Elizabeth Stone: commitment

Transcript context

…I want to touch on a couple things that I've been thinking about in this world of AI that we're approaching. One is junior people. It feels like everyone's just like... This is a good example. You're hiring a lot of awesome senior people that have proven they're awesome and high talent, density, high bars. Also, just AI makes it so easy to do stuff that people may not be learning how to do anything. Like junior engineers, I'm thinking, or junior PMs, junior designers. How do new people become these awesome senior people? Is there anything you think about? Are you hiring junior people? How do you think about this? What happens with junior people not necessarily learning or having a path to learn to become the senior person? We are still hiring junior people and they're really important to our talent strategy. So, we still have an intern program, we still have a new grad program, which was new for us as of a few years ago. So, prior to a few years ago, we were only hiring more experienced talent across all the functions. Now we do hire people straight from undergrad and graduate programs and we'll continue to do that. So, even in a world of AI where some things are easier, we were talking earlier about mindset, AI fluency. From my experience, younger folks are more open-minded. They tend to be more native in some of these new ways of working. For a company like Netflix, they're also very fluent in how entertainment is changing, how consumer behaviors are changing, how product and tech is influencing that in the products that they're using. That's really important to have on our team. So, there's the part of the persona, which is who are you as a new grad who's an engineer? But there's also, who are you as someone who's in their early twenties and has a perspective on the world that is highly valuable and a comfort with the way the world is changing? So, that's why I say it's a critical part of our talent strategy. To the, okay, so you step into the role and you have AI tools that didn't exist five or 10 years ago. I would say mastery of the craft is still very important. So, going back to, as the team member, I'm responsible for the quality of code that I am submitting for production. I'm responsible for the quality of products that I'm building, how they are designed, what that user-consumer experience is. None of that is going away. So, if I think about more junior or earlier career talent on the teams, we need to be investing just as much in the mentorship of this is what good looks like. This is how you use these tools, but you still take accountability for what the outcomes are, what the quality of the output is. And I think I mentioned this earlier, I find that mastery and that craft excellence scarce still. So, we want to make sure we're teaching that. I think it's a valid concern of, how do I get that if I'm not as hands-on as I would've had to be? But you still carry responsibility for reviewing code, testing code, being able to diagnose problems, knowing what a good product looks like. I think that's a very scarce skill to say, this is excellence in a product that solves a problem that matters and in how it's designed. So, I don't think that craft mastery, the importance of it is going away. Probably the way we train and grow talent has to change, because they're going to use different tools. And I can guarantee you that earlier career talent is going to be teaching older folks like me many new things, too. So, I think it goes in both directions. Where do you think engineering goes in, I don't know, five, 10 years? Do you think people need to still understand code? Or do you think there's this abstraction layer that sits on top where you don't even have to learn C++, Java, Python, whatever?…

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