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.
I was on Roy's team at this time. I am not one of the four mentioned in the link, but I definitely know exactly who is being talked about. I wanted to comment that these four were considered outliers even by Netflix standards for being very high performing. So bear in mind the example is an extreme one.
What were the words they used to decline proceeding? Do you happen to remember?
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'…
Reed is taking that into account. Reed and Netflix have been creating software for many years. They certainly have had "Rockstars" who could bust out functional but unmaintainable code. Those people are not valuable to Netflix because Netflix is looking for long term success. A 100x engineer exists in the context of a global company like Netflix. Because if a developer makes something just 1% better that translates i…
Netflix doesn't win or lose customers based on programmer performance, they win by having content that people actually want to watch. I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch. The only reason I've ever considered dropping Netflix is "why am I paying for this when there is nothing I want to watch". Fortunately, they have come through with some interesting content recently, a…
I'm perpetually frustrated with nf's UI, and tend to rag on them a bit. But then, my partner got subscriptions to other services. Disney, crave, amazon, showtime... holy shit is it actually difficult to remember what I've watched and take me to the next episode? I'll still crab about nf, but the competition is hot garbage.
One reason for that is way more variability in developer compensation. A company hiring a senior SWE in SF might be paying 130k or 400k. But until recently there wasn’t much transparency. My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pretty much understood you make 225k plus any overtime so there’s not much more to discuss.
225k for a nurse? Nurses in the US must be way more qualified than here to command that kind of salary.
CRNA is very specialized nurse that is near the top of the ladder of education and credentials. Then tack on a bay area salary and you have 225k.
> ...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…
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…
can't agree with you more here. I just rejected Amazon's "onsite" interview as I could not find(not motivated either) time to redo all those only-useful-for-interview-leetcode questions before the interview. I for one, _never_ need use those in a 20+ year career as a software programmer. Most of the time is issue tracking, feature addition, and if I do need an algorithm, I know where to find them and which one is the best, which are enough and are 100% of the time done, I don't need reinvent the wheel for that at all.
All of the above, the great qualities came in many different ways. But I think a common theme was the ability to increase leverage and have a multiplicative effect. Sometimes this meant being an expert on a certain technology to better leverage it (especially important on teams that need to go deep such as video encoding, CDNs, television hardware, etc). Or looking at needs and pain points across teams and building h…
The question would be what other companies did you work for? If it's all top tech companies in the valley, it should be pretty good across the board.
You're right. I've not worked at all top companies, but I would still say the lesser known ones had good employees for the most part.
I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those). Failed of course :) But they put me up in a really nice hotel, so there's that. In the years since, I've definitely lost all interest in working in SV (the fact that I've failed every single interview I've had with SV c…
> ...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…
What's a good "ELI5" resource for learning these things again?
One reason for that is way more variability in developer compensation. A company hiring a senior SWE in SF might be paying 130k or 400k. But until recently there wasn’t much transparency. My buddy is a nurse in Bay Area with a CRNA, it’s pretty much understood you make 225k plus any overtime so there’s not much more to discuss.
225k for a nurse? Nurses in the US must be way more qualified than here to command that kind of salary.
It's not the US, it's the Bay Area... prices for many things, including wages, are very different here than elsewhere in the country.
This is BS. Netflix pays market rate, the same as the rest of the FAANGS. The only difference is that they pay everything in cash, while the rest of the companies pay a big % in stocks. However, because of the tech bull run of the past decade or so non-Netflix FAANG employees have made significantly more money than Netflix employees.