As I walked out of the meeting with the new manager, he turned to me and said, “Who does that guy think he is? How dare he talk to me that way!” I told him that the engineer was one of our best, and that we had cultivated the practice of asking people about the nature of problems they were tackling rather than assuming an understanding of them. Netflix turned out to be too much of a culture change for him, and he moved on before long.
