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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

#371

Post by rightbyte »

babesh wrote: post #107
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 one misconception is the range. I think that the range is dependent on the situation both immediate and long term. The immediate situation’s range is more bounded. The bottom of the range can veer into the negative and the top can go way beyond 10x. It’s more a phase change at that point. Example of >> 10x phase change: Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat with MapReduce and BigTable. For the negative, I think we al…

Your best developers are your competitor's worst. It easier to destroy than to build!

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#372

Post by ghaff »

ohyes wrote: post #37
ghaff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not one agrees with him... It's not really inconsistent to pay people at the top range but that comes with an expectation of being shown the door if they don't perform at the top levels and coming into an office to work because that's better for the company (in Hastings' view).

For 500k a year I'd be more than willing to show up at an office. I assume they're spending money on testing and whatever protocols they need to enforce to ensure they don't kill / incapacitate their golden legion of software engineers. And when you're making that much money, it becomes much easier to (for example) have someone else do your grocery shopping.

There are certainly mitigations like lots of retail stores are doing. They're obviously not as effective as people just staying home. It's a matter of tradeoffs.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#373

Post by MR4D »

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…

Maybe the best employees are the people that can best overcome broken processes?

And yes, I meant that seriously. Every fortune 500 company is held together at some level with bandaids and bailing wire. Being able to deal with things like that might be important.

In my firm, I know we place a much higher emphasis on being able to just roll with it than technical perfection. But my firm is but a drop in the ocean compared to everyone else.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#374

Post by smt88 »

olnluis wrote: post #349
smt88 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have a chance. You should wonder if you want it. Ignoring the ethics of each company, the lifestyle is not for everyone. You should try to figure out if it's a good fit for you or not.

What is the lifestyle, though? I was under the impression that all FAANG companies are pretty different from each other.

Well, most of them involve (pre-Covid) living in one of a few extremely expensive cities.

All of them involve being a single person in a huge organization, which is very different from being (for example) the CTO of a lifestyle business or the first hacker of a startup.

A friend of mine works on CSS optimization at Facebook. That is both narrower and deeper than anything you would do at a small company.

There's also the question of who your coworkers are. Large companies are large enough that you can spend all your work time with other devs. That's not true at a small company.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#375

Post by woobar »

fotta wrote: post #65
tolbish wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it strange that Netflix is associated with them considering the breadth of subdivisions and acquisitions that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have.

FANG was originally a Jim Cramer thing [0, 1] about very high-growth tech stocks that somehow evolved into being about the big, high paying tech companies. The original didn't even have Apple but people started using FAANG to include it. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100436754 [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fang-stocks-fb-amzn.asp

Fun fact: if you have listened to Cramer and invested $10K in each of these stocks on 02/06/2013 you would be at $441K right now (+1011%)

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#376

Post by Guest42 »

burnte wrote: post #350
Guest42 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it seems to me often that companies will have greater resume demands for lower levels than 90 percent of the people at the organization, many times for skills that aren’t relevant for projects or business goals, it doesn’t require a tier 1 PhD in order to rush through zen desk tickets

Oh, it's just as bad at higher levels, despite the people there generally having even FEWER of the qualifications. I'm top level IT management with a tremendous amount of actual technical knowledge, and just getting to an interview is the hardest part. I've never taken an interview that didn't result in an offer, but getting to the interview with all the demands is insanely difficult. Usually the spots get filled thr…

I’m sorry to hear that. Every now and again I see a person gets hired that seems like a bad fit and have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope their attitude and ego don’t drive people away. It also seems that many people that are really good prefer to avoid promotions in order to have more stability and focus on their strengths. I have a family member who is a technical expert with 30 years experience who often gets mistreated by people with fluffed up resumes.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#377

Post by gonehome »

kaesar14 wrote: post #337
gonehome wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, you implied it was harder later in your career because of assumptions made about previous history. The comment that replied to you said you can study and pass without your age being held against you.

The comment reply said it was difficult and they grinded hard. First comment did not say it was impossible.

> "...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."

One person is saying it's hard because of ageism/bias against old applicants.

One person is saying it's hard because you have to study.

The disagreement is not about it being hard, it's about why and it's a pretty substantive difference.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#378

Post by bird_monster »

nkingsy wrote: post #351
bird_monster wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose I'm pointing out the nuance between "Big Tech Co", "Startup" and FAANG. There are plenty of big tech companies that pay well, offer a lot of freedom, interesting tech, but are also not FAANG companies with silly interviewing practices.

I think I’ve done maybe 30 interviews? Only three of them were the full blown whiteboard for 5 hours process. The first two I failed at the beginning of my career and in hindsight I was properly rejected. The most recent one just made me feel like I’d earned it. The leetcode grinding helped, but my years of experience helped more. IMO if a company messes around with soft skills, take homes, techno chit chat, long lun…

I guess the splitting point is thinking that whiteboard interviews select candidates that are good coders - a point I have an entire career of anecdotes to disagree with. YMMV, as with everything.

edit Also, to be clear, you seem very proud of your interview, your company and coworkers, and I do not mean to discredit your pride or success. I am simply pointing out that your experiences are not universal experiences and might be due to lots of other factors, totally unrelated to interview methodology (healthy attrition rates, supportive teams, constructive code review, etc).

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#379

Post by LordFast »

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…

Defining a filter in order to filter people out is fine, but we should be honest about the fact that it has very little to do with learning, and more to do with the willingness to deal with crap and jump through hoops. More amenable employees are easier to manage, nothing wrong with that.

All exams can be crammed, and having crammed into plenty of gated opportunities in life before, I believe you're mistaken if you believe that it produces more knowledgeable workers as a result.

At the end of the day, it's a market like any other. If there is someone who is more willing to do X for Y reward than you are, then they will get that something instead of you. And if you find that there is a shortage of people willing to play ball, you can always work towards bringing in more people who are willing to play ball.

Agree with your last sentence. If you want something, you have to go get it. If employees aren't motivated enough to organize and close the power gap, then employers will continue to be motivated enough to push for and work towards their own goals.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#380

Post by chansiky »

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…

Exactly how I see it.

Good code builds and compounds on itself. It makes every developer on the team more productive. Its not just about the output of the single "10x" developer. Just having them on your team increases your whole team's output, even after they've left. Sometimes other "10x" developers build on top of that work.

Bad code also builds and compounds on itself. Same argument but in reverse. At some point the codebase becomes so unwieldy, someone will have to convince the manager, that a complete rewrite is arguably a better option.

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