Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

insights.dice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 448 posts

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#111

Post by victor106 »

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…

> 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 guess).

Wow!!! so true, never heard it said like this.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#112

Post by aaronblohowiak »

kilbuz wrote: post #70
tolbish wrote: post #13

I never understood why Netflix frequently gets mentioned in the same context as Apple, Google, and Amazon. I think I hear more about it than Microsoft on here. Can anyone explain this to me? Surely they aren't the only newish company that tries to employ smart people by paying well.

When Cramer coined the FAANG acronym, Netflix was included. That group of companies was grouped together by investors due to their performance and marked dominance at the time, which has by and large continued. In addition to their stock price, these companies also pay very well. In fact, if you are lucky to get an offer from Netflix, their aim is to pay you and keep you at "top of personal market". That is, they do…

You can choose how much of your comp to take in equity, if you work in countries where that is allowed (most of them.)

We pay enough that your compensation is not a reason you want to leave (or stay — we don’t pay more than the best you could possibly get elsewhere.) because our philosophy on compensation is such, it has a few ripple effects - there aren’t limited budgets for raises, instead we ask for each person did the market move for your role, or did you substantially change roles? This avoids the common shenanigans / pitfalls of comp elsewhere.

I personally believe that our early move to the cloud, early adoption of micro services and our open source contributions also help our “tech brand”.

It’s the best place I have worked.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#113

Post by runevault »

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…

Anything at a large enough scale becomes a hard problem. And they are one of the largest scales there is considering how many people use their service daily.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#114

Post by vonmoltke »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #68
ccmcarey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software Engineer seems a pretty safe choice.

Not so. In some states, engineer is a protected term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineer#United_State... edit I may have been mistaken and the word engineer itself may be non-protected, but the term software engineer specifically is protected in Florida: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...

No, "Engineer" (as a proper noun) is protected as a synonym for "professional engineer" (common noun phrase). The common noun "engineer" is not protected in any States.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#116

Post by asciident »

cbanek wrote: post #104
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 thi…

I was involved in an accidental situation where two teams at different companies worked on the exact same project from the same starting point, each led by different developers. This was not the company's core product, but a necessary part of it (for anonymity, let's say this was the device driver for a fancy piece of hardware).

The lead developers on each selected different frameworks, used different data architectures, and set up different workflows. One project became hugely convoluted, with bugs that were very difficult to trace due to race conditions, the way the navigation worked, and choices that let to more complex code. The other team had a much simpler architecture, and was literally 95% less code. That team was able to add new features with ease, and without complex bugs cropping up out of nowhere.

In fact, that project went into "maintenance mode" because there was nothing else to add, and the lead developer could just add one or two minor things when they cropped up, and instead spent most of his time on a new unrelated project. I'd say the lead developer with the better architecture was not only 100X, but the other team's lead developer would probably lead to the downfall of that company -- both morale and development speed would plummet to 0.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#117

Post by qppo »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #72
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think of technologist as being a term for anyone who works to develop new technologies, which would include the folks at AMD working on CPU designs, but wouldn't include typical web developers. Of course, in reality it's a rather fuzzy term.

I've pretty much only heard it ascribed to business analysts/operations, sales, or other non management, non engineering work at tech companies. Or want to work alongside emerging technologies but doesn't have the credentials to do the engineering or management.

I'm not trying to make their work sound less-than, just describing how I've heard the term used. Total anecdata.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#118

Post by randomfitnessq »

kilbuz wrote: post #70
tolbish wrote: post #13

I never understood why Netflix frequently gets mentioned in the same context as Apple, Google, and Amazon. I think I hear more about it than Microsoft on here. Can anyone explain this to me? Surely they aren't the only newish company that tries to employ smart people by paying well.

When Cramer coined the FAANG acronym, Netflix was included. That group of companies was grouped together by investors due to their performance and marked dominance at the time, which has by and large continued. In addition to their stock price, these companies also pay very well. In fact, if you are lucky to get an offer from Netflix, their aim is to pay you and keep you at "top of personal market". That is, they do…

Plus, FAAG may not be the best acronym.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#119

Post by bjornsing »

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…

It all depends on the problem space: if the deliverable is a program that produces a proof of Fermat’s last theorem then Andrew Wiles would have been a 1000000000000000x (or Inf) engineer on that project at a certain point in time...

Also, there are entirely different “10x engineers” being talked about as one and the same here. The copy-paste spaghetti guy probably couldn’t even get a job at Netflix...

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#120

Post by pjmorris »

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."

"If a programmer is indispensable, get rid of him as quickly as possible." - Weinberg, Gerald. The Psychology of Computer Programming.
Post reply on HN