Netflix Employee Reviews about "culture of fear"

Pros

High Compensation Good Name Recognition

Cons

Firing Culture Culture of Fear

Pros

* "Freedom and Responsibility Culture" = Lots of individual control (Read Reed's slide deck) * If you're part of a well-run team, you'll love it - Excellent compensation - Unique stock option program with personal choice for $$$ allocated - Fast-paced environment with lots of challenges - It's the largest streaming movie service in the world and it's just getting better - Extremely open with corporate information sharing (no internal culture of secrecy like Apple) - Incredible execution over the last couple years - the methods can be controversial, but you can't argue with the quarterly/annual results

Cons

* 'High Performance Culture' = You can hang yourself easily and get canned (Read Reed's slide deck) * If you join a mis-managed group, you'll be posting a negative review on here soon. :-) - Average benefits programs - Inexperienced managers can mis-apply the 'high performance culture' philosophy and lead to the 'culture of fear' some people have complained about in certain organizations - Double-standard for performance: VP/C-level staff appear immune from 'high performance culture'. Reed rocks, but some of the others are average/good, not exceptional.

Pros

Great brand Disciplined Focused Good at execution and keeping schedules

Cons

Performance driven culture = culture of fear and suppression Few chances for development or advancement Management does not seem to care about employees as people Not at all a fun place to work, very hard to build relationships

Pros

Innovative company and a lot of access to learn what you want to

Cons

Culture of fear and difficult to move up

Pros

Fantastic colleagues, small teams, top-of-market pay, autonomy, teams getting more and more diverse.

Cons

Constant internal fear of being cut or 'exited' due to company culture. Few and rare avenues for growth.

Pros

There are some teams doing progressive, technically interesting work- content encoding, some machine learning teams

Cons

Most teams aren't working on anything very innovative. The tech is your standard microservices architecture, and everything gets open-sourced, with a blog post and a nice conference talk. Eventually these projects wither because no one maintains them, and sometimes they don't even solve very effectively the problems they tout, but it's good PR for the engineers and 'leaders'. Culture of fear is real. My manager was toxic, he loved to talk about diversity even though he was the biggest mansplainer in the room. My interview was interesting, it was a monologue of his rather unique theories of engineering management, most of which was a bunch of gibberish culled from the culture deck. When I got there I found him to be a pretty ineffective manager. He didn't have any engineering vision, no idea of strategy, and wasn't technical. If you get into an interview room and the manager spends 45 mins talking about himself, that's probably a sign to run! Pick and choose what team you join. You can have either a pretty cool time with some smart folks, or have to deal with narcissists who believe their own PR. Everytime I run into a Netflixer- they've either 1) just been fired or 2) tell me stories about the people in common we know who've been fired.

Pros

Walk the walk consistent with the well-articulated culture. Very focused. Clear, well-articulated strategy with very good execution against it. Very transparent, both internally and externally.

Cons

A bit of a culture of fear articulated as 'the sniper in the building' as some new hires and long-time employees are either bad fit or fail to grow, and are subsequently let go. Culture emphasizes experimentation, which includes needed organizational experiments, and this type of experimentation also reinforces the fear. Again, most of this well-articulated in culture deck, so no surprise.

Pros

Pay and benefits. They typically pay above scale and provide benefits from the time you become a full time employee.

Cons

Management, on several occasions missed their mark on several key initiatives in the center. Specifically they never had a clue what was happening on the floor in regards to employee satisfaction and were never involved in developing employees to rank up. 'Manage up or out' was stated on several occasions and this approach is what developed a culture of fear in the call center. High turnover is never a positive motivating factor and management was quick to let go of the people who stood against that ideal.

Pros

top of the market compensation and good product.

Cons

Very political and the culture of fear is real. People will bad-mouth you behind your back, just to save their jobs and since there are no HR processes/rules or documentation, your entire existence will depend on manager. Talking of which, personally I had two managers so far: One who never led bigger teams before, he said inappropriate/unprofessional things all the time (mind you, Netflix is supposed to hire only experienced people). The other one was a macho, drinking type. He always favored the ones who went out with him drinking. If you were not into drinking/socializing/alpha male communication style - too bad! Summary: If you only care about money, this place is for you but if you want an environment with a positive culture you should look elsewhere.

Pros

The pay is above average. The environment is kept very clean. The dress code is very relaxed.

Cons

Everything else about the job. I worked for Netflix for 3 months and had to quit. I have never left a job so quickly. It's that bad. You know you're in a culture of fear when the person training your group talks about how they were nearly fired. I was told I would be let go during training if I didn't 'improve'. The problem is they were incapable of telling me what needed 'improving'. I've worked in customer service for over a decade and never been exposed to such a fear based culture. If you read other reviews of Netflix you'll find that most people have had a similar experience.