put-downs, and talking behind the backs of others, from those who should be modeling the opposite behaviors
-limited structure in certain areas where at least some process would be helpful, often feels like throwing darts in the dark and decisions are often emotionally based on not data-driven
-speaking up earns you a target on your back

Advice to Senior Management

You cannot continue to tell yourself over and over that your culture is innovative, fresh, and uncomplicated, because it is not. Perhaps it is time to be realistic and call it for what it is. Perhaps then you can be self-reflective enough to change for the better.

Pros

Innovative company with strong growth and brand recognition, pay and benefits are good, the work is challenging and there are some great people that work there. New hire orientation was a good experience and fun to attend.

Cons

The culture sounds great at the beginning however, in reality there is no empathy or understanding of human error. People are not given the time to learn, make mistakes and grow from the mistake, instead one mistake (even small) will get you shown to the door. There is no training and even high powered professionals need some direction and guidance. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty inherent in the culture and it leads to an "every man for himself" culture which does not promote teamwork.

Advice to Senior Management

HR 101, your employee's are your greatest asset and constant turnover is not healthy for any business in the long run.

Pros

Pay is good
Stock
Clean place to work

Cons

Turnover is high
You never know when you will be fired
Always in fear
Vacation policy is a joke - the moment you become an employee, you are given a laptop and Blackberry. You are basically tied down to both (7 days a week 24 hours a day).
Benefits are expensive (not fair for a hub employee who make as low as $9-$10hour).
I was forced to fire 5 people by upper management due to not being a "fit" for the position.

Advice to Senior Management

Change your HR Leadership team as they are the ones who are consistently firing people for no apparent reason..

Pros

- Fast paced environment
- Lot of smart people
- Minimum processes (great for an engineer, may not be great for ops)
- Market pay (It would seem above market until you look at the details, at which point you realize its at market i.e. google, facebook etc)

Cons

- Poor planning
- Paying for health/vision/dental out of pocket if you want coverage for family
- Put your head down and do the job. Don't question.
- Full time employees are basically long-term contractors.
- No career growth (Of course there's always a handful of exceptions)

Advice to Senior Management

Its a really different culture that is almost close to being great but not there. Need to recognize that real people work at the company.

Pros

Freedom and responsibility. We're given the freedom to make our own choices. unlimited vacation (there's a catch though); free lunch

Cons

no real job security; advancement to other positions is extremely limited, but getting better.

Advice to Senior Management

More actionable feedback. Vague feedback is the worst kind.

Pros

culture of excellence in all ways

Cons

small scale teams means less opportunity for variety than other firms

Pros

Like many of the reviews have already said, Netflix does offer some nice employee benefits, especially the employee stock purchase program (take a look at what Netflix stock has been doing, the last couple of years - you'll wish you'd bought in 2007)

I've met some great people while working there, both peers and supervisors.

For the most part, customer support is incredibly easy, because the service itself works pretty smoothly. When it doesn't, CS reps have the power to make things right for customers, which is fabulous.

Unlimited time off (within reason, and when it's available) is awesome.

Cons

Ultimately, the cons outweigh the pros. I will be voluntarily leaving Netflix for a new job in the very near future.

Netflix treats employees like they're completely expendable. I realize that no one is indispensable to a company, but Netflix uses up employees like I use up tissues when I have a cold. The turnover is ridiculous, and it doesn't have to be that way.

For CS reps, the main statistic used to determine our "worthiness" is the DSAT. Customers get asked a simple question after contacting customer service: "Were you satisfied with the call?" A "no" response counts against the rep, even if it was something the rep couldn't control (I'm sorry, it looks like your bank declined your card for this month's service fee.), or the customer was making an unreasonable demand (I got a disc that won't play! Give me six months of free service or I'm cancelling!). Netflix's stance is that we should be able to sugar-coat bad news so well that the customer doesn't hang up unhappy. This method of measurement is incredibly flawed and has led to reps "gaming" the system to avoid "no" responses.

Netflix does not give raises. Period. Not for cost of living, not for length of time employed, not even for outstanding performance. I have worked there 3+ years and my stats have been stellar the whole time. So stellar, I'm one of the people they have trainees shadow, to hear how to handle calls properly. I have *never* gotten a raise. Monetarily, Netflix considers my value to be the same as a new hire who just got out of training.

No paid time off. (Unless I want to take a pay cut and bank that toward paid time off.)

Mandatory overtime during the holidays. (They're promising it won't happen again this year, but that's what they said last year ... and we had mandatory overtime for three months last winter. And the winter before.)

Extremely limited career options - unless you want to be a CS supervisor, you're pretty much out of luck at the call center.

Narrow-focus hiring - Netflix hires people with EXACTLY the skills they need for a particular position. If that position goes away, so does the person. There is very little provision for cross-training or retraining a good employee to fit them in somewhere else.

TRaSE - one exception to the cross-training policy has been TRaSE, which is a disaster, so far. TRaSE combined the department that handles streaming tech support escalations with the department that handles loss prevention: billing fraud, shipping issues, physical inventory problems and website content issues. They all received cross-training, and even though there's more people to handle problems now, CS reps can never get a response when they have an urgent loss prevention issue. Reps have to tell customers "someone will get back to you within 1-3 business days." What happened to "one call resolution"? There's a guaranteed "no" response for my DSAT. Thanks a lot.

Workforce Management can't seem to forecast how much staff is needed; we will have weeks where they offer to let reps go home early every day, and then a couple of weeks later, they're offering voluntary extra hours and begging people to stay after their shifts. This is probably related to the fact that Marketing doesn't feel like they need to let anyone know about promotions until the last minute.

Speaking of Marketing, they don't seem to feel a need to ask anyone what kind of impact various promotions will have on the rest of Netflix's operations. The "no credit card necessary for a free trial" promo was a fiasco, much of which could have been avoided by asking some seasoned reps a few key questions.

The same can be said about some of the "tests" that Engineering sets up on the website. Isn't it logical to maybe ask a few questions of the people who actually talk to the customers before you try something out? I realize that we need to find out what works and what doesn't, but if a "test" makes the service unusable or unpalatable for a customer and they call to complain, CS reps can't remove them from the "test". Netflix is willing to lose the customer because that's a valid "test result". There has to be a better way.

The Canadian service was launched prematurely, in my opinion. Many of the calls we get from Canadian customers center on the lack of content, especially newer releases. The Canadian streaming library will grow, just like the US library, but that's not a satisfying answer to Canadian customers. Thanks for another "no" response on my DSAT, Marketing department!

Advice to Senior Management

The service works so well. Figure out a way to make your human resources department work at least half as well. You are losing good employees at a ridiculous rate, which is going to start affecting customer satisfaction, and ultimately, your bottom line. Dealing with the general public is stressful enough; your outstanding employees shouldn't have to deal with unfair treatment from you, as well.