Lots of marketing coming from the Netflix CEO lately. Anyone notice a similar trend?
think he released a book
Reed Hastings, “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention,” released Sept. 8.
Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
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Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#42I have no opinion on Disney, as it's not available in my country, but generally for me Netflix's latency from the play button is much better than youtube's or HBO Go's. HBO's app / web page is full of bugs that would be probably easy to fix (it gets stuck even after I turn my new Samsung TV off and on again, I need to force quit the app). At the same time while youtube offline video watching always works for me on my…
Altered Carbon, especially season 1 was pretty good imo
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether or not one agrees with him... It's not really inconsistent to pay people at the top range but that comes with an expectation of being shown the door if they don't perform at the top levels and coming into an office to work because that's better for the company (in Hastings' view).
For 500k a year I'd be more than willing to show up at an office. I assume they're spending money on testing and whatever protocols they need to enforce to ensure they don't kill / incapacitate their golden legion of software engineers. And when you're making that much money, it becomes much easier to (for example) have someone else do your grocery shopping.
> I assume they're spending money on testing and whatever protocols they need to enforce to ensure they don't kill / incapacitate their golden legion of software engineers.
If it's anything like my experience and anecdotal experiences from my friends, then they're just giving you the illusion of safety and not actually providing a safe working space.
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#44Exactly what is Netflix doing that requires such skilled programmers? As a consumer of its product I haven't noticed any significant groundbreaking changes to the platform in years. I find more people complaining about the software experience as years go by. What have these rockstar programmers done exactly? I can tell you it's for sure not the UX, or its recommendation engine, which are frankly both abysmal. I'm gue…
Right that's the theory and you can read about it in his various books.
So instead of paying $260k per year for 10 engineers (2.6M), they might pay 451k for 3 "10x" engineers (1.3M). Costs are 50% lower overall, and if the engineers are even 2x more productive than the average you "break even".
Smaller staff means you need fewer managers.
I'm not saying this is actually how it works in real life (can a developer really be 10x more productive? who know). This is just their operating theory.
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Netflix,Google,Facebook,Micr...
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#45Exactly what is Netflix doing that requires such skilled programmers? As a consumer of its product I haven't noticed any significant groundbreaking changes to the platform in years. I find more people complaining about the software experience as years go by. What have these rockstar programmers done exactly? I can tell you it's for sure not the UX, or its recommendation engine, which are frankly both abysmal. I'm gue…
They write about some of the interesting engineering work on various blogs.
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#46In my opinion a huge role in the raise of IT people salary is their tendency to brag about their salary, one way or another. For better or for worse, this lead to discussions about salary, negotiating practices, and to people looking elsewhere. I sometimes speak with people that work in other fields and many of them have zero clue about these topics, whereas in most IT-related discussion boards (whether it's HN, redd…
i think you'll find that the work and value being created is required to support the high salaries. Imagine a super-market checkout person or a waiter - i'm sure they talk about their wages too. Why don't they get higher wages just by talking and negotiating?
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#47Exactly what is Netflix doing that requires such skilled programmers? As a consumer of its product I haven't noticed any significant groundbreaking changes to the platform in years. I find more people complaining about the software experience as years go by. What have these rockstar programmers done exactly? I can tell you it's for sure not the UX, or its recommendation engine, which are frankly both abysmal. I'm gue…
I haven't worked at Netflix, but I believe there are a lot of problems around video encoding and infrastructure which are quite tricky to solve. Netflix uses something like 15% of the world's internet bandwith, and the infrastructure/delivery challenges are probably enormous.
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#48Why does the article use the term "technologists" when Hastings' quotes are all specifically about software engineers ?
In the same vein, even I get confused what to call myself when talking to other people.
There's like 5 or 6 different ways to identify my position: programmer, coder, developer, engineer, hacker..."technologist" isn't that big of a reach from them I guess.
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison to Disney and Amazon is because their products are in competition, not because they pay similar wages
Amazon is also known for paying high tech salaries. And also known for being a shit place to work. It sucks, but they pay for it.
Netflix is famous for paying absolute top-tier engineering salaries. Amazon is pretty middle-of-the-pack, or possibly slightly lower (hard to separate from the COL of being mostly Seattle-based).
Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
#50In my opinion a huge role in the raise of IT people salary is their tendency to brag about their salary, one way or another. For better or for worse, this lead to discussions about salary, negotiating practices, and to people looking elsewhere. I sometimes speak with people that work in other fields and many of them have zero clue about these topics, whereas in most IT-related discussion boards (whether it's HN, redd…
One reason for that is way more variability in developer compensation. A company hiring a senior SWE in SF might be paying 130k or 400k. But until recently there wasn’t much transparency.
My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pretty much understood you make 225k plus any overtime so there’s not much more to discuss.