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Working at Netflix 2017

brendangregg.com

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Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#111

Post by Mithaldu »

mimsee wrote: post #3

> We don't do anything shady, and we're proud of that. We're an honest company. Maybe not shady, but surely controversial. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ [1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/18/drm-for-the-web-is-a-bad... [2]: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/drm-in-web-standards

Another example to add for "shady", for a long time Netflix used to push shows you'd watched to the end in your "continue watching" show to prompt you to watch them again, which could easily be mistaken for "the show actually has new episodes".

They did fix that though, i think.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#112

Post by silly_goose »

overcast wrote: post #86
sqeaky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point where things break because of it. It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet. But it has happened in the past. There are videos games that are single player and can't be played without an active connection back to the publisher. What happens when the publisher doesn't like you or mislabels you as a pirate? What if you just want to play the video game you bought and payed fro without an Internet…

You're comparing a subscription service to a game that you purchased a license for. The former you're not entitled to a copy of, the latter you are. With or without DRM, companies are also entitled to revoke your licenses regardless. You don't own any of it. DRM would also not exist, if it wasn't for everyone stealing the stuff. Do you really think companies want to pour all of the money and resources into this, if t…

We could call it "shareware"

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#113

Post by pmiller2 »

bmwe30is wrote: post #50
zerr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could understand this if interviews were broken (in a different way) at Netflix - is this the case? i.e. is it ridiculously easy to get a job there?

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve…

Don't forget that "turnover" includes people who aren't engineers, as well.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#114

Post by mahyarm »

user5994461 wrote: post #110
conanbatt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1b visa for next flix doesnt show almost* anything above 200k either. Biased sample, but still. Im sure some make that amount, but i gotta wonder about how many.

H1B is biased against high salaries. Immigrants are not aware of local salaries and can't change companies.

You can change companies, and the hiring tech companies are willing to do the paper work. Small startups might not be willing due to $$$, but they won't pay well if they don't want to do that.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#115

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

sqeaky wrote: post #72
paulddraper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which could potentially shut them down in the long run Yes, if we ever possessed the technology to pirate movies, everyone would watch them and the industry couldn't survive.

I think he meant hollywood could withhold license to big name movies.

They already do. Netflix's streaming library is garbage filled with direct-to-DVD dreck.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#117

Post by rbritton »

mimsee wrote: post #3

> We don't do anything shady, and we're proud of that. We're an honest company. Maybe not shady, but surely controversial. [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ [1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/18/drm-for-the-web-is-a-bad... [2]: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/drm-in-web-standards

Blocking virtually all VPNs and VPS IP ranges is not the most pleasant practice. I realize this is likely a Hollywood demand, but absent any kind of other information from them, it sure appears that they are complicit in it.

Further, they make it essentially impossible to to create a local routing rule to bypass the VPN for them alone. You're stuck whitelisting the whole of AWS.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#118

Post by nathan_f77 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #79
bmwe30is wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve…

> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.

I just read through the OP's other post about PMCs, and I would beg to differ: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2....

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#119

Post by phamilton »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #105
phamilton wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.

Can you be more specific? Do you mean producing their original content? Or rendering renditions for each bitrate, and then pushing those renditions out to their custom CDN appliances? (OpenConnect) I can most definitely get behind original content production being hard. But pushing a couple hundred TB (or even low double digit PB) of data out to CDNs doesn't require a fleet of devs.

Total content is likely closer to 100 PB. The "25% of consumer bandwidth" is a proxy for how heavily Netflix is used.

Take a look at some of their open source projects and their tech blog to get a feel for the problems they solve at their scale.

https://netflix.github.io/ https://medium.com/netflix-techblog

Some things I find personally interesting:

They run a 5000 node Cassandra cluster.

They can failover an entire datacenter in 27 minutes.

Re: Working at Netflix 2017

#120

Post by phamilton »

user5994461 wrote: post #109
phamilton wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.

Akamai can do that for you just fine.

Apparently, Akamai does about 30 Terabits/s[0]. Netflix does "tens of terabits per second"[1].

Essentially, Netflix is about as big as Akamai when it comes to content delivery.

[0] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp

[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...

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