Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs 397
theodp writes "Describing How Netflix Reinvented HR for the Harvard Business Review, ex-Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord describes 'the most basic element of Netflix's talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees — a perk better than foosball or free sushi — is hire only "A" players to work alongside them.' Continuing her Scrooge-worthy tale, McCord adds that firing a once-valuable employee instead of finding another way for her to contribute yielded another aha! moment for Netflix: 'If we wanted only "A" players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people — and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them — we learned to offer rich severance packages.' It's a sometimes-praised, sometimes-criticized strategy that's straight out of Steve Jobs' early '80s playbook. But, even if you assume your execs are capable of identifying 'A' players, how do you find enough employees if 90% of the country's population is deemed unworthy of jobs? Well, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings' support of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC suggests one possible answer — you get lobbyists to convince Congress you need to hire as many people as you want from outside the country. An article commenter points out that Netflix's 'Culture of Fear' has earned it a 3.2/5.0 rating on Glassdoor."
Well, it is from the bring-your-D+-game dept. (Score:5, Informative)
14 errors in font-awesome.css, over 50 errors in application.css, "Expected media feature name but found 'touch-enabled'" I don't even know what that means, but it came up a dozen times, downloadable font format unrecognized, another 50 errors in providers.css...
Re:Well, it is from the bring-your-D+-game dept. (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, you'd think with all those "A" players they could design a mobile interface that actually worked well instead of sucking.
Re:'A' Players Make a Lot of Questionable Decision (Score:4, Informative)
I think the choice of VC-1 came because it was supported by Silverlight while H.264 was limited if present at all. VC-1 is also the protocol of choice for Blu-Ray, and the time saved simply copying the files instead of moving them to H.264 may be significant.
While VC-1 is part of the mandatory codecs in the BluRay standard due to very heavy lobbying by
Microsoft at the time, I've yet to encounter a single actual disc using it. There are some of them out
there (it is used a lot by Warner Brothers), but "of choice" VC-1 certainly isn't.
And copying files from BDs to directly use as streaming sources? With their double-digit megabit
per second encoding bitrates (the maximum video bitrate alone is 40MBit/s)? Absolutely not.
Re:'A' Players Make a Lot of Questionable Decision (Score:5, Informative)
Re:this is like (Score:3, Informative)
Re:this is like (Score:3, Informative)
Actually...Netflix does quite a lot of research. They are famous as being tireless in their quest to improve every aspect of their business...and while most of those changes are invisible to us there are still plenty that are quite apparent.
Yeah and so was Microsoft and it's decade+ of stack ranking was a complete disaster despite the arrogant HR managers thinking they were as great as these Netflix ones.
Re:this is like (Score:3, Informative)
Actually...Netflix does quite a lot of research. They are famous as being tireless in their quest to improve every aspect of their business...and while most of those changes are invisible to us there are still plenty that are quite apparent.
Remember back many years ago,when the return envelopes started showing up with the window cut-outs so that the bar code of the DVD could be scanned from the outside?
Yes, I remember. That was a looong time ago. And ever since they stopped being an underdog and hopped onto the corporate "A" list things have been going steadily downhill. The menu is utter shit! It mixes in movies I watched, it mixes in TV series with movies, it doesn't show anything (like star rating) but big dumb pictures, it fakes the star rating to feed me some crap I they just bought, etc.. It's as if they're trying to make it difficult to find something on purpose. Just tried to find something to watch yesterday. Wasted 20 minutes, walked away with a headache. And it didn't used to be this way - the interface was informative, you could sort by ratings, you could see what your friends rated and watched. I also think there were movies. That went out of the window, though now there's an annoying bar inviting me to share info with friends. Of course I need to sign in with a facebook account to do so.
Which brings me to my final point. What kind of a half-assed company requires a third party sign in to provide customer feedback?! I don't have a facebook account, and so I can't even send Netflix a message explaining how much they're messing up. The only way I can send a message is leave.
But it's not like they'd read it anyway - evidently they're too busy enjoying their "A"-list corporate circlejerk.