Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421

I think that's some studly work, so much so that I'm sitting at the FreeBSD conference at Netflix right now.

I'm retired but some people got me interested in this stuff and I asked netflix for some hardware to look at numa performance issues. I showed up and they just handed me a 2U server, 2 Haswell sockets, 14 cpus (unthreaded) per socket, 256GB, 26TB of SSD. Neat machine :)

So far, from what I've seen, Netflix seems like they are close to what they describe on their culture page (that's been linked on this page) but it's early on for me.

I can say that playing with the hardware, learning about the issues, talking to people about kernel work has got me pretty pumped. Fun problems, fun people.

My point is, that releasing for more people = more profit. And the opposite - not serving the demand = lost sales. It's pretty straightforward. DRM-free markets show there is demand. And those who refuse to release DRM-free show they don't do it not because of money, but for some side, shady reasons.

Not sure what your EMI example shows. They offered with DRM and without DRM, and then just with DRM, but it sounds like they didn't address the audience right. I.e. they should offer in all stores, not in one place exclusively.

> The easiest way to combat DRM is to start gofundme / indie gogo campaigns, where the developer gets paid upfront, and that way they don't care about DRM since they already made money.

DRM is not about money, it's about control (i.e. power). A different kind of urge some have. That's why using rational business arguments often doesn't work with such people. Control freaks don't care about lost profits, if in the end they feel "we are in charge".

> In any case, DRM is one of those things that I don't see going away.

It was broken through for music and games. Film industry is the one most plagued by it. And I agree - I see no sign of progress in it. It's too backwards thinking.

Black bars surrounding all four sides of the video (only with ultrawide content on ultrawide browser) because their app can't properly apply video dimension to the user screen dimension is kind of sad.

It's a little hard to believe they don't know about it, because I'm not the only one affected. There are even some compromise-options users contribute through use of Chrome extensions like this one:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ultrawide-display-...

Even this is not a good solution, because Chrome is limited to 720p (Edge goes to 4k).

So.. users can either get a smaller video in a box centered on their screen, but with higher resolution, or they can get actual fullscreen with a poorly supported browser at penalty of a lower resolution.

I know, not the best place for bug reports, but customer support, Twitter, other social media all have failed to solve this for a good year and a half.. Hopefully one of their engineers can read this and think "I feel empowered enough at my job to be able to pursue a solution to this."

Some background. I wrote Netflix's recommendation system. Netflix later went on to take part in fraud against USPTO which now led to Netflix with no ownership of it's "most important technology". Xavier Amatrain https://www.linkedin.com/in/xamatriain/ was my boss. Xavier went on to hire lots of staff to try and replace my system and was unable to do so. In the end he started claiming credit for systems I had written without understanding the technology. He still presents his incorrect knowledge in public conferences. The result is that for 5 years Netflix has been running my alpha system without improving the technology (various techniques that Xavier tried and k-means, LDA and deep-learning). Netflix never did push a version I had written with 40% greater "click-through" rate, 3 times greater speed and order of magnitude less memory.

One example conversation I had with Xavier after he left Netflix (para-phrasing of course): Me: How is my system doing? Xavier: We don't use it anymore. We stopped using your system 1 week after you left. Me: Really what do you use? Xavier: I cannot tell you it is secret. Me: Who wrote it? Xavier: You don't know him. We hired him after you and he wrote and pushed the new algorithm. Me: So that new person, wrote a new recommendation system; pushed it into A/B test; got test results and then pushed it into production in 1 week. Xavier: Yes - he is better than you. All was this is a lie (and not out of character), because I have been in touch with other engineers post-Netflix and in fact I've talked with Justin on a number of occasions on the phone about how to keep my system running. Later Xavier invited me to work for him at Quora. He offered in his own words "an unbelievable salary". I of course refused. I met Xavier sometime later and tried to talk to him about a particular bad presentation of his. He got upset and shouted "Fuck Off, I'm not interested in listening to anything you have to say" multiple times. We were on the Facebook campus at the time. He left at that point.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Always remember https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...