Issue #32

All-Star Dev Teams vs. Farm Systems

Netflix calls their employees a dream team.

They don't hire many engineers, but those they do hire are world-class. Up until recently, they only hired senior engineers. Netflix wants to hire the top 5-10% of engineers, and they are willing to shell out top 5-10% salaries.

Management is also reportedly encouraged to dismiss any employee who does not meet rigorous standards. The idea is that if a manager wouldn't fight to keep an employee on their team, it's probably better to let them go. For most people, that's a pretty radical stance.

They only want all-stars.

This mentality of only hiring the best extends even to interns. In other words, they don't have any. Someone on my Discord quoted a former Netflix employee regarding interns. "When I was at Netflix, I heard it put quite succinctly: if you don't get a puppy, you don't have to clean up its messes.”

On the other hand, consider a company like Amazon.

Amazon still maintains a high hiring bar, though it's not quite as high as Netflix's. The difference is that they are willing to take chances on interns and entry-level employees. The student program at Amazon is robust. They hire thousands of interns per year, as well as thousands of entry-level software developers straight out of school.

The results? We've found that interns who receive a return offer tend to perform better. There's a Distinguished Engineer at the company (two levels above my level) who is the only person to have started as an intern and risen through the ranks to the very top. Without the "farm system" where we take chances on lower-level folks, it's very likely that we would never have recruited him.

Both places are high-performance environments. The main differences are that companies like Amazon let go of the bottom n% of performers on a yearly basis through their stack ranking process, whereas Netflix continuously removes anyone who isn't meeting their high bar.

I believe Netflix's model works for companies that are relatively limited in their offerings. Although streaming video worldwide is a large and complex problem, it's not as if they're also offering web services, delivering same-day packages of toothpaste to people's doorsteps, and launching internet satellites. I have doubts that the Netflix hiring model would allow Amazon to launch so many different offerings so quickly.

But I wonder what would happen to Netflix if it employed the Amazon model. What do you think? Let me know by responding to this email.

Would the net result be the same but with more employees? Would it result in an inferior product? If you started a company, would you use the dream team model or the farm system model?

I am where I am today because Amazon took a chance on me, a self-taught programmer without any prior experience. I guess someone had to clean up my puppy messes, and I am incredibly grateful for that. But if I were to start a company today, it would be hard for me not to want an all-star team. Why wouldn’t you only want the best?

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