Netflix

You are part of a team that is at the leading edge of a cool entertainment paradigm. Reed Hastings, the CEO, is probably the CEO that I have most respected in my career, and I feel he pretty consistently makes good decisions and moves the company in the correct direction.

Netflix has a very quantitative approach to almost everything, including detailed user testing for their products, so there is a lot to learn about that. The other employees are generally cool people, and fairly smart in general. The user interface aspects of the website are strong, so again, there is a learning opportunity. The company-wide meetings are fun and entail good communication.

In the website development group, there is a two-week development cycle. This means that there is a push to the website every two weeks. This has a few consequences. One is that there is a high percentage of overhead (testing and release stuff) compared to actual development time. There is not much time for software design in such a scheme; there is always a rush to hit the next two-week time click. Longer-term projects are tougher to schedule, and short-term thinking dominates.

The performance policy is that anyone who, if they quit, would not be attempted to talk out if it, should be fired preemptively (a hair-trigger threshold for firing, basically). This creates a chilling effect, in my opinion. I have seen fairly senior management that disagreed with their boss being (fairly apparently) fired. This creates a bit of a yes-man environment, something that Netflix would deny (perhaps even to themselves). There is very little empowerment of employees in real decisions, and decision-making is very top-down, with the resulting motivation hit that entails.

Even going to a three-week release cycle would help things a lot. The counterargument is that that would lead to more pressure to have inter-release "patches," but I think the overhead percentage would drop a lot (like 50%), and that would make it worth it. If you don't patch a bug for a two-week cycle, do you really need to patch it for three?

I think the culture of keeping decision-making in a very few hands at the top is working okay because Reed makes the right decisions, but it may prove poisonous if he ever leaves, and it will be too late to turn the cultural tide.