131–140 of 202 posts
I attribute and applaud the strong leadership of Reed Hastings. Apple and Tim Cook is another example. Both companies keep their products and secrets close to their chest, and don't put-up with employees who think their political views or personal agendas are more important than the company. Leadership by committee (Google is notorious) in my view is not the answer. Large public companies should be dictatorships. The…
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A person can have an income of $300k a year but spend every penny of it on debt and necessities. That's generally not considered making a profit. EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood something. Netflix has indeed been making a profit.
Sure but if a corporation makes 300k a year that's called revenue, the revenue minus costs are profit, no?
A company with a positive cashflow and GAAP profitable is in the best spot, followed by a company with a positive cashflow and losing money in GAAP-land, followed by a negative cashflow and positive GAAP-land, followed by a negative cashflow and negative GAAP.
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It is shockingly high, but it's true. It's also a produce or leave environment where folks don't stick around who aren't, as the previous poster says, "top tier."
By "top tier", do you also mean people who are willing to put in longer than normal hours and deal with a super-competitive culture and the office politics and drama that come with it? Or am I reading too much into the quotations? I'm honestly just interested in hearing more about what the culture at Netflix is like.
Top Tier in the sense that they have very good technical skills, paired with the right attitude for Netflix’s culture. I haven’t them be unreasonable for the standards they set but they want the very best and want you to work hard everyday. The difference is they don’t seem to stockpile talent, they cut when someone doesn’t meet that bar and have paid them incredibly well till that point.
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That is a good question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer. Kickstarter and Patreon seem to be doing pretty well, but AFAIK they haven't been used to such a scale so they may not work for this. This is a big issue and our economy is largely suffering for it, but old-world thinking about treating digital goods like physical goods is a poor response.
Veronica Mars movie was made through kickstarter way back when. That was successful, and specifically covered cost of production. I can't remember the donation system, but most tiers got free digital copy of the film.
A proper example would be something like Kung Fury[2].
1. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140314/23410326583/warne...
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Netflix compensation packages are base salary only. So they are competitive by attempting to compute the value of Google or Facebook compensation packages which include shares and generous bonuses, and then Netflix aims to slightly beat that as well. Netflix has other perks of course. But they also have a pretty crazy layoff policy and they brag about how awesome their severance package is. Employment as Netflix is r…
>Employment as Netflix is really a mixture of the income premium and lack of stability that a contractor would have, with a compensation structure closer to a startup (base salary only, no formalized bonuses). Note, ever since IC Engineers started getting significant bonus/stock grants (Which, I think, is something that has been a thing for less than a decade, at least for grants of publicly traded stock.) From what…
When you look at that world, contractors still win by a very wide margin: They are organizations where HR will not allow a hire for a competitive salary, but a department head can spend their budget on contractors any way they want. This leads to gigantic pro-contractor differences: As recently as last year, I made three times as much as someone sitting next to me that had Architect in their title, and the contract was for many hundreds of hours, so it's not as if there was non-billable overhead.
Now, the big tech companies can compete with contractor billing rates, just as long as it's either Netflix, or someone with good-as-money stock grants, but if you live in, say, Kansas City, you won't smell those companies anyway, and chances are that, barring remote work for a giant, the best you can hope for without contracting is salary that isa little bit below Google's, but no stock.
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Interesting. I have a few friends who have interviewed and talked with people there and it's always been described to me as a place that does cut the bottom performers every year. When you hiring only "rock stars" those bottom 10% may still be great. I'm glad to hear that may not be true as it's always put me off from attempting to work there.
Do you trust a random commenter on HN on the Internet than a few of your own friends? This is something I wonder about. I weigh the opinion of random reddit posts than people I know in real life. How did I get that way?
Contrasted to a friend who heard something passing on information that they were not expecting to be held accountable for.
I might trust my friends more, if my friend and someone on the internet had the same information, but might trust someone on the internet more if they had better knowledge.
Also, they did say "might not be true", and it certainly makes sense to use new knowledge to adjust the probabilities of belief.
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> so there's no ethical shell game being played Netflix has some shady stuff like DRM going on, while pretending it's not their fault it was pushed into HTML standard.
As someone that works for a company with a moderately similar business model as netflix, I can almost guarantee that Netflix is not imposing this DRM by their own volition. It is highly likely that the owners of the rights to their content force the DRM as a condition of allowing their content to be used.
Want a happy life? Stay out of any sort of video or music related business. It just isn't worth the trouble.
That Glassdoor reference on Netflix software engineer salaries is wrong/outdated from my understanding - I don’t know a single Netflixer making less than $300k. Netflix seems to have an unusually open culture in general, including topics such as salary - they put their money where their mouth is and basically egg everyone on to beat them. Gotta respect that a company is willing to do that (I don’t work for them, but…
Seems like selection bias. Netflix fires you if you’re not happy.
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I also don’t know a single engineer whose total comp is below $300k at Netflix. They get paid well and the caliber of talent is top tier.
I could certainly be wrong! That feels shockingly high as an average, but good on Netflix for valuing talent. Something to aspire to. ;)