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It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers. For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.

Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer and who is not. I don't think there's one, people are good in different things, even within the same job... for one assignment, Joe may be the best, but for another, Mary is the winner (but again, to measure this reliably and objectively is nearly impossible IMHO for anything related to knowledge work - and I've read lots of research in this area!).

Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content! I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.

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lolinder 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.

So much this. OP's description of the work environment is stressing me out and I don't even work there.

At best a strategy like the one described above will get you the top 10% of people who are willing to put up with that kind of work environment, which means you might get the top 10% of single, childless 20–35-year-olds—people who are motivated first and foremost by ego and pay and don't value stability and work-life balance. But in the process you're more or less explicitly saying that you're not interested in people who are further along in their lives and value stability and reliability more than ego and raw paycheck size.

This means that you're missing out on the top 10% of 35–65-year-old engineers who are now parents with responsibilities outside of their career, even though the top 10% of that bracket would typically be "better" by most metrics than the top 10% of the younger bracket you're pre-filtering down to.

In a startup environment this might be a perfectly rational tradeoff—you want to filter for people who don't have much else to do and can give you a huge amount of unpaid overtime in exchange for you stroking their ego—but past a certain size and market share you need the stability offered by mature, experienced professionals.

If Netflix failed to get over that hump, it's not so surprising after all that they fell so hard in the last 10 years.

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jedberg 3 days ago | parent [-]

Most of the people I worked with were 30-50 years old with families and kids. The work life balance was great. I was the rare outlier who was married without kids.

We had senior engineers who would work hard and get things done and then go and be parents and partners.

	▲	relaxing 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We’re going to need a rigorous, data-driven assessment of their effectiveness in parenting and partnering to back up this claim.

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kube-system 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content!

It isn't that simple. Making money from content is not 1-to-1 related with the quality of the content. There are many examples of great content that doesn't make money, and many examples of content that makes a lot of money that isn't great. Also there are many differing opinions on what 'great content' even is.

	▲	echelon 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's an increasingly bad business to be in. Netflix burns customers when they cancel beloved shows, and they constantly have to experiment. They now have a bazillion competitors who are ramping up comparable businesses. There's no moat or secret sauce competitive advantage. Customers are free to switch at no cost. Bigger tech companies are using media content as simply a fringe benefit or commodity to enhance their platform offerings. YouTube, on the other hand, is already starting to eclipse the entire Netflix business model. YouTube is a monster with a huge and enviable moat, and it's only going to continue growing. It's a much stronger business model and they have a sticky and growing user base.

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exe34 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's safe to assume gp has drunk the koolaid. I spoke to somebody from the army once, and they too had the top 10% and it's difficult to imagine that every employer employs the top 10%. it's a cultural meme really, like everybody tells themselves they are good people really.

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jajko 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

At some point, people invest into their work/employment so heavily and tie it to their identity tad too much, they internally need to feel this is the right and best choice, which for many top talents may mean working with "top 10%", whatever that means. So otherwise smart folks will start parroting official company policies and become a 'good boy'. Suffice to say I don't look kindly on this, but it highly depends on the business.

I've heard similar claims many times before, albeit mostly not from places paying so much. Ie at university, there was promotion seminar from Accenture branch in our country, the guy was some higher manager and stated the same, how they want only the best of the best and work hard getting and maintaining this. Then maybe 10 years later I had 20 of them as contractors and reality was not that rosy, huge variation from good to terrible.

	▲	exe34 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I love my job, but I'm careful not to give the impression at work. Best to keep them on their toes. I'm also good at weaving the corpospeak into conversations, but very few can hear the sarcasm.

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lbrito 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like the Leadership Principles, or expecting everyone in your company to be a "leader". If everyone is a leader, the word is meaningless.

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relaxing 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At least good behavior isn’t a zero-sum game.

	▲	exe34 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		not everybody can be in the top 10% best behaved.

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creer 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers

It's difficult to achieve, but it's not an unreasonable objective to have. After that there is a question of measurement. How do you measure that? Did they? What was their score? - and yes, until the evidence is released, they probably didn't. (But I would also cut slack on the measurement - it IS difficult to measure so a decent attempt - a top 10% attempt? - will do.)

Where the "top performers" meme obviously fails is when every new business and their sister claims the same thing. We are all winners here and all that.

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jedberg 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers.

Of course there is no hard data on it, but I can say anecdotally the people I know who went on elsewhere were consistently rated at the top of whatever organization they landed at. And also, there wasn't a single person there that I would not want to work with again and would jump at that chance.

> For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.

On the flip side, a lot of people wanted to work there because of that culture. But you're right, some really great people wouldn't even apply, won't deny that.

> Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content!

Actually, objectively, it's not the best content, which is why it gets cut. The way that decision is made is every piece of content is charted on a cost vs minutes watched. Then that chart is looked at by actual humans.

Some content, like reruns from the 1950s, is super efficient. It's not watched a lot but it also costs very little, so it stays. Some content, like the latest Marvel movie (before Disney had their own streaming service) was very inefficient, but it was kept because it was a big marketing draw. But some content didn't quite make it over the line because it was expensive but niche. It was popular amongst a small set of die hard fans.

I think your complaint it more about the industry in general though -- it's not just Netflix that doesn't give a show room to grow. Even the old school TV networks cut shows much quicker now than they did before.

> I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.

Netflix knows it didn't go well. Streaming in general used to break just as much. But the nice thing was that they gave us the resources to hire the right people and the autonomy to fix it. And so we did things like create Chaos Engineering and OpenConnect. I suspect the same will happen with live streaming.

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suzzer99 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Another reason I really don't trust that to be true is that I've never seen a good way to measure who is a top performer and who is not.

I can work at a new place for a week and know who the top performers are. Their names are all over the commits, and whenever you ask someone a question, you get funneled to the top performers.

Then you talk to them. If they're open and engaging, and don't seem like they got their status just by being around forever, they're almost certainly a top performer.

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FuriouslyAdrift 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Netflix has a reputation for the highest salaries in tech. That tends to attract top talent.

https://medium.com/dice-insights/netflix-ceo-explains-why-he...

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crystal_revenge 3 days ago | parent [-]

My career experience has been that there's low correlation between TC and talent, especially at the high end of the talent spectrum.

While I know some really smart people working at various FAANGS making great TC, nearly all of the people that are truly something special are grinding away on hard problems, relatively unknown, getting paid "fine" because they'd rather work on truly hard problems than make optimal amounts of money.

My experience has been that the high TC crowd is above average skillwise, but attracts far more people whose number one concern career-wise is maximizing TC. These are often people that chose technical work because they did the math and felt it was the highest paying per effort required but aren't really passionate about the areas they get paid in.

Truly brilliant people, especially ones from less traditional backgrounds, tend to have a hard time surviving in high TC orgs because they aren't aligned with the culture. Likewise whenever I interact with someone in a high TC role, I'm undoubtedly disappointed by how little they care about their area of work. For them the point of the job is to make money, and they make a lot of money, so there's nothing to talk about.

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ip26 3 days ago | parent [-]

You can apply a filter to top 10% talent and get a perfectly well supplied collection of driven, high output people who are motivated by high TC. It’s a subset, of course. And while visionary genius may not be motivated by TC, nobody said Netflix was looking to crack string theory. People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work.

	▲	crystal_revenge 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work. Even in your core logic here you're proving my point. It's not about being passionate about your job, it's about being passionate about your work, which for me and most of the people I've enjoyed working with the most only has a rough overlap with our jobs. It's a true privileged to work in an area with high paying jobs, but if tech completely crumbled I would remain working in the field so long as the work was relevant to what interests me, regardless of how little it paid. Doing really good work, in the sense I'm talking about, has little to do with how good you are at your job. In fact, as your job pays more it increasingly requires a distracting loyalty to your employer and the "work" you do tends to increasingly become less interesting. There are very clear exceptions to this, but for the most part I've found it to be the case. High TC speaks solely to an individuals ability to meet the needs of a high paying employer. I prefer to work with people who are working on something much larger than their job, so tend to work at weirder companies that pay less. I guess it all comes down to what you define as "talent" (as that was the original point), personally I'm not interested in working with people whose primary talent is being a good employee.