Reed Hastings Explains Netflix’s Culture in ‘No Rules Rules’

Not all of this was influenced by the technology industry, of course. Workers everywhere have demanded different things from their employers. But as Silicon Valley’s legend grew, the management methods there spread.

— Shira Ovide, writer of The Times’s On Tech newsletter (sign up here)

Our current relationship with technology reminds me of our relationship with food. Granted, we may not need tech in order to survive, but many of us do rely on it to work, to learn, to document and to connect.

We like, and even love, many foods — fresh baked bread, piping hot tacos — and the same is true for much of our tech. Would you voluntarily give up the smartphone or tablet that many of you are probably holding right now? Your favorite app? Your ability to access vast catalogs of music or to have video chats with your doctor or relatives who live far away?

As is also true for food, we have reason to be cautious, and even angry, about how some tech is made and the inequalities of access to it. Some food companies deliberately engineer their products to make us addicted. So, too, do some tech companies. Working conditions in both the food and tech industries can be suboptimal, and in some cases downright dangerous and exploitive.

Under public pressure, hazardous food additives and ingredients have been regulated out of our food supply, and unfair labor practices are under scrutiny. Now that we’re discussing the toxicity of tech, we need to be specific: Which technologies nourish society, and which are making us sick?

— Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and author of “Troublemakers”

What backlash? Whenever I hear about the “tech backlash,” I glance at Facebook’s share price, consider that the tech sector is the only thing holding up the stock market and wonder just what planet the speaker lives on. I also imagine Facebook’s internal usage dashboards, which must be similarly off the charts (not to mention Zoom’s).

Times have never been better for tech. Work-from-home orders were less of a hit to productivity than management thought, and many founders, C.E.O.s and other senior executives have decamped for gorgeous rural areas or “second-tier” cities with shockingly high qualities of life. Every weekend features a traffic jam of moving trucks in front of my Bay Area apartment building.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/business/dealbook/reed-hastings-netflix-book.html