Welcome to Netflix

(Specifically, to Reporting to Me)

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Roy Rapoport

February 13, 2016

Disclaimer: This should not be read to in any way apply to any other group or hiring manager at Netflix

This is Weird

• Quite likely, yes
• We'll learn more about each other organically
• This was the best way I thought of to quickly and efficiently* mention a few things
• This is not a presentation, but an infodeck
• You probably should read, and be deeply familiarized with, The Netflix Culture first

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* For some value of 'efficient'

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I Don't Believe in Personality Conflicts

• We may have substantive disagreements
• When it comes to adjusting to personalities, I strongly believe that the person in the more senior position is getting paid, partially, to adjust to the personality styles of the people reporting to them
• If you're a manager, this belief also extends to how I expect you'll work with your reports

Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)

• See http://originalfuzz.com/blogs/fuzz/83782148-the-directly-responsible-individual for more context
• I strongly believe this
• Means that a decision is either yours, or mine, but not both
• My scope of responsibility does not enclose your scope of responsibility
• I cannot override you
• I can try to persuade you
• I can definitely fire you if I don't believe your judgment is sound
• Disagreeing with me is not prima facie evidence of bad judgment

Directly Responsible Individual (DRI)

• Being DRI means you don't have to get consensus
• Being DRI means you don't have to get agreement
• Being DRI does not mean
• You get to be thoughtless
• You're exempt from having to explain why you made a certain decision
• You're exempt from people telling you, ahead of time or afterward, that you made a mistake

My Job

1. Attract and Retain World-Class Talent (that's you)
2. Set context

There's no #3

• If I do something that negatively impacts my ability to retain you, you would be doing me a huge favor if you let me know about it, as soon as possible
• If I do something that feels more like telling you how to do your job than setting context, you'd be doing me a huge favor if you let me know about it, as soon as possible

On Feedback

• I love feedback
• Feedback is critical to your success here, and mine
• Three dimensions are required for people to continue to give you feedback:
• Safety (unlikelihood of being punished for giving feedback; should be high)
• Effort (The amount of work in order to give feedback, also known as "how much do you argue when people give you feedback?"; should be low)
• Benefit(how likely is it that giving you feedback will materially impact your behavior? should be high)
• Let me know if I don't do well on any of these three dimensions
• I'll let you know if you don't do well on any of these three dimensions

On Feedback

• I've been called 'blunt'
• I care about kindness, but I'll optimize for effectiveness and within that optimized effectiveness try to be as kind as possible
• My job is to make sure you got the feedback

Work Hours

• I'll endeavor not to talk to you about work things outside of work hours (~0800 to ~1800), assuming we're not at some sort of after-hours work function
• I may slip
• Unless I clearly indicate it's an emergency, if I reach out to you via IM or email outside of those hours, feel free to ignore me until next day
• Even within these hours, I don't expect you to be responsive 0800-1800. Be reasonable.
• I'm disinclined to call you or page you outside of business hours. That means that if I am, it's an emergency. This shouldn't happen very often (so far, less than once per year per developer)
• All of this is just for me contacting you, not being on-call or being paged by production systems.

Want to Talk? Let's Talk

• I do a bunch of things here.
• Very few of them are more important than spending time talking with you if you want to talk with me
• Feel entirely free to put time on my calendar to talk whenever you want
• (Actually, that applies to others here: Feel free to just send meeting requests rather than asking for permission from anyone here)

Put Time on Your Calendar? That's an Empty Promise

My calendar for a random February week in 2016:

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8 open hours out of 40

They'll fill up too

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Forget My Calendar

• You may not find a slot on my calendar in any given day
• If you need to talk, let's talk
• Let me know via IM or phone and I'll evict something
• I do a bunch of things here.
• Very few of them are more important than spending time talking with you if you want to talk with me

Are You Afraid of Being Fired Yet?

• Chances are very good that sometime in the first 3 months you will be wondering if you're about to be fired
• Find three engineers who've joined Netflix in the recent past and ask them if they experienced that fear
• Chances are, at least two have
• It's totally natural
• If you're within your first three months at Netflix and you're an engineer, you're incredibly unlikely to get fired anytime soon
• Exception: I've actually told you, explicitly and bluntly, that you're in danger of being fired

Speaking of Terminations, My Track Record

As of February 14, 2016, I've been an engineering manager for a little more than three years. In that time, I've

• Hired nine people
• Had two people transferred under me
• Terminated three people

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Speaking of Terminations, My Track Record

• I'm deeply interested in making sure anyone terminated by me for performance reasons is entirely unsurprised by this
• I have so far been pretty successful at this
• Bluntness helps
• You will not be surprised

How Are You Doing? The Performance Spectrum

In my head, every person reporting to me is in one of three particular levels of performance at any given point:

1. Green: You may have things you want to improve, there may be things I want you to improve, but if you changed nothing, given our current requirements I'd be delighted if you continued to work here for as long as you wanted
2. Orange: There's something you're doing that, long-term, makes your current trajectory unsustainable. This, if not changed, will not end well. You'll need to change something
3. Red: Your trajectory is unsustainable on a short-term and there's a specific, concrete, timebox we'll be putting around changing it, and you and I have had an explicit conversation around what's wrong and what the timeline for fixing it is.

I might realize in hindsight that you're not actually green but orange, but red is never a hindsight realization. It also means that chances are that the answer to the question "am I red right now?" is "if you have to ask, the answer is no".

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Going Orange? That's It, Polish the Resume!

• Not at all
• Going orange is utterly recoverable
• In the three years I've been an Engineering Manager I've gone orange 2-3 times. Each time I've recovered
• My ability to recover rapidly from orange has improved my management's trust in my ability to do my job and self-correct
• The same has happened to people under me
• If you go orange, you can pull out. And if you do, this builds trust
• Even red is not necessarily terminal. People have been in red, pulled out of it, and went on to have long successful careers here
• If you're here, it's because I still have faith in your ability to be successful here. IF I lose that faith, I will not be performance managing you, I will be terminating you (with the obvious generous severance package)

What (I think) I'm Good At

• Giving feedback, both positive and negative (AKA "I'm high on the candor scale")
• Making sure my message is heard (AKA "I'm high on the bluntness scale")
• Receiving feedback and acting on it

Known Failure Modes

• I've been accused of an extreme interpretation of "context not control"
• At least until you demonstrate an ability to resist me telling you to do stupid things, I'm likely to be reticent to express opinions about what/how you should be doing (But I'll never demur in the face of a direct question or request for advice)
• I tend to take this whole "personality conflicts are my problem" thing a little far. In at least one case I've retained someone too long because I was unwilling to consider they were just wrong

One on Ones (1o1s)

• Huge variety in frequency and length of 1o1s with direct reports (from weekly hour-longs to bi-weekly 15 minutes)
• We'll start with high frequency, high length
• You figure out when/if to taper back
• 1o1s are for you
• 1o1s are not for status updates unless you want to update status
• Either of us might be up to 5 minutes late (5 minute lateness is normal for us here). I'll endeavor to not be more late than that.

On Candor

• This company may require me to not tell you about something before a certain date (e.g. stock option plan changes which managers knew a week before they were announced). This has happened here once in the three years I've been managing
• This company cannot require me to lie to you. That's never happened (I've never been asked to do so), and it could never happen (I would not abide by such a requirement).
• We bias toward transparency and candor. You can ask anything. Most of the time, I'll answer. Rarely, I won't. I'm committed to never lying to you.

One Last Note

• If you report to me (directly or indirectly), you have edit rights to this document
• That's intentional