Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

As other wrote Billions, and Broadwalk Empire are bothe great.

As for designated survivor it was a nice copy of house of cards, but lacked the level of storytelling that went into house of cards.

I agree the barrier to entry should be low, but it apparently isn't from a tech perspective, hence this article. See the comments further up the thread. Maybe the HN crowd is just unusually sensitive to app quality, but I think Apple showed pretty conclusively that consumers respond well to quality tech. It shouldn't be really hard to run a video streaming and recommendation service at scale, but, it is. That tech isn't off the shelf, you have to build it. And to do that you need to be able to hire and attract good technologists.

This matters because a repeating theme seems to be that the only people who can build competent tech teams are engineers. A generic media executive will find it much harder going because they don't have any intuition for the skill gap being discussed by Hastings here. Disney+ seems to have managed it but only by buying buy theirs from a sports streaming firm that had already proven themselves effective, if I recall correctly. Obviously there's a limited number of opportunities like that.

So I guess it's a question of what's harder - for an engineer to build a great content operation, or a media guy to build a great tech operation. So far it seems like maybe neither are possible, although Netflix has had some great content perhaps that's more luck than anything else? If so then it'd make sense for eventually these firms to form a truce, with Netflix focused on the retail/online store aspects and other firms creating the shows.

> if they're anything like other tech companies, they're doing a shit job of hiring

Facebook grew from 17K employees in 2016 to 45K in 2019. 38% annual growth, and the vast bulk of that was in engineering. "Only" 17% at Google, but it was already larger so the absolute numbers are higher. 22% at Netflix. This is hardly a "shit job of hiring" as you say. I often saw such growth numbers at startups, but never at companies with headcounts already in the thousands let alone tens of thousands. They're doing a fantastic job at hiring.

Part of the reason they're hiring so much is because they have to. Again contrary to what you say, they are not holding on tight to the good ones. The number of people who leave after two years - at all levels - is almost as stunning as the number coming in. Big Tech is notorious for this. The good ones might leave to found or join startups, but leave they still do. The high compensation actually facilitates such departures as much as it discourages them (certainly did for recently-retired me), except among the exceptionally greedy.

These companies are not pools of carefully selected and tended talent, with low rates coming in or going out. They're more like massive pipelines, with huge numbers entering and leaving all the time. The coding interviews are a very coarse filter to keep out the worst of the dreck, but they also keep out many good engineers. I've known several demonstrably excellent engineers who failed in that moment, and more who self-selected out of the process for various reasons. The people who can get in are barely distinguishable from those who got jobs elsewhere via more traditional interview processes, except for skewing very young.

This interview process selects for someone with whom the interviewer might enjoy having meetings.

I’d imagine it’s very hard to distinguish between a good talker and a good worker. Maybe some people can do it, but this is not a skill set I’d expect everyone conducting interviews to possess.

The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment. This is why I appreciate an approach with mechanized layers such as “ask problem with known answer, take notes”

> Only if you assume features are equal in terms of necessary effort and value (they aren't)

This is why we use story points and velocity, not time.

> and never leave technical debt behind for later cleanup (they do)

What does this have to do with anything? We do this all the time and capture this sort of thing for our backlog.

> or at least leave behind the exact same amounts of debt regardless of the implementation path chosen (they don't).

So? tech debt is tech debt and it's a bear regardless.

I don't know why you're being so aggressive with the gotchas, but if you think it's impossible to objectively measure engineer quality I don't know what to tell you and I wish you good luck in your hiring and career growth.