<story><title>Adopting Microservices at Netflix</title><url>http://nginx.com/blog/adopting-microservices-at-netflix-lessons-for-team-and-process-design/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matthewmacleod</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for violating the guideline. Overall, the high level of mutual trust among members of a team, and across the company as a whole, becomes a strong binding force.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christ on a bike, that sounds horrific.&lt;p&gt;All this approach can do is replace codified guidelines with unknown, arbitrary ones. Who defines what &amp;quot;NetFlix&amp;#x27;s best interest&amp;quot; is? In an organisation of that size, conflicts of interest must happen all the time.&lt;p&gt;Is this just a fancy way of saying &amp;quot;If we don&amp;#x27;t like you, you&amp;#x27;re out of the door?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brendangregg</author><text>G&amp;#x27;Day, I work at Netflix, and we hire what&amp;#x27;s been called &amp;quot;fully formed adults&amp;quot;. Here&amp;#x27;s a quote that can explain it better than I (also see the full article):&lt;p&gt;Source &lt;a href=&quot;https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hbr.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;how-netflix-reinvented-hr&amp;#x2F;ar&amp;#x2F;1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults&lt;p&gt;Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I trust myself, and everyone on my team to act in Netflix&amp;#x27;s best interest. Throughout my career, I&amp;#x27;ve worked with many professional engineers who could have been trusted to work in the company&amp;#x27;s best interest. But there have been many times when we&amp;#x27;ve been prevented to do so, due to process. So I&amp;#x27;ve been fascinated at how Netflix is operating, and it&amp;#x27;s been great working here.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s important to know that a key role of management is to provide context to employees: what problems exist, what challenges we are facing, what opportunities might exist, what&amp;#x27;s important to Netflix right now. So that we know what to do, and how to exercise judgement.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve written about working at Netflix earlier this year on my blog (someone else posted a link).</text></comment>
<story><title>Adopting Microservices at Netflix</title><url>http://nginx.com/blog/adopting-microservices-at-netflix-lessons-for-team-and-process-design/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matthewmacleod</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Netflix doesn’t have an HR manual. There is a single guideline: “Act in NetFlix’s best interest.” The idea is that if an employee can’t figure out how to interpret the guideline in a given situation, he or she doesn’t have enough judgment to work there. If you don’t trust the judgment of the people on your team, you have to ask why you’re employing them. It’s true that you’ll have to fire people occasionally for violating the guideline. Overall, the high level of mutual trust among members of a team, and across the company as a whole, becomes a strong binding force.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christ on a bike, that sounds horrific.&lt;p&gt;All this approach can do is replace codified guidelines with unknown, arbitrary ones. Who defines what &amp;quot;NetFlix&amp;#x27;s best interest&amp;quot; is? In an organisation of that size, conflicts of interest must happen all the time.&lt;p&gt;Is this just a fancy way of saying &amp;quot;If we don&amp;#x27;t like you, you&amp;#x27;re out of the door?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caw</author><text>This other quote seem horrific as well.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; A single specialist in Java distributed systems is managing the entire configuration without any commercial storage tools or help from engineers specializing in storage, SAN, or backup.&lt;p&gt;So this person is either a genius who has specialized knowledge in these areas, or it&amp;#x27;s been abstracted by the platforms people to the point where it&amp;#x27;s only Java knowledge. Either way, it sounds like this person never gets to take a vacation or be not on-call. Hopefully there&amp;#x27;s not just 1 person responsible for all of the configuration, it just takes 1 person to run it.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Process prevents problems. At many companies, the standard response to something going wrong is to add a preventative step to the relevant procedure.&lt;p&gt;The linked section goes on to talk about HR process with the &amp;quot;Act in NetFlix&amp;#x27;s best interest&amp;quot;. It totally avoids the concept of technical processes. I&amp;#x27;m betting &amp;quot;best interest&amp;quot; is a bit more formal on the tech side. Bad process is process for process&amp;#x27;s sake. Good process serves a very important role for offloading what people have to remember, as well as knowledge transfer. From time to time, steps of a process become irrelevant because of other changes and it has to be pruned. Sometimes companies forget about this step.&lt;p&gt;If Netflix has ever seen a problem with their builds&amp;#x2F;deploys and added a test to check against that problem, guess what--they followed the standard response to update the procedure. It&amp;#x27;s not necessarily a bad thing.</text></comment>