Netflix Culture Change 

A reasonable definition of evil: behavior that is unduly/unnecessarily cruel or harmful without sufficient cause to outweigh or justify the harm. What’s the harm in preserving a “feel-good but possibly impossible to define” ticket, versus the obvious signal removing it conveys? It’s stupid. But it’s Google stupid. (And part of why I stopped using them for anything except when commenting on a video I watch using MPV, shortly after that canary died.)

​@@GothAlicefart

@@electrolyteorb fax

Do you know when Google started they really were a darling who seemed to be bringing change for the good. Now they're another faceless corporation prioritising fat stacks. It's been a death by a thousand cuts.

​@@GothAliceleefy leefuh lurb

This. I remember when Google dropped it. Almost immediately after, the company publicly looked evil. Everyone in the know had already seen them drinking from the "fountain of profits, no matter the cost". If I remember right, it was shortly after that when the public learned Google was spying on them. They changed the public-facing phrase from "don't be evil" to "you can make money without being evil"-which is true, but it doesn't mean Google can't also make money while being evil, too.

lol clueless wait and see google is not what you think i've been using google since it came out we are about to see the real AI frens. you'll see. dont care if you argue, youre just wrong.

Nah, it's when they got tired of their small set of annoying, very vocal employees who would say that every time the company did something they didn't like, it was evil and Google shouldn't be evil. It was very annoying nonsense. Meaningless drivel. I'm glad they removed it. It encouraged naivety and immaturity that Google needs to grow out of.

Google didn't drop "Don't be evil" actually. It was still the wifi password in some places. "Don't be evil" was just catch phase used as a header in the Google mission statement on one section and it still remains there. The alphabet mission statement riffed on the idea without saying it so people falsely claimed "google dropped don't be evil".

@@YesInMyBackyard kind of, but not really. DBE was the Google motto. It wasn't just a thing they said every now and then, it was one of the main phrases associated with the company. It got changed to Do the Right Thing during the whole Alphabet thing. It used to be big internally, but most references to it in official docs got scrubbed. So it was pretty much removed, and a lot of people got upset about it because software engineers and terminally online folks can't understand nuance, or look for the full context of what happened, including what it got replaced with. I think people are reading into it too much. Companies change mottos. It happens. And the change from passive ("don't be") to active language ("do") is a plus. My main interactions with people who reference DBE had been negative. It mainly seems to be used by people to justify their being an annoying asshole.

That is so crazy

You actually have to think that there exists many roles where all they do is plan reorganizations, not actually do anything, just simply move desks

@@ThePrimeTimeagen I’ve heard it proposed as an attrition tactic to keep people from realizing they’re unhappy. Thought it was a meme at first but honestly it checks out

@@ThePrimeTimeagen “Team synergies” keeping people who work well together, apart. 😜

Not to brag but I got re-orged this January and then was re-orged back to my original org by March.

i think this is a big one. When I'm reviewing work from people I haven't worked with before I let them know it's not anything personal. I'm teaching them how to improve their code and why that makes a better product. At the end of the day it's all about trying to build the best software we can .

yep, it's a skill issue, people skills

This is a trauma issue. Many people do think all direct communication is dangerous. Probably thanks to having an angry parent so they were always walking on eggshells. They think saying things directly = daddy's about to punch the wall. Even when they're 63 years old now. And they refuse to get therapy because they think they're normal and you're the weird one.

Yes. Just saying “this is stupid” or “you’re bad at your job” isn’t giving feedback. It’s no more helpful than just saying “LGTM”. If you want to be direct, you have to focus on the issue that you are addressing. I think a lot of people want to be direct, but just end up acting like an unhelpful dick because they don’t have the social skills to give feedback.

Odds are if someone is being offended you are being an asshole. It's like seeing someone ugly face and saying you are ugly I am just being honest.

I'm a tech lead/lead developer and let me tell you that I hadn't interviewed the last three people that joined my team. One of them turned out to be really good to be fair, but the other two just can't hack it. And I had to BEG them to let one go because not only could he not hack it, I could never get him to answer calls, chats, or emails.

The good old tasking people with no knowledge of a field or not enough social intelligence to hire people while never firing the bad hiring. Produce the worst work environment 100% of the time.

"Former manager says management is never to blame"

I can tell you 99% of problems with an organization is management and leadership and as demonstrated by your statement they always blame the people below them.

Don say "can you ..." -- that is a weird power / simp move, and is indirect, and the answer requires no work. A single word of 'yes' completes the ask. Just inform them of the required deliverable and how they failed to meet it. Some people, like myself, are aggravatingly literal in a conversation. It is only in quiet reflection that we can see the subtext.

I think it comes down to having a project-based mindset. No one should call anyone stupid, but if something is unacceptable it should be said that it's unacceptable and needs work.

@@Efecretion hahaha that sounds like a you problem dude, asking someone to fix something is a normal method of communication. Also it leaves the door open for them to say “no actually I can’t do that for x reason”, which occasionally happens when reviewing a PR

If you have coworkers who actually call others stupid, those aren't coworkers you want to keep around

I had the same thought especially as a person who likes direct communication - some people take that as a liberty to be completely unkind. In this video - the only reason that I cringed about the feedback was he said that he told him “he was acting like a child.” I’m not sure if that’s a direct quote from the conversation but that would have put my hackles up in the workplace too.

Kinda wild he used to manage a full time job, exercise, family, twitch and sometimes RU-vid.

Progressive culture is incredibly corporate. Raising a family is seen as a conservative thing now. Girl boss culture says a women should bring her newborn baby to work and breastfeed at work. Trade culture says stay home and raise your kid. We need to meet in the middle. Parents need leave time, and on a day when they need to be in the office, we need to realize that raising baby humans is more important than turning your 23% growth into 23.04% growth.

​@@KevinJDildonik Woah, you're crazy

RU-vid is easy. What are you on about

​@mattymattffs Depending on the content you make RU-vid is definitely not easy. Even if it was the rest of the list definitely aren't easy. Young kids are basically a full time job.

why would you work at Microsoft dude? If you can get hired there clearly whatever you do you are skilled at it. So that means you can get hired pretty much anywhere.

@@iraniansuperhacker4382 Microsoft still has the glitz and glamour to tempt folks to come work with them. Still, I'm working on switching jobs

@@iraniansuperhacker4382 I would work at Microsoft to fix their shit on Windows that makes me insanely mad about how no one fixed it. Which is probably why they don't want me there, they don't want any feedback.

Like RU-vid?

@@GothAliceyeah but you can easily turn off auto play on RU-vid. It’s right there in the video player

Grow up. That feels like the most important millennial issue ever, do u need to see a phycologist?

​@@SuperOvidiuMihai and you are older? Cuz I'm younger and autplay drives me up the wall and I am sure you can find plenty more who are like us.

God yeah that's so annoying. I honestly just can't support them due to the fact that they decided family means "under the same roof/IP address. My spouse and I live on separate continents currently. Who are they to decide that?

Agreed on all counts. I hate autoplay trailers, and I always wait for a season to complete before I watch a show. Can’t be bothered to wait a whole week when I would rather watch one or two a day or every other day.

the problem is the "spirit of negativity" (Chesterton, orthodoxy, ch2) it has no real value. "Do what is right" >>>>> "don't be evil" don't be evil just has no real meaning and i am shocked it was used as a cudgel.

@@ThePrimeTimeagen Not sure what you're saying. "Do what is right" also is subjective. When I say "cudgel", I mean that it just because code for blocking, like how politicians say things like "we need to support real Americans" or "American values", they don't mean any sort of positive measurable thing, they're just saying that as a shorthand to short circuit something. Put it all another way, when you have a cohesive culture, almost anything can work, but when your culture has lost cohesion, people start using the cultural furniture to promote their own goals.

Ding ding ding. Best answer on here.

I blame others for being so intolerant to new ideas as I was raised loving to learn from teachers but I blame myself for overestimating people's intelligence assuming they can understand if I can. Like an Angel said in Gitta Mallasz's iconic book, don't chew up other's Food. Bingo. Your comment was spot on but the ones to be most blamed are the ones who refuse dialogue to escape pain. Dialogue is what is dangerously lacking today.

wait, it took 4 paychecks?

4 paychecks? How?

@@yoshi314 it took 1, but it took 4 for me to build the courage to buy one without feeling like I'm being irresponsible with my money

Maybe not 100% of every from those 4 paychecks

@@hailahong3021 probably set aside some percentage of the full paycheck each month.

He adopted that from asmon

most certainly not true. there are _so many_ amazing people at netflix. it was ackshually a great place to work for the entire time i worked there and my final team was truly amazing as well. very direct in feedback. there, at any scale, will be the "bozo" explosion. but netflix historically have done a pretty great job at managing this.

these companies are so attractive that people put themselves in the deep end to work there. So they get stressed and burnout. Maybe not Netflix specifically, but this is definitely the case with Google.

I worked at Netflix for two years, I think I left right before primagen joined. Many top notch engineers, and many things I liked. What made me leave was having a kid, a really bad director busting my balls (he was kicked out about a year after I left, but that was too late), and pretty bad life balance (2 weeks of vacation in 2 years, and I had to work remotely while on vacation). And I've seen some really bad managers, and a few really good ones. Overall, some good, some bad. I've worked in better places, and I've worked in much worse places. But I had no complaints whatsoever about engineers. I think I would enjoy exchanging some war stories with primagen :-)

Telling them what to do is bad. I agree with the first part, disagree with the second, usually. Engineers are problem solvers, not order takers.

what's TOIL?

@@alonzo_go Time off in lieu

quit

What you've said is 100% true. Directness is not rude. However, some people cannot differentiate between being direct or being rude. Those people make it difficult to be respectful while being direct, because they destroy the ability to have rational discussions. You can't have a real discussion with someone who can't tell the difference between rude and direct. For some people, due to cultural reasons, being direct IS being rude. That's their lived experience. How do you respect their personal experience without giving up being direct? I think Linus succeeded where many others failed, because his intentionally rude behavior is a signal for people who can't tolerate rudeness. It's not good to be rude, but the alternative is a slow erosion of your culture and a loss of the direct communication that enables your success. In that context, being rude is a defense against people who can't differentiate between being rude or being direct. If you're often rude, those people will avoid you, which solves the problem in a roundabout way. People only contribute to the Linux kernel if they know and are prepared to be unfairly chewed out. People are willing to tolerate that behavior, because broadly speaking, Linus cares about code quality and isn't a biggot. If he's chewing you out, you probably did something wrong. You might not like the way the message was communicated, but it leaves no room for negotiation, and it prevents repeat mistakes because of the pain from being chewed out. Do I think it's a good principle to live by? No. But I do see practical value in Linus' rants. I think there's a reason that no "kind linux kernel" project has ever gotten close to success. The type of people who care about code quality enough to be responsible for one of the most widely used and safety critical pieces of software in the entire world are also the type of people who are willing to put their emotions beside them and accept rudeness in order to ensure that communication is direct.

@@alexlowe2054 People talks about "being able to receive feedback well" as a fundamental skill, and that is true. But in my experience I have found the larger problem to be the lack of people who know how to give constructive feedback. It is very easy to say "Wtf this is so wrong, are you st*pid??" than it is to say "This is wrong because this and that, and you need to fix this as soon as possible", in the same way that it is easier to take feedback and say "that guy is an id*iot, he doesn't know what he is talking about" instead of "I was wrong about this, but now I know how to make it right, and I will become better for it". Both are fundamental skills.

Unfortunately some don't get the point and take you seriously unless you are rude to them. For example, many from NY or NJ.

Listing out problems then immediately deflecting to someone else to fix the issue is weak sauce my man. Be a big boy and tell what needs done to fix it

@@plaidchuck Ah yes I want the new hires to take longer to get good at our codebase. This is more for stuff like code style, stuff you cannot look up.

Heaven forbid men thrive in a productive environment. It'd totally be better with a bunch of mid, catty mean girls...

Because they're average at best, but their seemingly "honest" decalogue says that adequate performance gets you fired. It is just another run of the mill corpo. Prime just loves it because he was on it.

oops, someone took that to mean more money than the objectively better women's team. oh well.

There's a certain hint of "Stockholm Syndrome" at display here. Also a lot of 'not saying the thing' for someone claiming to prefer straight talk. The track record for people who claim the be straight talkers that can't abide 'bull' isn't very good. It's usually an excuse to misbehave.

@@cacheman I get you but no misbehaviour here. It just seems actually absurd to me and i have had companies treat me well at first and as soon as "something" happens (might not even be your fault) you're in the dumpster (and theres billions of people out there who have experienced this or worse)

@@DeathBender Well yes, I'm agreeing with you. It just hasn't happened to _him_ so it's all good. He's still blind to the arbitrary backstabbing and biases that hide under the guise of Perfect Meritocracy.

This is true for almost all big corporations today, no? It is called "Corporate Culture".

u think thats a cult you should work at costco.

@@Scrahdabley welcome to costco, I love you

I suspect there’s more to it than that. The corworker most likely threw a small tantrum or moaned about it after a back and forth before prime you’re acting like a child. While I agree it’s not productive thing to say, you can imagine after trying to reason with a coworker for a long time, you can have frustration come out

Yeah im suuure netflix will be suffering without you

@@plaidchuck I'm sure netflix won't have any trouble without me. That wasn't the point of the comment. I'm talking about image there.

yeah you are

The truly best companies figure out how to continue to make amazing things with average Joes. They know it’s impossible to keep up the level of BS necessary to maintain a happy place for the personality types who’ll kill themselves for a startup.

As soon as he left there was /helloWorld route lol

It's Prime. Half his stuff is misinfo lol

do as we say not as we do but if you compare Netflix to other streaming platforms - they have a better than average product (perhaps first mover advantage) what is your favorite Netflix alternative?

Netflix is average?

@@HominisLupis at best, yes. It is not like they're landing on the moon with a calculator as a navigation computer. They're not solving anything specially complex at all.

@@marcialabrahantes3369 I go to cinemas if/when something likable is released

@@puntoycoma47 They did when they came onto the market. This comment just comes across as contemporary condescension to past innovation.