I wouldn’t assume that Netflix (or any company) is necessarily representative of some “new business model”. As for whether their alleged business practices is good for society or not, you’d have to consider what we would have to do to prohibit that practice and if that would be better for society than letting companies run their hiring/firing process as they see fit.
So, what would be your solution to this “problem”, and how can you assure us that the cure won’t be worse than the disease?
Isn’t this the reason a lot of companies are ‘moving’ out of the country? To avoid paying taxes?
Large corporations in no way do their hiring and firing “as they see fit.” If you actually believe they do, it means you have zero experience hiring or firing employees and not even a basic education in modern business (sorry to sound harsh, but there are so many laws and regulations regarding employment I just don’t see how arguing that point would be fruitful).
The possible solutions to a leaner business environment are not anything radical or even out of the ordinary, just an expansion of existing policy. Currently a wide range of disadvantaged groups are protected or subsidized by the government.
You probably get the picture - the vast majority of workers in the US are some protected class or another. To mitigate the negative effects of a more chaotic business environment, there could be greater tax incentives to reward companies for keeping employees longer(carrot) or greater disincentives to laying workers off, such as higher UCI rate(stick). I could go on, but I’ll just stop her for now.
Anyhow, I think the future will involve basic minimum income, so I am not worried about any of these developments. I don’t think the wise money is on slaving away and making tremendous personal sacrifices for a corporation, I’m with the millenials on that.
I don’t think we can only discuss/worry about problems that have an immediately apparent solution.
That said, tax credits to companies that invest in retraining obsolete workers seem at least as defensible as subsidized student loans, and would be the basic textbook way to encourage such.
And after that “blip”, technology changed things. I work for a state government which means we are way behind the times technology-wise. We only got actual email in 2005 - before that, we could only email people people who used the same 1980 something mainframe system we used.
When I started 20 years ago , professional staff kept hand-written notes , which were later typed by support staff who were basically typists. All they did was type, file and answer phones. Professional staff also handwrote or dictated reports and letters, which were typed by those typists. There was one typist for every for every 6 or 7 professional staff. Someone needed to supervise those typists, so every office also had a secretary who supervised the typists , did the typing etc for the manager and made sure supplies ( mostly pre-printed forms and brochures) were kept in stock. Timesheets were completed by hand and sent to payroll clerks who then entered them into the payroll system. There were mailroom clerks who sorted mail and receptionists who did nothing but staff a switchboard in some offices.
Twenty years later, times have changed. Professional staff no longer keep handwritten notes - there are computerized case records and professional staff make their own entries into those records. They type their own reports, memos and letters because most of them can type them nearly as quickly as they can handwrite them (In the ten or so offices I’ve worked in since the change, an average of about 80% do their own typing). Fewer supplies need to be ordered because brochures and forms can be printed locally as needed. There is less filing to be done, email has drastically cut the amount of incoming and outgoing mail and voicemail has cut down on the need to take messages. Timesheets are electronic, so there is no need for clerks to enter them. But due to what I assume are political considerations, these jobs are being eliminated by attrition only- so my office now has three typists and one secretary who don’t have 80 hours of work to do between the four of them. Only two are needed- but there aren’t any jobs to transfer the others to. It’s not like my program doesn’t need typists, but some other program does or that I don’t need a typist but I could use a mail clerk - it’s an issue across the board for all of the jobs that these people are qualified to do.
I’m not sure that even during that blip people were kept on and given made-up jobs when their function and skills were no longer needed. Sure, you could rely on having certain jobs for life if you didn’t screw up - but the company could also rely on people retiring at 65 or so. That’s not true anymore- and I’m not talking about people who can’t afford to retire at 65. They have always existed. I’m talking about people who can afford to retire at 65 and don’t because they prefer to keep working for whatever reason*. There seem to be a lot more of them now than there used to be.
*The reasons I’ve personally heard are
That’s not what I said. I said you can’t declare something “not good for society” without explaining how you plan to fix it and how your fix won’t make things worse for society.
Depends on how you define “obsolete workers”. If you end up just subsidizing companies for making bad business decision, then that’s no different from punishing their competitors who did not make such bad decisions. Not sure that is “good for society”, but I’m open to anyone who explain how it is.
Why not? I think lots of things are bad for society, but I also think they are currently the least evil solution. But I think we need to stay aware of the fact that the current situation is problematic, and be flexible enough to recognize if the situation changes and better options arise.
Keep in mind that people are living longer and healthier than they did back in whatever yesteryear we’re talking about. To be honest, 65 doesn’t seem that old to me even right now. No doubt it will seem even “younger” to me if/when I get to be that old.
Also, the upside (or downside, depending on how you want to look at) of the “Do what you love” philosophy is that people’s careers really are tied to their self-identity and sense of happiness. If a person really loves coming into the office, why would they want to give that up?
I’m coming up on 60. Sixty-five seems down right young!! 
FMLA legally requires companies to make “bad” business decisions sometimes. Companies are subsidized for hiring disabled workers, which is also a “bad” business decision. There are many more examples, but why bother going into it if you just want to completely ignore any of the facts of the matter?
There are two schools of thought, 1) Business exists as a part of society and to serve society, and 2) Society exists to serve business.
On the whole our laws in the modern era have struck a balance between the two. There is a belief, held by many, that this is good. In general, “progress,” for society as a whole, as I have always heard it defined, is when there is more more freedom, more prosperity, less poverty as a whole.
I have not heard of anyone looking at the situation in a place such as Russia, where there are very strong and powerful companies with extremely wealthy oligarchs yet widespread social problems as an ideal that we should try to emulate as a society. But there is always a first time for everything, I suppose.
Slight nitpick, but tech companies normally have paid internships, probably around $4000-$5000 per month is pretty typical compensation for kids who don’t even have their degree yet. It’s not all bad news as you seem to paint it. Sorry for bursting your ranty bubble.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it- but it is a big change that is going to affect how easily a company can keep people who aren’t really needed anymore in their current roles/locations. People retiring leave openings that others can be moved into and when people retire at a predictable time the company can plan for that- so that maybe Joe doesn’t lose his job when his current role is no longer needed, because the company knows his counterpart Frank is turning 65 and retiring in two months. They can (and some did) just move Joe over and have a gradual transition or keep Joe in his current spot for two months and then move him.That’s not feasible if Frank is turning 65 in two months but may not retire for another 15 years.
Sometimes you can’t take one part of an era without having other parts- that blip in time when (some) employers rewarded loyalty and hard work with virtually lifetime employment was a time when many other things were different - everything from when people retired to employees being more reluctant than they are today to change jobs or careers voluntarily.
Do you have a cite for this figure of $4000 to $5000 per month for being typical for kids who do not have degrees? We can start a discussion about internships if you like.
I apologize if I am coming off as ranty, I am not sure exactly what in my writing leads you to that conclusion - I am just presenting the facts and arguments as I see them. I do find some of the non fact based comments a little annoying though, to be perfectly honest.
I find your claim of “bursting of my ranty bubble” on a “slight nitpick” to be disappointingly Trump-like.
Compensation figures are readily available on the net such as www.glassdoor.com where you can see for yourself what internships pay at various companies.
OK, I see this in a couple dimensions.
First, it doesn’t sound like an HR revolution. It sounds like the standard operating procedure at a lot of companies. Further, I never take the self-stated brilliance of a company for granted. For all we know, they were firing people could have been used in other departments with a little more thought. C-level management is always quick to assume its own competence while questioning that of others.
Second, I’ve also seen this issue from the other side: Japan, where being a “good worker” and showing effort are rewarded much more than competence. I worked for a drug company there and said to my boss, “About half the people here are deadwood.” My boss, who didn’t like me and had no incentive to agree with me, said, “No, I think it’s about one-third.” People would just dick around with useless analysis–but they were really trying! Conversely, I would get dinged brownie points for turning in good deliverables too quickly.
Since 2004, I have been a translator and copywriter for big Japanese companies, and, sweet jezus, the sheer incompetence that comes through my peephole is scary. Seriously, huge conglomerates would rather bleed yen and even go down the tubes than injure the egos and pocketbooks of middle-aged middle managers. It is, in fact, very hard, legally, to fire people in Japan, and the deadwood has become a kind of Japanese socialism: the are kept on the payroll instead of going on unemployment, etc.
Is there a happy medium? Probably, but it’s going to be hard to find. White-collar automation is only going to continue, to the point where “good jobs” are going to be scarce over the long term. Think about it: Until sometime in the 80s and for many until the 90s, being a white collar worker meant sitting in an office with no computer–and somehow there was work to do! People got paid big money for jobs that would seem like a joke today. This environment isn’t going to get any kinder.
They give numbers less than that, typical is around 3400 a month, anything over $5000 is considered very high from what I saw. But I see your point, many companies are paying engineering interns relatively decent money.
I don’t see how that counters or negates what I am saying though. Not all white collar workers are engineers, and 53% of all internships are unpaid. And only a small portion, about 6% of Silicon Valley workers are tech workers, and not all of those are engineers. So your nitpick only effects a small outlying portion of the job market. Of all the marketers, accountants, lawyers, marketers which these companies need to function - which as a whole is a much larger segment of workers than the engineers, the majority of them would have been trained by unpaid internships.
Even if your figures were 100% correct, it would not really make much difference. The question is “Who is training these workers?” and the answer in large part they are trained by unpaid internships. If a company is following the law, then they are using their resources to add a net benefit to the intern. If they are not, then they are considered to be taking advantage of the intern and are not in compliance with the law. At any rate, this type of system of give and take does not really mesh with a system of maximum self interested efficiency, that is my main point.
My career is about 11 years old and it’s shocking to me anyone would expect anything else from an employer. Who would even want to work at a company where they have nothing of value to contribute?
I actually lost my job in January at an energy company. I worked for 3 years helping them establish a division that was building software products to complement their other services. I was fired when they gave up on trying to do that and abandoned software entirely. If they had said “well obviously we’re not firing you, because you’ve worked really hard at writing software for us. So… can you do anything besides develop software? Any interest in becoming a lineman?” I would’ve looked at them like they were out of their fucking minds. Instead I packed up my desk and got another job doing what I actually do. Hard work has nothing to do with it.
I think a key point is that there’s no such thing as a static business. What is the long term strategy for Netflix? What happens when their business expands? Or when employees retire? Unless Netflix is planning on shutting down, it has to figure on hiring new employees at some point.
And when it wants to hire new employees, it’ll have to look for them among the people who are available. It may find that good potential employees are already working for other companies and have no interest in working for Netflix. Even if Netflix is offering competitive wages, employees are going to prefer an employer who if offering competitive wages and stability. Netflix is going to end up having to employ the people who couldn’t get jobs with other companies.
On the other end, Netflix probably has a lot of employees who it plans on keeping around - top notch employees who are doing valuable and needed work on an ongoing basis. But in the environment Netflix has created, can it count on keeping these employees? Having abandoned the idea of loyalty, Netflix shouldn’t expect these valuable employees to remain with Netflix if another company makes a better offer (and remember those other companies are offering the stability that Netflix isn’t).
I think Japan is an excellent example for this conversation. This article talks about the fact that the low economic growth of Japan has not had a severe negative impact on quality of life. Also, I think it is important to note the the Japanese have the longest life expectancy of any population in the world - yes, that’s correlation without establishing a causal relationship, but I just want to throw it out there.
On the other hand, the US seems to be slightly above Japan on most Quality of life indexes - which would indicate that the gains from a more competitive, efficient business climate outweigh the negatives.
I think you are remembering things different from me. In the podcast, the emphasis I remember is that Netflix considers such types of long term relationships a rare anomaly not the norm and from day one instills this concept. The expectations are that what is considered valuable and needed will change and the most efficient way of meeting these challenges is through separation.
It even talks about a worker who fell ill through overwork (at least that is the unchallenged claim presented IIRC) and was no longer needed. So, the idea that your personal qualities make you a top notch and valuable employee are not what Netflix emphasizes. It is not personal qualities, it is delivery of what Netflix needs is all that matters. Netflix is seeing the employment market as a professional sports team where only top talent that fills the specific needs to win is required. If you look at professional athletes though, you see a much different type of career trajectory than what we have come build our legal and economic practices on.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record, I’ll give it a rest for a while:).