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Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

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Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#101

Post by dktoao »

benmanns wrote: post #83
dktoao wrote: post #77

I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I g…

If 100x is from 100x the throughput of a 0.1x developer, in reality some developers are <0 net contribution. If I'm a 10x and the baseline/worst is -5x, then I need to start saying I'm a -50x developer.

I feel like this can actually happen in practice... Your code sucks and then you hire a 10x developer who is really good a duct taping everything in your code to work with nasty hacks. Good times!

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#102

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #32

In 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…

[deleted]

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#103

Post by andrewingram »

notJim wrote: post #94
dktoao wrote: post #77

I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I g…

> Good developers are the ones that create code that resists the slide from a 10x code-base to a 0.1x code-base That may be true of good developers. On the other hand, in my experience "10x developers" are the ones causing the slide.

This feels like the ones often seen as 10x heroes, because they're the only ones who can be productive in the mess they created.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#104

Post by cbanek »

dktoao wrote: post #77

I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I g…

I don't think I'm a 100x developer or anything, but I think people underestimate the compounding interest of being a 5x-10x developer. If you architect things just right today, that can save you a lot of time tomorrow. Spending time testing today can save weeks of bug time later, which can be spent to create something useful, compounding on itself.

If we say green field is 10x, and someone is doing good things, I think that should go up over time. Getting things like builds, documentation, tests, make people more productive.

Whereas on the other hand, people who make code worse eventually start drowning in their own filth, and eventually slow down to nearly nothing. Filth also compounds.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#105

Post by flerchin »

Pay fewer folks more money each, but less overall gets them to own the software they build. It's a virtuous cycle. A large team treated like "resources" will build exactly what they're told to build, and it's someone else's problem if that solves a business need, or even works.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#106

Post by drewg123 »

ArlenBales wrote: post #38

Exactly 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 work for Netflix Open Connect (CDN). We've been leaders on CPU and power efficiency with things like async sendfile, kernel TLS, and more. We've had servers doing 100Gb/s in production for 4 years, while competing CDNs are just now rolling out 100Gb/s servers. I have a prototype machine right now serving 375Gb/s of TLS encrypted customer video traffic with just 32 cores.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#107

Post by babesh »

dktoao wrote: post #77

I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I g…

I think one misconception is the range. I think that the range is dependent on the situation both immediate and long term. The immediate situation’s range is more bounded. The bottom of the range can veer into the negative and the top can go way beyond 10x. It’s more a phase change at that point.

Example of >> 10x phase change: Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat with MapReduce and BigTable.

For the negative, I think we all have seen the programmer who is useless and that actually requires other people to replace their work.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#108

Post by dktoao »

babesh wrote: post #107
dktoao wrote: post #77

I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I g…

I think one misconception is the range. I think that the range is dependent on the situation both immediate and long term. The immediate situation’s range is more bounded. The bottom of the range can veer into the negative and the top can go way beyond 10x. It’s more a phase change at that point. Example of >> 10x phase change: Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat with MapReduce and BigTable. For the negative, I think we al…

I agree, but I used 0.1 - 10x for illustration purposes only.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#109

Post by MiroF »

pathseeker wrote: post #93
znpy wrote: post #32

In 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've got cause and effect backwards. The rocket-ship rise of IT salaries is what has everyone in the field discussing salaries. The topic wouldn't even come up if it was pretty well-bounded to $80k/year for a SWE with 5 years of experience. However, in our field you end up with people who have sat around in their same SWE job at DuPont/Lockheed or some other boomer company for 10 years and are making $80k w…

> That's why they are willing to compete for competent engineers.

The skyrocketing wages for engineers are because until recently, tech companies were illegally conspiring to not compete for competent engineers.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#110

Post by cameronfraser »

winrid wrote: post #79
d23 wrote: post #34

> Eventually, Rick snapped. Once he departed the company, the team of supposedly “mediocre” engineers redid his work to make it more elegant and efficient: “We didn’t have any mad geniuses building everything from scratch. But our productivity was never higher.” A silly strawman. I'd firmly put someone like this in the bucket of "not that effective."

Yeah, if you're not focused, and you're not even writing documentation, there is no way you should be considered very good at your job. Early in my career I had someone that kept telling me "we don't write documentation because nobody will read it". I'll never put up with that again. You can take 30mins to write a confluence page describing the context, the solution, and comparison to other solutions and why this one…

Different companies have different needs, early stage startups would probably fire you for spending too much time on documentation because they're paying you to make progress on their product and you're usually working alone anyways or very small teams with heavy interaction. So not only would nobody ready it, it would become outdated within a month.
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