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Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

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Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#341

Post by bryanrasmussen »

JCharante wrote: post #311
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too. Apparently he was smart enough to get away from the Fortune 500 company he worked at, reporting to yourself, and "got a pay raise too." > Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. See above. > If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Net…

> or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level. sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.

I was consulting at a place, there was a very bad programmer whose code looked sort of like this

cost arrayIneed = [];

const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => {

if(item.hasProp) { arrayIneed.push(item); }

});

return arrayIneed;

the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo.

he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise.

I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#342

Post by jhugo »

rjh29 wrote: post #326
briansm wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White-Knighting for 'fucking morons' is not a good look though. You'll end up in a world where packets of peanuts have a label on saying 'may contain nuts'.

Which would be doubly silly as peanuts aren't actually nuts.

… which is why the label makes sense. They may have been contaminated with nuts during production.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#343

Post by bryanrasmussen »

rjh29 wrote: post #326
briansm wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White-Knighting for 'fucking morons' is not a good look though. You'll end up in a world where packets of peanuts have a label on saying 'may contain nuts'.

Which would be doubly silly as peanuts aren't actually nuts.

I think acting as if peanuts are actually nuts for purposes of communication is much more defensible than acting as if tomatoes are vegetables, in short you are dying on a hill that was paved over long ago.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#344

Post by dilyevsky »

hmcq6 wrote: post #325
dilyevsky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the same streaming - netflix is doing that over HTTP. Totally different tech and scaling issues

Yes and no. It's not the "same" but this is a solved problem. Fastly regularly delivers the Super Bowl to 10x as many viewers. Netflix dropped the ball hard

Fastly says they do 6M ccv for superbowl (i'm actually surprised they let them do the entire thing and don't mix different CDNs) and I'm not sure they do encoding and manifest serving - they might just cache/deliver chunks. Do you really think tyson vs other guy was only 600k ccv? I'd be shocked if Netflix can't handle this.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#345

Post by jhugo »

moralestapia wrote: post #119
spencerchubb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

livestream is quite different from streaming pre-processed video, so I'm not surprised by the scaling issues

I know. But given how much they spend on engineering, how much time they had and how important this event is ... mediocre performance.

All true, but this part of your GP comment:

> a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this

… isn’t true. From the couch, watching Suits and watching a live sports match may seem similar but they’re very different technical problems to solve.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#346

Post by addicted »

rascul wrote: post #273
whoknowsidont wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't make these types of comments, they mean nothing and they serve no purpose.

Why is it acceptable to share that it doesn't work but not acceptable to share that it does?

For the same reason that pointing out the sun rose in the east today would be ridiculous but if it happened to rise in the west, or you perceived it to rise in the west, that would be worth sharing.

Being able to livestream a sporting event is the default now and has been for at least over a decade since HBO’s original effort to stream a Game of Thrones season opener failed because of the MSFT guy they hired, and they fixed it by handing it over to MLBAM.

Maybe that’s what Netflix should do. Buy Disney so they can get access to the MLBAM people (now Disney Streaming because they bought it from MLB).

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#347

Post by someothherguyy »

tass wrote: post #333
freditup wrote: post #8

I wonder if there will be any long term reputational repercussions for Netflix because of this. Amongst SWEs, Netflix is known for hiring the best people and their streaming service normally seems very solid. Other streaming services have definitely caught up a bit and are much more reliable then in the early days, but my impression still has always been that Netflix is a step above the rest technically. This sure do…

Was live streaming much of a use case for them before this? They stream plenty of pre recorded video, often collocated. Live streaming seems like something they aren’t yet good at.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/04/entertainment/chris-rock-netf... (2023-03-06)

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#348

Post by YZF »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #109
walrushunter wrote: post #56

I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too. Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.

Having worked with a bunch of guys who have gone on to "top teams", I no longer believe they have top teams. My fav was the guy who said the system could scale indefinitely after it literally fell on its ass from too much traffic. He couldn't understand that just because Lambdas my themselves can scale, they are limited by the resources they use, so just ignored it and insisted that it could. The same guy also kept o…

I've worked for many companies that said they hired the best. And to be honest when I hire I also try to hire good people. I think I could hire better if a) I had an open cheque, b) I was running coolest project in the universe. I did hire for some interesting projects but nothing close to an open cheque. Even under these conditions it's tough to find great people. You can go after people with a proven track record but even that doesn't always guarantee their next project will be as successful.

The reality though is that large companies with thousands of people generally end up having average people. Some company may hire more PhD's. But on average those aren't better software engineers than non-PhD's. Some might hire people who are strong competitive coders, but that also on average isn't really that strong of a signal for strong engineers.

Once you have a mix of average people, on a curve, which is the norm, the question becomes do you have an environment where the better people can be successful. In many corporate environments this doesn't happen. Better engineers may have obstacles put in front of them or they can forced out of the organization. This is natural because for most organizations can be more of a political question than a technical question.

Smaller organizations, that are very successful (so can meet my two criterias) and can be highly selective or are highly desirable, can have better teams. By their nature as smaller organizations those teams can also be effective. As organizations grow the talent will spread out towards average and the politics/processes/debt/legacy will make those teams less effective.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#349

Post by jhugo »

colesantiago wrote: post #269
anakaine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a total supposition without any proof.

What more proof do you need other than the fact that streams went down worldwide on a highly anticipated event from a public company? I wouldn't be surprised if lots of engineers at Netflix are currently now writing up a length post mortem of this. And this is from the company that created the discipline of chaos engineering for resilience. It is clear they under invested and took the eye of the ball with this. This…

The assumption that it was related to insufficient investment isn’t supported by any evidence. Flawed technical decisions can be made by the most expensive engineers too.

Re: Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

#350

Post by YZF »

ethbr1 wrote: post #159
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the issue is that Netflix gets its performance from colocating caches of movies in ISP datacenters, and a live broadcast doesn't work with that. It's not just about the sheer numbers of viewers, it's that a live model totally undermines their entire infrastructure advantage. See: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

I'm curious if the root cause is more variable than usual latency. Sample size 1, but... I saw a ton of buffering and failure on an embedded Netflix app on a TV, including some infinite freezes. Moved over to laptop, zero buffering. I assume the web app runs with a lot bigger buffer than whatever is squeezed into the underpowered TV.

Likely these devices use different media formats and/or quality levels. And yes, it's possible one device buffers more than the other. Infinite freezes sounds like some routing issues or bugs.
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