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Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

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Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#171

Post by shmerl »

imustbeevil wrote: post #170
shmerl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how those developers measured piracy in general. But piracy is naturally increased by limiting legal sources for buying something. Other developers commented on this very issue, saying that existing DRM increased piracy.

I'm not going to continue this off topic conversation.

> The new Assassins Creed has been pirated Zero times because they made the DRM as invasive as possible.

It was also not bought by people who see this obtrusive nonsense which drains CPU resources and degrades performance as something to avoid. In the end, they only lost sales. I wouldn't call Ubisoft or any other legacy publisher rational. Rather irrational control freaks.

Besides, Ubisoft's DRM will be broken, same as all others.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#172

Post by megaman22 »

shmerl wrote: post #166
imustbeevil wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer of The Banner Saga when asked if the second game would be on GOG. > sadly once we released DRM Free for The Banner Saga we saw our game get pirated like wildfire. Which is something we're keen to avoid as much possible. We haven't given it much thought at this point to be honest when it comes to GoG. https://steamcommunity.com/app/281640/discussions/0/39218452...

Which is a pretty clueless response. Avoiding GOG will only increase such pirating (by decreasing legal sources for the game). Developers should know better.

People really pirate games still? Steam and GoG have made actually paying for games so easy I haven't even thought about it for years.

There was a time when you couldn't find most games in a physical store, and sketchy cracked versions on PirateBay or your favorite tracker were the alternative. Of course, I have orders of magnitude more disposable income now than I used to, as well.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#173

Post by marssaxman »

Bahamut wrote: post #3

That Glassdoor reference on Netflix software engineer salaries is wrong/outdated from my understanding - I don’t know a single Netflixer making less than $300k.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…

When you say "making less than $300k", are you referring to actual salary or to some nebulous "total compensation" estimate?

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#174

Post by shmerl »

megaman22 wrote: post #172
shmerl wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a pretty clueless response. Avoiding GOG will only increase such pirating (by decreasing legal sources for the game). Developers should know better.

People really pirate games still? Steam and GoG have made actually paying for games so easy I haven't even thought about it for years. There was a time when you couldn't find most games in a physical store, and sketchy cracked versions on PirateBay or your favorite tracker were the alternative. Of course, I have orders of magnitude more disposable income now than I used to, as well.

> People really pirate games still?

Some do it for sport, especially DRMed ones. I.e. they see DRM as something to break. So the mere presence of DRM is an incentive to pirate for them.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#175

Post by imustbeevil »

shmerl wrote: post #171
imustbeevil wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to continue this off topic conversation.

> The new Assassins Creed has been pirated Zero times because they made the DRM as invasive as possible. It was also not bought by people who see this obtrusive nonsense which drains CPU resources and degrades performance as something to avoid. In the end, they only lost sales. I wouldn't call Ubisoft or any other legacy publisher rational. Rather irrational control freaks. Besides, Ubisoft's DRM will be broken, same…

See above.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#176

Post by solatic »

jedrek wrote: post #164
nostrademons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 100M+ subscribers who each pay ~$10/month. That's a billion dollars a month , or $12B/year. $12B/year can pay for a lot of $300K/year salaries. (Most people have trouble wrapping their heads around just how huge consumer markets are. If you have 300M users - a la Whatsapp when Facebook acquired them - and charge them just $1/year, that's $300M/year in revenue, or enough to afford 1000 $300K/year engineers […

> $300M/year in revenue, or enough to afford 1000 $300K/year engineers [or actually more like 1000 $200K/year engineers once you figure in overhead]. I think you're massively underestimating overhead. Each person who works on a product should make a max of 15-25% of what they bring in. If you have a repair shop and you charge $100/h, you should be paying your techs $15-25.

Back of the envelope calculations:

$1 billion a month is about $1.4 million an hour 24/7.

$300,000 + ~$50,000 in benefits / 260 working days yearly / 8 hour work days is about $170 an hour.

That works out to earning about 0.012% of what they bring in.

Netflix is a bad example because, like most media companies, the vast majority of their expenses go towards media licensing and production. So while it's easy to paint their engineers as overpaid compared to the labor market, it's very difficult to paint their engineers as overpaid relative to their product.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#177

Post by shmerl »

imustbeevil wrote: post #175
shmerl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new Assassins Creed has been pirated Zero times because they made the DRM as invasive as possible. It was also not bought by people who see this obtrusive nonsense which drains CPU resources and degrades performance as something to avoid. In the end, they only lost sales. I wouldn't call Ubisoft or any other legacy publisher rational. Rather irrational control freaks. Besides, Ubisoft's DRM will be broken, same…

See above.

Where did you get data that DRM prevented lost sales? It's vaporware. Your link doesn't show in any way, that if they'd have released it DRM free, they wouldn't have more sales in result.

It's boring that you support anti-user methodology like DRM and try to justify it. It's been debunked multiple times.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#178

Post by chickenbane »

briga wrote: post #163
sambe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you worked at Netflix and everyone around you made a million whilst you made half a million, you might give such an answer on a survey, and it probably wouldn't change with the absolute amounts.

That's something that worries me about moving down to Silicon Valley. It seems like everyone there is envious of how much their neighbors and co-workers make, regardless of how much they happen to be making. I want to avoid falling into that trap--it seems like a recipe for unhappiness.

Another perspective: Netflix is notoriously interested in only hiring top talent. Top talent is ambitious and always seeking to advance. I don't think it's a matter of envy, it's the unending beat of progress.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#179

Post by lsc »

hibikir wrote: post #135
lsc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is only true when looking at tech companies that really hand significant stock grants. There are tons of software developers, all over the US, getting only salary and modest bonuses outside of those few places that grant stock that is as good as money. 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 de…

Sure, I am just saying that things changed in those silicon valley companies in the last ten years.

Those jobs with the as good as money stock grants are interesting because they represent the top of the market not just locally, but globally. If you want to maximize income in this industry and you are not good enough to move markets to you, you move to silicon valley and interview.

Re: Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

#180

Post by ksk »

shmerl wrote: post #159
ksk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if a lot of people were willing to pay more for DRM-free, or if people avoided DRM'ed content, it would make business sense to do that. Its easier to effect change from the bottom up, than demanding a company change their policies just because you disagree with them. For example, EMI experimented with selling their entire catalog DRM-free on itunes for 30 cents more per track in 2007. I don't think it turned out…

What makes sense is to offer an option instead of saying "we know better what you should want, so we won't offer it". Music sells just fine DRM-free on Bandcamp. Games sell fine DRM-free on GOG. So I don't see any reason for films to be different. Lack of DRM-free video has nothing to do with lack of demand, but more with paranoia and backwards thinking of some legacy media execs. See https://www.gog.com/forum/genera…

Music sells fine with DRM too, so do games. Not sure what your point is. I showed you that EMI offered an option with and without DRM. We know the results. Do you have examples where DRM and non-DRM products were offered, and users overwhelmingly chose the non-DRM product? I'm genuinely curious to see if it has ever happened and how successful it was.

In any case, DRM is one of those things that I don't see going away. It might change its form. People have gotten used to the convenience of not owning digital goods and merely renting them, and companies have gotten used to making money off of keeping users running on their subscription treadmill.

The easiest way to combat DRM is to start gofundme / indie gogo campaigns, where the developer gets paid upfront, and that way they don't care about DRM since they already made money.

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