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Python at Netflix

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Re: Python at Netflix

#142

Reason #8,201 not to model your org after FAANG: writing custom software just to operate your site is like building your own tools to till your farm. I suppose if you hire world-class toolmakers you'll have some very good tools, but that's not quite the point of the farm, is it?

If you hire world class tool makers to make the best tools for your farm then your farm has a strategic advantage.

Really good tools can make a big difference.

You really do need world class though - the trade off of custom means your tools really do need to be a lot better than the standard.

Re: Python at Netflix

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot other loopholes: 1. Get F1-visa and do MS. 2. Marry a US citizen 3. use a J1 visa?

> 3. use a J1 visa? I've addressed this in this sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19789172 > 1. Get F1-visa People that study here also have to go through the H-1B lottery, like everyone else. Graduates with MS/PhD have a slightly higher probability of winning the H-1B lottery, but it's like 0.5 for US MS/PhD versus 0.3 for everyone else. You are still forced to go through a lottery. (One thing is…

> Marrying someone for the purpose is immigration is considered "immigration fraud"

No, it's not; Marrying someone for the purpose of evading immigration laws is. There is a difference; even if immigration is sought as a benefit of marriage, if there is genuine intent to enter into and maintain a bona fide marital relationship and that is maintained throughout the conditional period associated with immigration by marriage, there is no fraud.

Re: Python at Netflix

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you resist it?

It would be nice if the language was typed. Easier for overall maintenance, and refactoring for big projects.

Type hinting is a standard feature since Python 3.6.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/typing.html

The thing about python, as overall language philosophy, is convention over enforcement.

If you want your team to have a particular style and use certain features, then you should agree to do it and then use automated tools (like pep8, flake) to check that code complies with those rules, but it is up to you how you want to write the code.

Re: Python at Netflix

#145
post #63

Interesting. I had it in my head that Netflix was a pure Java shop. Was I wrong in the first place, or has something changed?

I mainly write js but our team maintains a scala app as well. It is much more of a polyglot company with a history of java (I have only been here 1.5y so this is from hearsay and my expirence, not a definitive source).

Re: Python at Netflix

#146
Does anyone have more info about this or know of similar projects?

We lean on the many of the statistical and mathematical libraries (numpy, scipy, ruptures, pandas) to help automate the analysis of 1000s of related signals when our alerting systems indicate problems. We’ve developed a time series correlation system...

Re: Python at Netflix

#147
>The ability to drop into a bpython shell and improvise has saved the day more than once.

what do you really do here - connect to the flask instance and route requests manually ?

Re: Python at Netflix

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their job site is a big /dev/null however. I spent several years dutifully submitting for numerous jobs with twenty years experience in internet and VFX in Hollywood and didn't even get an "other direction" form-letter for my trouble. (They don't date their posts so you have no idea which are active.) Netflix is in biking distance, but instead I work for a company on the east coast, 4000km away, waking at the crack o…

The only way to get hired at competitive companies is via referral - if you live in the Bay Area you probably know someone or know someone who knows someone at Netflix. Trying any other way is a lottery - and if you didn’t go to MIT/Stanford/CalTech/Harvard then your odds are pretty bad. The other way is already working at a famous company and having another famous company send you a recruitment email via linked in,…

I was not hired via referral. They reached out because they were using a node module I had written. Not sure how common that is, but tbh I think any general characterization of the hiring practices of such a large org is bound to be wrong in many ways.

Re: Python at Netflix

#149

"You've read 11 stories this months, lets make things official". Medium is trying to look like NY Times, minus any kind of effort to actually write the stories.

Why can't I read their articles through Pocket?

Re: Python at Netflix

#150
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python’s type annotation mechanism is somewhere between afterthought and joke. Nobody uses it and nothing is built with it in mind; it can be anywhere from needlessly complicated to utterly impossible for code that interacts with third-party libraries to successfully discover and import class names for type annotations. Making matters worse, you need to use even more extra libraries for the type annotations to actual…

I beg to differ, I've seen it adopted in quite a few places by large companies. I've rarely seen it used in startups though. My evidence is anecdotal (so is yours though). I definitely agree that it's not seeing nearly as much adoption as let's say... TypeScript in the JavaScript ecosystem though. Facebook even wrote a package to generate types automatically for existing code https://github.com/Instagram/MonkeyType .

I’m speaking from the personal experience of using it myself. I don’t doubt that some companies have large internal Python codebases with extensive type annotations. If you’re at one of those companies, maybe the experience of using those annotations rises from third-rate to second-rate. It’s never going to be comparable to a statically typed language, or maybe even a language designed from the ground up with optional static typing in mind.

And that’s fine! Python is probably the best language in its niche. Type annotations just don’t do enough to break out of that niche. Annotated Python with mypy is a terrible statically-typed language. Python generally is an excellent dynamically-typed language.

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