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Working at Netflix 2017

brendangregg.com

91–100 of 162 posts

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many shady tech company practices: * Open sexual harassment culture * Building spy software for the government * Selling censorship tools to governments * Selling your private data to advertisers * Allowing advertisers to target a person's emotional state * Profiting off of fake news and click bait * Tracking people across the web * Using monopolies to limit competition in other realms * Strong arming third…

Could you re-phrase this somehow? I'm not sure if you are talking about companies in general or Netflix. Edit: I rather ask than make an assumption. Thanks for the confirmation.

From the second to second-last line, they're referring to shady practices in general. In their last, they're arguing that delivering lower-quality streams to Linux-based user agents is comparatively benign.

Not sure I agree, FWIW.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#92
post #3

> We don't do anything shady, and we're proud of that. We're an honest company. Maybe not shady, but surely controversial. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ [1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/18/drm-for-the-web-is-a-bad... [2]: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/drm-in-web-standards

There are many shady tech company practices: * Open sexual harassment culture * Building spy software for the government * Selling censorship tools to governments * Selling your private data to advertisers * Allowing advertisers to target a person's emotional state * Profiting off of fake news and click bait * Tracking people across the web * Using monopolies to limit competition in other realms * Strong arming third…

You have sources for these?

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve…

> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.

You could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)...

>Is there much left?

You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#94

Answer me this: Why does the interface suck so bad? How are pissing off 100 million subscribers good business? I apologize for not expanding my view with a detailed analysis, but damn. The update you guys promoted like half a year in advance made it even worse.

Author works on performance, so he's probably not the person to ask...

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glassdoor would be completely wrong.

Source?

LOL, you won't find one, because if true that's got to be an outlier by several standard deviations. Whenever a salary discussion comes up on HN, someone always comes out of the woodwork to let us all know that his brother's niece's room-mate's boyfriend makes $300K+ at BIG_TECH_CO, so therefore that must be what tech companies pay.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so we'll make it stupid simple for people to do. A giant, unencrypted library of movies, that can be saved and redistributed. Pirating exists, but if I asked most people how to do it, they still wouldn't know how to download a torrent client, find the torrent, unpack the movie, get a movie player, etc.. You know how locks on your front door keeps the honest thieves out? Same idea. I've never understood the com…

The point where things break because of it. It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet. But it has happened in the past. There are videos games that are single player and can't be played without an active connection back to the publisher. What happens when the publisher doesn't like you or mislabels you as a pirate? What if you just want to play the video game you bought and payed fro without an Internet…

I must have missed the part of Netflix ToS that gives me ownership of all their content for $9.99 a month.

I do agree with you for purchases that have DRM, but this is a subscription service - you watch when you pay, not when you don't.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve…

> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.

Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many shady tech company practices: * Open sexual harassment culture * Building spy software for the government * Selling censorship tools to governments * Selling your private data to advertisers * Allowing advertisers to target a person's emotional state * Profiting off of fake news and click bait * Tracking people across the web * Using monopolies to limit competition in other realms * Strong arming third…

You have sources for these?

I totally understand the need for sources in informed discussions, but I also feel like these topics have been so well documented that they have reached a point where asking someone for a source every time they throw out the fact that companies are "Tracking people across the web" is a contrived roadblock at best, and purposely stifling to discussion at worst.

With that said, I don't want to just single you out since this is a common practice, so I went ahead and found sources for you:

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... [1]https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti... [2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveill... [3]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr... [4]http://mashable.com/2017/04/30/facebook-leaked-report-advert... [5]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11... [6]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530741/the-murky-world-of... [7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [8]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160920/07021035568/hp-la...

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#100
post #9
post #3

> We don't do anything shady, and we're proud of that. We're an honest company. Maybe not shady, but surely controversial. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ [1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/18/drm-for-the-web-is-a-bad... [2]: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/drm-in-web-standards

Yeah, being limited to 720p because you run a free software operating system is not my idea of 'not shady' (Netflix is keeping their streams on Firefox and Chrome on 720p as a matter of policy, 1080p requires IE11, Edge, or Safari on a non-free operating system, or their proprietary app on an approved operating system). The only way this makes sense is if the purpose of this blockade is to push people towards devices…

Have both Amazon Prime and NetFlix. Still fetch torrents, so I can control playback speed (watch faster).
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