Half of a Good Idea is a Bad Idea

The Half of Netflix’s Culture Everyone Forgets

When I started my new job a couple of months ago, my desk came with the usual gear: monitor, mouse, charging cable plus a small stack of books management clearly hoped we’d read and live by. One of them was about Netflix’s engineering culture.

I’d already heard the mythology. Netflix went from mailing DVDs to running one of the largest streaming operations on earth, and somewhere in that leap, the story goes, they overhauled their engineering org: they kept only the “far exceeds expectations” performers and let everyone else go. Productivity went up. Netflix became a giant. The end.

I’ve heard versions of this story more than once in my own performance review cycles, usually from someone in management asking, half-joking and half-not, why we don’t just do what Netflix did. Why carry anyone who merely “meets expectations”? Just cut them.

That question always leads somewhere useful: a conversation about whether your own bar is genuinely high, and whether you’ve actually told your engineers, clearly, what’s expected of them. But it also skips the part of Netflix’s culture that matters more than the bar itself.

Netflix’s real bet wasn’t the bar. It was the trade.

The half of the story that gets dropped is that Netflix engineers are also unusually autonomous. Product managers don’t direct the work or prescribe how a feature gets built, they collaborate. The engineer is expected to own the business outcome of what they ship. Netflix’s own culture memo puts a name to this: “context, not control” — managers give teams the information and clarity to make good decisions themselves, instead of making the decisions for them. For big calls, they name one “informed captain” accountable for the judgment, then let different teams, each with their own captain, execute independently “highly aligned and loosely coupled.” Decisions get argued over (”farming for dissent”), and once made, everyone, including the people who disagreed, is expected to “disagree, then commit.”

That’s the part I keep coming back to. You cannot ask someone to own an outcome they didn’t get to shape. I’ve worked places where a product manager specifies not just what to build but how, waves off real pushback from the engineers building it, and then still expects those same engineers to be accountable for how it performs. That’s not accountability, it’s someone else’s decision wearing your name.

Netflix’s near-zero rulebook only makes sense in that context. Vacation policy: “Take vacation.” Expense policy: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” Those aren’t quirky perks, they’re what you get when the company has already decided its people should be trusted with judgment calls, so it stops writing rules for people who don’t need them.

Worth saying plainly: this isn’t a purely happy story. Netflix has acknowledged, including in its own updated culture memo, that the freedom got abused: an assistant expensing $30,000 with no rule technically broken is the go-to example. Their fix, notably, wasn’t to add more control. It was to reinforce the responsibility half; hence “People Over Process” now sitting where “Freedom and Responsibility” used to.

Which is really the point. Freedom and accountability aren’t two separate policies you can mix and match. They’re one system, and it only works as a pair. A high performance bar without real decision-making authority isn’t Netflix’s culture, it’s just a harsher review cycle bolted onto the same old command structure. You’ve kept the consequence and cut the deal that made the consequence fair.

So when the question comes up — why don’t we just get rid of anyone who isn’t “far exceeds?” The honest answer is: you can, but only after you’ve given your engineers what Netflix gave theirs first. Real context. Real ownership. Real say in how the work gets done. Skip that part and copy only the bar, and you haven’t adopted Netflix’s culture. You’ve adopted half of it and half of a good idea is a bad idea.