Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs

http://slashdot.org/story/13/12/25/0242207/netflix-non-a-players-unworthy-of-jobs

by wyclif • 13 years ago

62 70 13 years ago

Robadob• 13 years ago

This appears to be a repost of yesterdays; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959269

wyclif• 13 years ago

Yes, I read the HBR post yesterday. But the reason I submitted this is (believe it or not) because of the rather cynical Slashdot commentary and links adding value, as well as the continued interest in employment and hiring trends on HN this week.

In the case of the latter, I'm not really sure why that's so. I suspect it may have to do with the fact that it's the end of the year and that is when a lot of companies do layoffs and firings, and an upcoming new year means some people are thinking about transitioning to new jobs or roles.

kiallmacinnes• 13 years ago

Its amazing how different the Slashdot commentary is from yesterdays HN post...

AmVess• 13 years ago

The quality of /. comments section has been in a tailspin for years. so it's no great shock that the opinions differ by a vast amount.

adestefan• 13 years ago

There are many people who say the same thing about HN comments.

davidgerard• 13 years ago

Approximate no-one reads it. I recently got Slashdotted, HNdotted and Redditdotted; Reddit melted the server (80k+), HN made it grind a bit (6k), Slashdot it barely noticed (<2000).

polskibus• 13 years ago

Firing once useful contributors is a failure of management. Managers should find a way to repurpose experienced employees and use their experience and knowledge of the company to greater mutual benefit.

tomp2• 13 years ago

Did you even read the original article? Even the part quoted above says:

we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit

If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills. In the original article, the author explained Netflix's transition from DVD-over-mail to video-streaming-on-demand. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few people that were useful in the old business model and completely useless in the new one. The only fair thing in this case is to let them go, gracefully of course.

perlpimp• 13 years ago

Here is a case. you have a jar from pasta sauce. You can toss the jar out after making pasta sauce or you can fill it up with sugar/spices. And it can serve you for a long long time this way.

High pressure environments usually burn people out leaving them useless and thats the underlying message in working for netflix - bust your ass, then most likely you will get fired.

Great message, maybe it is a challenge to youngsters that want to see how not to build a company and rub shoulders with some great minds - before starting their own gig and pillaging the company for their top talent.

protomyth3• 13 years ago

"If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills."

A-players cannot learn new skills?

Basically, they want specialists and not A players[1] and then they discard and hire new specialists. Its HR checklistism disguised as elitism.

1) A players can learn new skills and still be A players. If they cannot, then they weren't A players.

trimbo2• 13 years ago

If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills.

Many companies at least try by way of retraining.

Netflix is saying they're not willing to offer courses/training to already employed people in order to keep them. Consider what this means in terms of dollars. They are choosing to spend more money on recruiting and hiring overhead than on training.

Maybe they've done the math and this hiring overhead is cheaper than retraining -- but they've ignored the long game of goodwill towards the company. Or maybe they just don't care.

analog31• 13 years ago

Failing to intervene when a contributor's usefulness starts to wane is a failure of management.

gopalv• 13 years ago

The best teams I've worked in has had A-players, B-players and C-players.

Some of the C-players were wild kids with potential, who needed mentoring.

Some of the B-players were people who were not motivated at all - some because they wanted money and the company didn't pay, some because they had been promoted upto their level of competence.

The best bit the A-players did more than anything else was to make the B-players competent & motivate them. They added in their abilities and sure, wasted a lot of time sitting in other people's desks. But the team of five or so around an A-player grew and prospered to become incredibly effective.

That was an awakening. That was when I stopped overworking myself to write tons of code and try to follow into the foot-steps of those A-players who became "force multipliers" in any team.

Knowing the people I admired, I feel like it will take another decade, at least.

logicallee• 13 years ago

There's a special kind of a-player who doesn't (or even can't) code, though understands the work of others. For example, Jobs early in his career and later on as well certainly seemed to fill your definition of an A-player force multiplier, with one exception: he did not code personally at all, according to Woz.

It is very interesting that he still fit the rest of your description, as far as I understand.

phaus2• 13 years ago

I wonder what he did at Atari if he didn't code? He wasn't a force multiplier there, he actually ended up on a shift by himself because everyone hated working with him.

I always assumed that he could code at a very basic level, perhaps I was wrong.

auggierose2• 13 years ago

Oh, a friend of mine is just like that. He is very smart, but very rarely codes (he likes to let his friends do the coding for him :-)). And by the way, he is of Syrian descent as well!

I think he just made his first couple of millions working for the Samwer brothers.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

I agree with most of your post, and the 'force-multiplier' aspect is important, however

The definition of A/B/C players is mostly subjective and dependent on the company as well.

An excellent Java developer can suck at a Python house and vice-versa (probably will suck less, but still).

But, the main definition of "A-Players" seems to be people that will overwork themselves for the company

And for these I say: yes, I'm not an A-Player, sorry...

mdwrigh22• 13 years ago

An excellent Java developer can suck at a Python house and vice-versa (probably will suck less, but still).

I've yet to meet an excellent developer who was only excellent in his language of choice. In my experience at least, almost all of the talents that make an A player an A transcend whatever language they're using and has far more to do with their ability to reason and hold an entire system in their head.

djillionsmix3• 13 years ago

But, the main definition of "A-Players" seems to be people that will overwork themselves for the company

It's really not even anything that consistent.

The definition of "A Players" is "whoever management is currently in love with."

Putting in long hours, doing incredibly vital work, but the brass doesn't get that funny feeling in their pants when they think about you? Then you're a B player at best and management has an infinite list of reasons why it's your fault that's the case.

It's utterly narcissistic ego-driven garbage.

jakobe• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that the whole notion of A-players, B-players etc is just an easy way for people in dysfunctional teams to put the blame on those idiots they have to work with.

Some people work great as a team; some don't. There's no magic formula that will predict that. Classifying people as A-, B-players etc assumes there is some well-ordered relation describing the productivity of employees; but such a thing does not exist.

There are people with good leadership skills, people who are great when guided, people who prefer working on their own. Some know every tiny technical detail of the platform they work with, some have a talent for hacks that work great in practice. If you try measuring all these people on an arbitrary one-dimensional scale, and pick only the A-players, you'll more likely then not end up with another dysfunctional team (but someone will then just measure along a different axis and declare that the team failed because of all those B-players)

jt21902• 13 years ago

To quote a subheading from the original HBR article:

  > Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

At no point does the article argue that job performance can be measured abstractly, without taking the context of the work into consideration.

Using your example, those you're labeling as "B Players" would be "A Players" within the context of their current team.

it_learnses• 13 years ago

What I got out of it was that HR didn't want to micro-manage so they allowed employees and managers to think what was best for the company, rather than treating them like children. They gave them spending leeway and trusted them to spend it carefully. I think that was a good call.

They did let go a few people who they thought wouldn't be able to adapt but with a good severance. I'm halfway split on this one. Is this a general policy? Or do they re-purpose people who they think are capable of being re-purposed and letting go the rest of them? It's sad that this happens, but I'm not sure I'd blame Netflix. Maybe if we had a guaranteed living wage, then this wouldn't even be an issue :)

walshemj• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I think a lot of the tail functions in organizations (accounts ,HR building services) get delusions of grandeur and start trying to run the company instead of just doing what they are paid to do - disastrous PRP and stack ranking systems being some very good examples

As one "engineering" telecoms CEO told his building services director "world class telecoms companies dont have a head office in a F^%&*ing shed at Heathrow"

fit2rule2• 13 years ago

What the heck is an "A-Player" or a "B-Player"? I think this is another American sporting term that has no place in the technology field, personally .. is it not discrimination wrapped up in a pop-cult package?

thatthatis• 13 years ago

In American education an "A" grade is 90% or higher, a "B" grade is 80-90% and a "C" grade is 70-80%

"A" player usually means someone in the top tier academically or professionally.

As far as I know it isn't used in American sporting.

caoilte• 13 years ago

Wow, your tests must be easy.

bartonfink• 13 years ago

I believe Joel Spolsky coined those terms in an essay about hiring. The reference is to American grading - letter grades are A (best), B, C, D and F.

He didn't, that I recall, define where the difference between an A and a B player was, so it's kind of a difficult metaphor to apply. It's really got nothing to do with any American sport that I know of - those terms would be more like "bench player", "starter" or "utility player".

fit2rule2• 13 years ago

Well, whether its derived from sports or not, I still find the terminology to be quite discriminatory. What justifies this, I wonder?

Its possible that everyone in the world is an A-player, given the right chance. But with rampant discrimination going on, I doubt the chance is ever granted in a company that uses this terminology to manage itself ..

bjustin• 13 years ago

An "A-Player" is someone amazing at what they do and never satisfied with the status quo. These are the kind of people that crank out an MVP that will need to be replaced as soon as you start to scale. They are (generally) terrible in teams, but necessary to keep a company from becoming complacent and thus slowly dying.

A "B-Player" is someone competent. These are the people that do most of the work to make a solid product. A sizable company needs to be 80%+ B-players to be stable in the long term. On the other hand, a company of only B-players is prone to disruption from those better able to respond to the market.

"C-Players" are the people who don't contribute much, or even drag down the company. They may be incompetent or have a poisonous attitude. Too many C-players will doom a company to failure.

These definitions are how "A-Player" and so on are described to big corporations, so YMMV with startups and small companies.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

I see the answers given, and have to wonder if they know we are talking people and not slabs of warm meat.

dictum• 13 years ago

USDA Prime beef won't complain when it's rewarded for the 60-hour work weeks with a firing.

drewhk• 13 years ago

It's a marketing term invented by companies for recruiting. If you think about it, A-Player simply means: "the people who we decided to hire". The idea is brilliant:

- If you are rejected, it is your fault. You are not good enough.

- If you are fired, it is you fault. You are no longer good enough.

- While you are working there, it boosts your ego, because you are "one of the elite", a "no compromise high-performer", a "rockstar" an "A-Player", etc. and you feel no empathy for the fired/rejected ones -- "they were not good enough, but I am!". And of course you do everything to remain employed, since that is what makes you the cool kid.

Of course other products are marketed in a similar fashion, by artificially creating a feel of "exclusivism" -- it is just a bit harder to recognize it in the software world, since it is designed to push our own "secret nerd desire button" (feeling mentally superior to others).

NAFV_P• 13 years ago

A, B && C players. First you categorise programming languages, next people. I thought this type of thinking died out in the late nineties, when people realised it was a load of shite.

djillionsmix3• 13 years ago

As long as there's an asshole looking for an excuse to be an asshole they'll keep reinventing the same stupid shit.

ChristianMarks• 13 years ago

Let the A-players clean their own toilets.

spacecadet• 13 years ago

Im a member of the A-Team. I have a certificate from 1985 to prove it...

joezydeco• 13 years ago

I pity you, fool.

coldcode• 13 years ago

So if I put "A-Player" on my linked-in page I will get hired faster? Such an imbecilic way to divide up programmers. This definition is so open to multiple definitions it's totally useless. Everyone's idea of a good/bad programmer is radically different and likely a continuum. What matters in the end is the team you have doing what you need them to do. Calling people A, B or C is like trying to digitize an analog signal made up of multiple frequencies with 2 bits.

CGamesPlay• 13 years ago

Using a bad definition of "A-level performance" obviously makes the idea of only keeping A players sound like a bad plan. Individual performance evaluations should create incentives that are aligned to company incentives.

- Evaluating performance based on effort fails to incentivize output totally; a high performer who works 9-5 is foolishly ranked underneath a mediocre performer who stays overtime: the mediocre performer will be around forever--the high performer will find a better job.

- Evaluating performance based on high quantity of output without regard to long-term viability (quality) of the output incentivizes reactionary behavior and leads to technical debt: over time, even your high performers won't be able to produce good output in a timely fashion because there is nothing sound to build upon.

If the incentives are aligned, "performance" at an individual level means increasing performance of the team and company, and involves the quantity of high-quality output (ignoring low-quality output) and the degree to which an individual enables the rest of the team to produce high-quality output.

I think the Slashdot comment totally misses the mark on how Netflix defines performance.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

I'd have more confidence in a company that retained only "A-players" if the policy was applied to everyone up to the CEO. But I doubt we'll ever live to see the CEO of Netflix resign because the company isn't performing well enough. (If he ever gets fired by the board, it will only be after the company under-performs for a very long time.)

macspoofing2• 13 years ago

Heh. The attempted spinning of the DVD business plus the fee increases were a PR fiasco and cost Netflix huge amount of subscribers. Surely the CEO was off his "A game" and was fired accordingly.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

I don't know if aggressively firing low performers is a good strategy, but it has zero bearing on the economy as a whole, or H-1Bs.

All tech companies would gain if they were allowed access to cheaper labor, regardless of their HR strategy. And all companies would prefer better employees over worse, regardless of whether they prefer to achieve this in the hiring stage or by firing people later.

lukejduncan• 13 years ago

Everyone claims to hire "only A players." Alice interviews at TechCo, enters the interview anti-loop, and doesn't get an offer. Alice leaves while TechCo tells it's new hires "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team." Alice avoids the anti-loop at MicroCo, gets an offer, and is told "we only hire A players, you're the best of the best, welcome to the team."

And the myth of only hiring A players perpetuates itself.

edit: grammar

zmjjmz• 13 years ago

I think the point of the article is that whether or not someone is an A-player is context dependent. Alice might not be an A-player at TechCo (for some reason e.g. the way they dole out projects) but is an excellent fit at MicroCo, where she is considered an A-player because she can work well in their context.

Whether or not this works in practice is obviously a bit iffy, since finding someone who fits exactly your context is incredibly difficult.

auggierose2• 13 years ago

I think this is totally OK. Pay me 10 dollars a minute, and I will surely understand when I will be let go because I am not fully adequate for your current purpose anymore.

stefan_kendall• 13 years ago

I no longer believe in A/B/C players. It's an excuse, as many have mentioned, of poorly managing a dysfunctional team.

Are there people at companies that shouldn't have been hired, or should be fired? Sure, but that doesn't mean you can't take a team of differing skill-set individuals and make great products.

When your product is iterating rapidly, you may suddenly find that your crack team of javascript developers suddenly needs to analyze an sql execution plan. The best guy on the team for the job probably isn't the smartest guy, it's the one whose dealt with these sorts of issues before.

A team learns from each other.

yalogin• 13 years ago

Slashdot says it like it is. This made me remember why I liked it in the first place. Unlike HN where its mostly people who look to implement or have implemented such policies and so have no incentive to be harsh on Netflix.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

Claiming to hire only 'A' players is probably much more important for successful hiring than actually doing it. It seems to be en vogue suddenly to claim to have only the best people. Is that really such a sought-after attribute of companies for people who are looking into new tech jobs?

avifreedman• 13 years ago

A friend of mine is a director at Netflix. He was explaining to me that compensation vs retention are different conversations there.

They want to pay people market+ for A players, but if you're not at the level expected, you'll be let go if you don't get (back) to that level.

So a conversation shouldn't (but sometimes does) go from "we shouldn't give her a $25k raise, {s}he hasn't been doing well enough" to firing her for not improving.

On the other hand, no one is supposed to be confused about where {s}he stands with respect to performance and improvement.

protomyth3• 13 years ago

How does new, disruptive technology enter the company if the consequence of such technology is hiring new A players and firing the existing A players?

macspoofing2• 13 years ago

I'm interested to read about the rating system they use to differentiate A players from others.

djillionsmix3• 13 years ago

You know who talked a lot about being A players who only hire A players?

The Bush administration.

Netflix: Non-'A' Players Unworthy of Jobs

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