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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

#301

Post by MiroF »

jtdev wrote: post #173
unoti wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months, but it is totally doable with reading and practice. I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at…

It’s difficult to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours working on imaginary problems. Kudos to you for doing this though. Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense. It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.

> Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense

Interview practices aside - I find them to be fun puzzles and know plenty of accomplished CS/math people who do too. I understand the anger at corporate tech practices but let's not malign those who find the questions interesting.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#302

Post by hintymad »

chinathrow wrote: post #291
user5994461 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphite has been obsolete for 5+ years. There are commercial products with unlimited scaling, great UI, alerting and a hundreds things out of the box (see datadog and competitors).

That's not the point here. OP said, that the Netflix team could at the time deliver scale, while other teams couldn't.

Yeah, and the key difference is simple: The 100x engineers in Netflix just understood that file-based lookup for key-value pairs won't scale for OLAP-like workload on time series, and of course they possessed the sheer capability of implementing the right technology from ground up.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#303

Post by josalhor »

hintymad wrote: post #138
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…

100X developers are the groups who turn impossibles into possibles. Some Uber engineers used to believe that Graphite was the best thing in the world and Nagios was second bar none, and they went ahead design a complex yet failing architecture for monitoring even when Uber's traffic was still tiny before Uber's M3 came along. This is what Netflix did with four engineers years before Uber's saga: https://www.quora.com…

Exactly this comment.

10x developers exist. 100x developers exist. These developers don't program 10x as fast or have 1/100th of the code. They bring 10x or 100x more value as compared to other developers.

People in HN seem to forget: Code doesn't live in a vacuum. Code has purpose. Code fixes problems. 100x developers are the ones that bring true value. That value may come from a 300 LOC data structure that improves efficiency by 50% or a 30-page code architecture that improves scalability. The means to produce value are irrelevant. What matters is how much value you bring to the table.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#304

Post by bird_monster »

techsupporter wrote: post #278
bird_monster wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer either pretended that a fire alarm was going off, or was actually going off, so they had to cut the phone interview short. When I asked if they wanted to call me back, they said they didn't think so, and that I'd be hearing from the recruiter. I did not ever hear from that recruiter again. It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company o…

> It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company of your dreams. My god, I'm terribly sorry that happened. I know you're probably not looking for apologies at this point but, as someone who has conducted countless interviews as the interviewer and I've had some really bad candidates on my phone and in person...I cannot fathom doing that to a person. If we're booked for a 30-minute interview,…

Yeah I mean, it was a decade ago and I've definitely done fine, but it definitely shaped how I approached giving interviews to candidates when I had the opportunity. I always tried to remember the gravity of being on either side of the table, and the amount of stress that usually went into being a candidate deserves an amount of respect that most FAANG companies, in my experience, do not provide.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#305

Post by lwansbrough »

karolist wrote: post #300
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…

The rampup at FAANG can be brutal and you'd be doing lots of learning even after getting in. The leetcode style interviews are designed to select people capable of studying and materialising broad problems in depth and scope under time constraints. They are also objective and can't really be faked nor you can talk your way in like in most banking/finance IT jobs. I was of similar opinion at some point but these reali…

Congratulations on your indoctrination.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#306

Post by bird_monster »

baq wrote: post #266
bird_monster wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer either pretended that a fire alarm was going off, or was actually going off, so they had to cut the phone interview short. When I asked if they wanted to call me back, they said they didn't think so, and that I'd be hearing from the recruiter. I did not ever hear from that recruiter again. It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company o…

Fire alarm tests happen at office campuses at regular intervals and aren’t announced beforehand. That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job and you’re little more than a row in a spreadsheet before and after the interview, perhaps even during, too. I wish this was taught instead of having to be hard won experience, especially since this is obvious as soon…

> That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job

This isn't really a thing candidates should care about, IMO. It is fine to demand decency out of interviewers, and it is fine to callout when bad things happen while people are "Just doing their job."

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#307

Post by MiroF »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #283
s1artibartfast wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWEs making 300k+ are not the little people

Relatively speaking of course and also I was kind'a alluding to the cross over between politicians and lawyers.

> Relatively speaking of course

In no world are SWEs "relatively speaking" little people compared to lawyers.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#308

Post by nullsense »

sidlls wrote: post #276
jcadam wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was years ago, so my memory is fuzzy on this - not sure how much I really heard after I knew I was being told no :) There was a decision point about halfway through the day (after being grilled by engineers) where I was going to be either cut loose or sent on to interview with more senior level people and/or HR. "How do you think you did?" "Eh... ok, I think. I was struggling on the data structures." "Yes, that'…

Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company that is not quite FAANG scale, but almost is: we have issues in our platform and systems that have forced us to adopt "FAANG-like" solutions to certain issues of scale. Almost none of the engineers at this company are doing anything at all with interview-styl…

But the 5% ~ 10% that do are at least guaranteed to be capable of it.

And it's likely that that matters.

Re: Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries

#310

Post by chrisseaton »

chris11 wrote: post #228
chrisseaton wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career 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.

It also seems like pay and experience are also a huge factor. I worked at a F500 once headquartered in the midwest. I was paid really well. I brought up wanting to move out to SV and the COL adjustment they mentioned would have been a paycut. Plus it seems like major tech companies downlevel you if you don't have relevant experience at peer companies. And salary negotiation is harder if you don't have competing offer…

> Plus it seems like major tech companies downlevel you if you don't have relevant experience at peer companies.

That's it I think - they see an engineer with relevant experience, but not at the scale of them and think it's not the same. Maybe they're right? I don't know.

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