Netflix's "freedom and responsibility" culture once set it apart from the competition, allowing it to attract the best talent; but under the leadership of Ted Sarandos, it's rapidly falling into line with every other large corporation as it rolls back the ground-breaking policy of unlimited parental leave during the first year of a child's life it implemented a decade ago.

Ever since Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings stepped down as co-CEO in 2023 to make way for the former employee of a video store chain, the company has steadily backtracked on its parental leave policy, using vague and sometimes contradictory internal guidelines to make the point that taking more than six months of parental leave is a bad career move.

This regressive cultural shift is part of an explicit refocus at the company from subscriber growth to profitability, in other words, or as Cory Doctorow would put it, full-scale enshittification: the only stakeholders that matter are the shareholders. A company that once attracted the bright and the best because it treated people like adults, and saw them to respond in kind, is now just another place to work.

What's important to remember here is that Netflix isn't doing this because its workforce abused the benefits it offered to the point of making them unsustainable or because they made a dent in its profits. No, this is the work of a new management team that played no part in setting up the company and that has no understanding of the culture that once made it a special place to work. Instead, they simply came in as administrators, falling into line with isomorphism, the tendency of organizations to copy others. After all, it's easier just to be like everyone else.

This is the same logic that has led so many companies to overturn policies and perks that have proven positive, such as decentralized work. The pandemic showed that people could be trusted to work from home during lockdown, and afterwards from wherever they wanted, respecting common sense and the interests of the company. Not only did productivity not suffer, it improved. However, mediocre middle managers made the decision that the well-being of workers was not the priority, and that what had to be done was to bring everyone back to the office to be micro-managed, because they could not be trusted and had to be treated like unruly schoolchildren.

Sadly, the majority of companies seem to prefer employing obedient automatons over people with a sense of responsibility who are able to align their well-being and interests with those of the company; cultures based solely on authority versus rational ones based on worker accountability and empowerment. Technology today provides for infinitely more adequate and reasonable working conditions than those that consist of long commutes or sitting in traffic jams so that the workforce can all enter at a certain time and remain there for the stipulated time. Instead, companies, heirs to a tradition dating back to the factories of the Industrial Revolution, are incapable of leveraging these technologies and instead find it easier to maintain surveillance cultures.

What a waste.

(En español, aquí)