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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

#271

Post by triceratops »

leptons wrote: post #215
bob33212 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reed is taking that into account. Reed and Netflix have been creating software for many years. They certainly have had "Rockstars" who could bust out functional but unmaintainable code. Those people are not valuable to Netflix because Netflix is looking for long term success. A 100x engineer exists in the context of a global company like Netflix. Because if a developer makes something just 1% better that translates i…

Netflix doesn't win or lose customers based on programmer performance, they win by having content that people actually want to watch. I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch. The only reason I've ever considered dropping Netflix is "why am I paying for this when there is nothing I want to watch". Fortunately, they have come through with some interesting content recently, a…

> I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch.

It's not a coincidence that they happen to have stuff that you want to watch. You're aware Netflix also applies data insights to decide what to make?

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#272

Post by nullsense »

98codes wrote: post #184
unoti wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months, but it is totally doable with reading and practice. I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at…

You mean doing the work _again_. I had all the algorithm stuff down cold out of college and maybe for another 5 years after. Now after 20 years of rarely needing any of it and having it be a web search away when I did, I couldn't come up with any of it on demand. "Doing the work" meaning having to study to relearn a thing that I'll maybe use sparingly in my work means the interview process is broken, not anyone's mot…

>"Doing the work" meaning having to study to relearn a thing that I'll maybe use sparingly in my work means the interview process is broken, not anyone's motivation

I used to think this too, but as a filter I think it's having the desired effect. From the outside looking in Life at a FAANG seems competitive in nature and they are optimizing for the people willing to push themselves that far to learn something.

The added bonus is all new hires at least know the effects of space/time complexity and how to make space/time trade-offs deeply well. Given they operate at the scale they do, mistakes with those concerns are more likely to have a material impact. Requesting that you know it _now_ and now that you _used_to_ know back in the day seems reasonable.

The upside from the candidates perspective, as ridiculous as leetcode study is, is one set of study applies across multiple companies, so candidates don't have to expend much energy on trying to optimize for how to study for a particular companies interview process.

If that's the way in and you want in, that's just what you have to do. If you aren't prepared to do it, you won't be getting in. If you are prepared to do it, and you do, it seems achievable.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#273

Post by vkou »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #225
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well scarcity is generally the best indicator. For a long time software developers have been a scarce resource and therefore hiring good engineers is competitive. It's true that some market forces and potential value of what is created are factors else nobody would pay for the premium, but he generally scarcity rules here. For a contrived example, why is caviar astronomically more expensive than bread? It's not the c…

Does caviar even taste that good? Just seems like one of those things rich people buy to show how rich they are. I find it hard to believe that they actually taste good enough to justify the price. Like...I had foie gras for the first time a few years ago, and while I thought it was pretty good, it definitely wasn't mindblowly good, and definitely wasn't worth the price. (Later, I looked up what foie gras actually wa…

> Does caviar even taste that good? Just seems like one of those things rich people buy to show how rich they are.

Yes, but it's an acquired taste.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#274

Post by Xavdidtheshadow »

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.

If you don't mind me asking, what prompted you to leave? Also, did you find the culture as cutthroat as it's rumored to be?

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#275

Post by user5994461 »

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…

Graphite has been obsolete for 5+ years. There are commercial products with unlimited scaling, great UI, alerting and a hundreds things out of the box (see datadog and competitors).

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#276

Post by sidlls »

jcadam wrote: post #219
renewiltord wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the words they used to decline proceeding? Do you happen to remember?

This was years ago, so my memory is fuzzy on this - not sure how much I really heard after I knew I was being told no :) There was a decision point about halfway through the day (after being grilled by engineers) where I was going to be either cut loose or sent on to interview with more senior level people and/or HR. "How do you think you did?" "Eh... ok, I think. I was struggling on the data structures." "Yes, that'…

Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company that is not quite FAANG scale, but almost is: we have issues in our platform and systems that have forced us to adopt "FAANG-like" solutions to certain issues of scale. Almost none of the engineers at this company are doing anything at all with interview-style algorithms and data structures questions. There are a few working in a couple of areas, but for the most part engineers are working on protobuf specs and implementations around them, front-end/other client code, etc. I'd estimate less than 5% of the engineers here even touch the internals of algorithms and data structures ever, and maybe 10% of them deal with them anything close to "regularly."

The specific team you were being interviewed for might have this apply, but the claim that "Netfix" (as a whole) deals with these issues regularly is almost certainly an exaggeration (at best).

These interview questions generate poor signals and are best seen as hazing ritual/ego stroking exercises.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#277

Post by user5994461 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #241
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 people often underestimate how bad the average programmer is out there. It’s apparently not unheard of to have C programmers who don’t know function pointers or even structs work, or who don’t know what a build system is (only ever used an IDE). There are many people who will just plug stuff together until it works somehow, without understanding why or how it works in the end.

Indeed, have a little trip to the outsourcing world, where you're paying for a team of experienced developers, some of whom have never developed anything before.

That's the antithesis of HN of course. Most commenters here probably work for tech companies.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#278

Post by techsupporter »

bird_monster wrote: post #233
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…

The first time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer either pretended that a fire alarm was going off, or was actually going off, so they had to cut the phone interview short. When I asked if they wanted to call me back, they said they didn't think so, and that I'd be hearing from the recruiter. I did not ever hear from that recruiter again. It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company o…

> It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company of your dreams.

My god, I'm terribly sorry that happened. I know you're probably not looking for apologies at this point but, as someone who has conducted countless interviews as the interviewer and I've had some really bad candidates on my phone and in person...I cannot fathom doing that to a person.

If we're booked for a 30-minute interview, the candidate is getting all 30 minutes of my time. If I guess fairly early on that the candidate is not the right fit or simply didn't pass, we will talk about general tech topics or I will ask more professional background questions than I usually do (I try to keep to a 50/50 split of technical questions and "tell me about yourself"-style).

If we're booked for an hour, the candidate gets a minimum of 30 minutes, and I shoot for a bit longer. Heck, I've had some candidates turn it around in those last few minutes. The candidate has already slogged all the way to this point. I feel that the minimum level of decency I can offer is to give most or all of the time I've already said I would give. This applies even if the fire alarm goes off; the candidate is going to get each one of those minutes because it's the respectful thing to do.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#279

Post by triceratops »

jtdev wrote: post #173
unoti wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months, but it is totally doable with reading and practice. I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at…

It’s difficult to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours working on imaginary problems. Kudos to you for doing this though. Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense. It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.

> It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.

Or driven to make outlandishly high salaries.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#280

Post by legulere »

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."

Depends on the project. If you have to develop features just for ticking off points in a contract that nobody will ever use or prototyping it can be pretty useful. If that code will run 10+ years then not.
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