Netflix reviews

In the website development group, there is two week development cycle. That 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 (farily apparently) fired. This creates a bit of a yes man environment, something that Netflix would deny (perhaps even to themselves). There is very little empowement of employees in real decisions, and decision making is very top down, with the resulting motivation hit that entails.

Lack of communication. Lots of turn over in management. Virtually no room to advance, it really is true that if you get promoted to anything you have a much higher probability of being fired. The job was always highly enjoyable - trying to appease the revolving queue of managers... not so much. I got conflicting feedback (when any was given) depending on who I spoke to, on varying days of the week at times. When I was hired, I was told about the "high performance culture" which was great for about a year. Everyone worked together, it felt good to work there, I was proud of what I was doing. If I had known that "high performance culture" was going to transform into a culture of fear, I would probably have taken a different job.