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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

#151

Post by chrisseaton »

jcadam wrote: post #144

I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those). Failed of course :) But they put me up in a really nice hotel, so there's that. In the years since, I've definitely lost all interest in working in SV (the fact that I've failed every single interview I've had with SV c…

I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#152

Post by ativzzz »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #90
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 there is a lot of truth to this. Big Law is a great example of this, where the nearly every firm operates in lockstep on the Craveth Scale[1]. If one firm increases salary, every other firm will for for same cycle. https://www.biglawinvestor.com/biglaw-salary-scale/

Isn't this basically collusion by companies? Didn't Google/Facebook get in trouble for trying something like this at some point?

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#153

Post by mettamage »

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 have one friend and he programs at least ten times as fast as I do (in typing). I can barely keep it up with reading.

And in my CS class I was in the top quarter percentile, he was in the top 1%. The difference is big. They type code as fast as I'm typing this comment, while having a sane architecture.

The secret: they programmed a lot more as a kid.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#154

Post by komali2 »

> Moreover, Hastings thinks that an exceptional technologist’s abilities extend beyond coding or debugging faster than an “average” colleague: It’s also about the ability to tackle more abstract problems. “The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn’t unique to programming,” he wrote. “The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can’t.”

I feel like an objective analysis of me as a software engineer is that I'm the opposite of this. Maybe because I've not been doing it long, maybe because I'm a bootcamp kid, who knows. I'd like to be that kind of engineer, though. The one that whacks out some mind-boggling fix to problems. I work with a woman like that. She just... figures it out. I don't know how to explain it. Like one time we had to build an SQL AST represented by the DOM, and she put down this recursive series of components that to this day I have trouble explaining to new people on the project.

I want that skill. If it's talent, fine, but I've yet to find things I can't learn through sheer brute force if necessary. This one, though, I haven't found the brute force solution to.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#155

Post by PopeDotNinja »

chrisseaton wrote: post #151
jcadam wrote: post #144

I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those). Failed of course :) But they put me up in a really nice hotel, so there's that. In the years since, I've definitely lost all interest in working in SV (the fact that I've failed every single interview I've had with SV c…

I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.

I dunno. I've had pretty good luck breaking into SF companies, and I didn't get started until 40. But I'm a glutton for punishment and went through a lot of grinding to make that happen. I'd say it depends on how flexible your mind is, and how bad you want to put in the work to get it.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#156

Post by lhnz »

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…

Er, isn't it a bit of a strawman to suggest that people that talk about 100x engineers are talking about 100x productivity?

Nobody I've met thinks that there are a set of people that believe there are "developers that write code 100x faster than other developers" but when people write comments on HN they act like this is a really common belief and only they are able to spot that it's not sane...

Everybody that I've met considers technical prowess more along the lines of: the ability to write complicated code which others would find difficult to do, the ability to simplify a problem in order that it can be solved without complexity, the ability to optimize the performance of something in order that it uses less resources, the ability to come up with an innovative design that others wouldn't have thought of, the ability to explain technical ideas to their colleagues in a way that enables others to achieve more, the ability to balance short-term goals against a long-term plan, etc.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#157

Post by ipnon »

hintymad wrote: post #138
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…

100x in this sense is akin to doctoral level research. Think SpaceX turning the impossible into the possible with reusable rockets. Their returns on investment are now 100x greater than their competitors.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#158

Post by gcheong »

jcadam wrote: post #144

I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those). Failed of course :) But they put me up in a really nice hotel, so there's that. In the years since, I've definitely lost all interest in working in SV (the fact that I've failed every single interview I've had with SV c…

Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every other company out there.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#159

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

drdebug wrote: post #142
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like they might be going a bit overboard with video compression optimization. As an example, Star Trek Voyager in HD looks significantly worse than OTA 480i. On the plus side, it looks good in 4k.

I agree, their quality is sometimes questionable but to be fair OTA has preallocated/fixed bandwidth, while netflix on the other hand likely gains from optimizing for lower bitrates.

They can optimize for lower bitrates, which they've been doing for a while, but the recent drop in bitrate is really awful.

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/netflix-degrading-hd-v...

Even if they are bandwidth constrained, I wouldn't be surprised if some shows looked better at 480i/.5Mbps than 1080p/.5Mbps.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#160

Post by chrisseaton »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #155
chrisseaton wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.

I dunno. I've had pretty good luck breaking into SF companies, and I didn't get started until 40. But I'm a glutton for punishment and went through a lot of grinding to make that happen. I'd say it depends on how flexible your mind is, and how bad you want to put in the work to get it.

> becomes extremely hard

> went through a lot of grinding to make that happen

Aren't we in agreement?

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