Firing once useful contributors is a failure of management. Managers should find a way to repurpose experienced employees and use their experience and knowledge of the company to greater mutual benefit.
Did you even read the original article? Even the part quoted above says:
> we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit
If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills. In the original article, the author explained Netflix's transition from DVD-over-mail to video-streaming-on-demand. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few people that were useful in the old business model and completely useless in the new one. The only fair thing in this case is to let them go, gracefully of course.
To add more context from the Harvard Business Review article:
> "Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and
> creative. She’d been very important to our early growth,
> having devised a system for accurately tracking movie
> rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But
> now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully
> credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals
> —and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a
> community college. Despite her work ethic, her track
> record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her
> skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about
> jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that
> wouldn’t be right."
(edit: To point out the obvious, in this scenario there was no argument that Laura was an "A Player", just that for her to become an experienced CPA would be a multi-year process, and the company needed a CPA immediately. The options the company has are thus:
A: Put Laura into a job that doesn't add any value to the company, and encourage Laura to retrain as a CPA. It's possible that Laura might be perfectly happy as a bookkeeper, and might not want to retrain. Also since the company needs a CPA immediately, the CPA job isn't guaranteed to be open if Laura finally does retrain, so the company would be asking for a big commitment from Laura with no promised reward at the end.
B: Give Laura a generous severance and a great reference, and help her find a job that is a reasonable "next step" for her in her career.)
"It's possible that Laura might be perfectly happy as a bookkeeper"
Not that they asked. I'm sure Netflix would be more than happy to hire her back after some other company or government program completes her training. Except for cost, the might as well hire consultants because that's what they want. They want to provision employees like they provision servers.
I'm a programmer. I learned programming over the past 10 years. Take the best lawyer, doctor, or chemist, and I doubt that they can learn to be A player relatively soon (i.e. in 2-5 years). Even if they could learn programming, they would probably not be as good at it as they are at their own original skill. I'm sure it goes the other way round as well.
And after all, why would an A player want to learn a new skill, if they can make a very good living using their present skillset (albeit in a different company)?
A-players often relish the opportunity to learn new skills. In the right environment, it can actually be fun, and it always helps improve their "A game".
> If people's skills no longer fit, then by definition you cannot repurpose their skills.
Many companies at least try by way of retraining.
Netflix is saying they're not willing to offer courses/training to already employed people in order to keep them. Consider what this means in terms of dollars. They are choosing to spend more money on recruiting and hiring overhead than on training.
Maybe they've done the math and this hiring overhead is cheaper than retraining -- but they've ignored the long game of goodwill towards the company. Or maybe they just don't care.
It's functional programming for HR! Employees are immutable data structures. I guess it's better to throw one away and make a new one than change one to fit a new purpose.
Unfortunately we're talking about people here, so there's something slightly inhuman, and inhumane, about all of this.
I also don't like the term "A Player." I guess corporations are the final word on the sum total worth of a human being?
Personally when an employee didn't know what I needed him to know as the leader on my team I took the time to teach them. It was almost always more efficient than going out and finding someone else. People can change - immutable data structures can't. And as you say, it's better for the long term good will of a company. You never know how that person will contribute later.
Here is a case. you have a jar from pasta sauce. You can toss the jar out after making pasta sauce or you can fill it up with sugar/spices. And it can serve you for a long long time this way.
High pressure environments usually burn people out leaving them useless and thats the underlying message in working for netflix - bust your ass, then most likely you will get fired.
Great message, maybe it is a challenge to youngsters that want to see how not to build a company and rub shoulders with some great minds - before starting their own gig and pillaging the company for their top talent.
>You can toss the jar out after making pasta sauce or you can fill it up with sugar/spices.
I'm not sure where I stand on what Netflix is saying here, but my immediate reaction to your analogy is this:
I used to do this with jars too. Now I have more jars than I could ever use for storage, so now I recycle any new ones I get.
It seems like it could work the same way with a company and its experienced employees. Once you've found use for a large number of employees whose original skills are no longer needed, it will get harder and harder to do.
It's much more like a big jar of something fermented like a sourdough starter. If you use up the entire jar and have to throw it out, you've failed to do your job as a sourdough baker. Everybody knows that you're supposed to continuously add more raw materials to the starter without exhausting its supply.
