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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

#131

Post by dawnerd »

cameronfraser wrote: post #110
winrid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 So not only would nobody ready it, it would become outdated within a month.

Agreed, small teams could get easily dragged down by obsessing over documentation (and even testing to some extent).

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#132

Post by anm89 »

city41 wrote: post #115

I left Netflix about 2 months ago after over 5 years working there. Overall I would say the average developer there is about on par with any other company I have worked at. But the great ones were truly, astonishingly, great.

Interested to hear more about this.

Technically great? Great leaders? Great thinkers/architects/high level people? All of the above?

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#133

Post by subsubzero »

purple_ferret wrote: post #78

It's interesting that Netflix's strategy with content is almost the complete opposite. Pump out junk reality TV and test lots of shows for a season only to drop them once they don't put up acceptable numbers (i.e. get past the Initial Probationary Period)

Netflix's quality of content on original shows really took a nose-dive the past few years. They had a stable of excellent shows with writing punching above the pack compared to network TV or cable: HOC, The Crown, Stranger Things, Narcos to name a few. But recently some of those shows have been spun out/watered down to death, and a ton of junk has been released by them. I'm rather bearish on this company think barrier to entry for this space is rather low. Look at the success Disney+ has had regarding its service. Now throw in every major media company doing the same thing and I see netflix slowly dwindling down in the next few years as others with owned content dive into that space.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#134

Post by skrtskrt »

kyriakos wrote: post #61
xiphias2 wrote: post #12

I 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…

Ozark One of the best shows on Netflix

Ozark I think is far and away the best Netflix-created fiction content. It's actual HBO-level prestige TV, which is hard to say about any of the other non-documentary stuff from Netflix.

If you get into it, Netflix also carries a bunch of good Korean dramas, which tend to have a lot of episodes and honestly just seem to have much more effort put into them than most American TV. Signal and Itaewon Class are two of my current favorites.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#135

Post by giblaz »

MiroF wrote: post #109
pathseeker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, the compensation has been lagging compared to the money it's been generating.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#137

Post by legohead »

ffggvv wrote: post #64
legohead wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

amazon is actually known for paying low salaries...

No they're not, at least here in California. Maybe you're thinking of warehouse jobs.

Several people from my work have come over from Amazon, and we constantly interview people who either take Amazon over us (citing more $), or are trying to get away from Amazon but they end up getting a big counter offer from Amazon and staying with them.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#138

Post by hintymad »

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…

100X developers are the groups who turn impossibles into possibles. Some Uber engineers used to believe that Graphite was the best thing in the world and Nagios was second bar none, and they went ahead design a complex yet failing architecture for monitoring even when Uber's traffic was still tiny before Uber's M3 came along. This is what Netflix did with four engineers years before Uber's saga: https://www.quora.com/Are-Netflix-employees-really-that-good...

To those who couldn't scale out Graphite and got crushed under gruesome oncall alarms, the Netflix folks were 100x engineers.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#139

Post by kulig »

MiroF wrote: post #99
notJim wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 10x developers If they're causing code quality slide, they're not a "10x developer."

From business people's perspective they are.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#140

Post by lojack »

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.

10x is 100 times bigger than 0.1x FWIW.

> but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base.

Its almost exclusively because of the prevailing code-base. We can't forget that the prevailing code base was built by developers of varying skills. You can have "100x" developers build it or you can have "0.1x" developers build it.

> One of my least favorite people to work with is also a "high throughput" developer who is a prolific creator of software, but everything created by this person is an un-maintainable, un-documented, un-tested, brittle block of procedural copy-pasta that ends up in the critical business path. And yes, this developer "snapped" about a year ago and it has been a 3 person project ever since to scramble to fix this stuff.

Was this person the aforementioned "Rick" from this article?

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