Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#361

Post by csmiller » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #348

nullsense wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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 ad…

> I used to think this too, but as a filter I think it's having the desired effect. Is it though? I'm a hiring manager and don't ask such questions and yet have had no problem hiring really talented engineers. The reason I don't ask those questions is because I know that cranking up the interview pressure and asking arbitrary, revisable, common interview questions doesn't actually prove anything aside how good the ca…

I think they are saying not that it’s a filter for talent, but for people willing to “put in the work” to pass that type of interview, which sounds about right. I feel the same way about some colleges.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#362

Post by jeffreyrogers » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #71

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned. Your comment was showing up as dead to me.

I saw it as dead at first (which was weird considering how on-topic it was), but it's showing up as "alive" now.

I vouched for it so it would show up.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#363

Post by devmunchies » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

randomfitnessq wrote: post #118

kilbuz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I prefer FAGMAN.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#364

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

khalilravanna wrote: post #209

jimbokun wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the sane architecture is the only relevant part. Real world "10x" developers are almost always in that class because they can solve the same problem with 1/10th the code of a 1x developer. Ability to solve problems with less code will always outpace faster typing.

To be clear, you don’t mean code golf levels of code-shortening, right? E.g. they’re also not sacrificing on clarity and readability of code to shorten it. They’re just removing unnecessary work. I think this is definitely good and creates a net gain for other devs. Because the people who shorten code at the cost of clarity are some of my least favorite people. I once saw “half = num >> 1” instead of, say, “half = fl…

I think the accepted standard for "code length" is about the number of tokens used, not the number of characters (or at least should be). So no points for replacing readable identifiers with random punctuation or one character variable names. And comments don't count towards the length either! :)

> I once saw “half = num >> 1” instead of, say, “half = floor(num / 2)”.

Again, that's just stuff that's getting you a small constant factor less code, a few characters here and there. To get closer to an order of magnitude smaller program solving the same problem requires a deeper understanding of the problem and different strategies for solving it.

To me, the gold standard example for the 10x to 100x coder is always Peter Norvig.

https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html

Notice the clear comments and detailed explanations and reasonable identifier names. But do you think the median developer would solve these problems with a similar amount of actual code?

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#365

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

newfangle wrote: post #356

jimbokun wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the sane architecture is the only relevant part. Real world "10x" developers are almost always in that class because they can solve the same problem with 1/10th the code of a 1x developer. Ability to solve problems with less code will always outpace faster typing.

Amount of code doesnt matter, what matters is the design decisions that are made

Design decisions can easily allow you to implement the same functionality in an order of magnitude less code.

Also, research shows the number of bugs per line of code is pretty much constant across programming languages and kinds of programs. So reducing the number of lines of code will almost certainly reduce the number of bugs, statistically speaking.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

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Post by oblio » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

winphone1974 wrote: post #242

MR4D wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of things are broken. The question is do you want to work hard enough to overcome it? My guess is you’ve got a good enough job already, so it’s not worth the effort.

But these are the people we need to entice to leave their jobs! The best potential hires always have jobs; they rarely go to the open market. They rarely respond to open casting calls and don't need to go through the broken song and dance routine. We know this as the most reliable metric is prior work directly with someone who you trust who vouches for them. Everything else like whiteboarding data algos is weak sauce…

Big companies don't care. Enough people still through themselves in the grinder, regardless. They have infinite talent lining up.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#367

Post by nitwit005 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

nullsense wrote: post #272

98codes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad…

You have to be careful about your assumptions. Being willing to put in the work could be a bad sign. If you already have a bunch of job offers, you aren't going to spend weeks studying to get one more job offer, unless the place might offer dramatically better benefits.

And, it may be some people don't need to be any extra studying work. There are people who do programming competitions for fun, and there was prior discussion of Google saying those people did worse on the job: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324209

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#368

Post by wegs » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

bdavisx wrote: post #250

wegs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the problem is in the Typical Man Month. 10x as many 1x developers will deliver a worse product on a longer schedule than 1x as many 10x developers. Even if you assume 150% developers at 300% the cost, it's worth it. The number of communications channels grows quadratically with the number of people in the org. You'll come out ahead at larger organization sizes. Fewer, higher-productivity people is a huge win i…

I completely agree with your premise on the 10x developer in concept (although what 10x means is up for debate). I agree with the fact that a team of "good" developers will outperform a team of The issue is, whiteboarding people on trivia programming problems doesn't determine if they are a 10x/good developer - it only determines if they understand the particular trivia they are asked.

Well, no. My experience is that the technical interview is a noisy fizz-buzz. Good developers need to know algorithms and data structures, and be able to write code. If they can't even do that, they're definitely NOT a 10x'er.

If they can, the next part is fit. You need to get over both bars to be hired.

All of this is incredibly noisy, so part of what happens is you have to set the bar high, since 37% of the people you interview will perform one std. div. above where they actually are, and 5% will perform 2 std. div. above where they actually are. Setting a high bar means you lose a lot of good people due to random error. But the costs of one bad hire are EXTREME compared to missing a few good hires. So it makes sense to do that.

People take rejections personally, but in most interview processes, it's pretty random. You have a bar. You hire people who interview 1-2 std. div. above that bar. You might be perfectly qualified, and I won't hire you if you had a bad day (or even an average day). The risk is too high. If you're 1 std. div. above, I'm moderately confident you're qualified. If you're 2 std. div. above, I'm very confident. And having hired people, that's how it plays out: I mostly hire people who interviewed well, and their performance on a typical day is typically lower than at the interview (not always, but usually).

Hiring is about finding and bringing in good people as efficiently as possible. I'd rather interview 20 people, hire two I'm confident are good (miss six qualified people among those 20 who had bad days), than I would bring in 10 people and hire two of them.

And bad people still slip in. You just can't do that much in an 8 hour interview.

For startups, I go for personal recs and github repos. Does that mean I miss people who aren't in my network, and who don't do open source? Of course. But that's okay. I still find enough really good people that way. (And yes, my network IS diverse, thank you very much).

But big companies need standardized processes, or things get rife with discrimination, nepotism, and all sorts of other nastiness. That easy to avoid small-scale, but with 1000 employees, it takes one bad apple to land on front page NY Times.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#369

Post by rebelos » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

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.

Could you elaborate a bit on where the bulk of the technical effort is being applied at Netflix these days, aside from recommendations and improved scaling? From the point of view of the user, the product has seemed fairly static for the past several years. But obviously there must be a lot going on behind the scenes.

I assume the broad buckets of continuous effort are "get the right content to the right users", "add more content" (which may involve some engineering support via e.g. analytics), and "scale it up to effectively reach more users". It seems like Netflix has fully shifted from a chaotic "zero-to-one" innovation state to a more mature "continuously aggregate marginal gains on top of a solid foundation". Is that a fair characterization?

The only conceivable "problem" with the above from the engineer's POV is that (1) individual contributions might feel less exciting and (2) it becomes progressively harder to find ways to move the needle. Though I would assume this is a problem at virtually any mature technology company. On the bright side, a marginal gain applied at a massive scale probably feels pretty rewarding.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#370

Post by LockAndLol » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

I'm not entirely sure what the best way to pay anybody is, but I definitely think that `maxWage = minWage * 10` or something similar should be applied or even codified in law.

500k as a programmer in a tech company that's doing well sounds like justified compensation. They do write the product after all. I does make me question if there are any juniors present in that company and what kind of salary it is they have. Having a colleague that earns 5x as much with maybe 10x the experience is still... quite bizarre to me. Would that kind of a progression even be possible from within the company?