4 ms·

Netflix Engineering team amazes me a lot. They literally took all the available apis, and build their own platform despite some of the features are already in t

• tybit 10y ago
  They specifically only hire seniors, they don't want to provide positions for juniors as they would prefer to pay more for more seniors than pay indirectly for training juniors. I think this reflects poorly on them, just as much as companies that use OSS but don't contribute anything back.
  • jhall1468 10y ago
    How does that reflect poorly on them? They are willing to sacrifice potentially great hires because they'd rather make velocity their focal point. It's a trade-off.
  • barrkel 10y ago
    I think it's a refreshing change from the ageism of much of the rest of the industry. It probably gives them a compounding competitive advantage.
  • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    I guess "experience discrimination" is a thing now? Seriously, if a company only wants to hire experienced folk, then so be it as long as they don't exercise REAL discrimination.
  • curun1r 10y ago
    I personally find it short-sighted since I find mentorship opportunities to be a hugely rewarding part of my job. I wouldn't want to take a job in an environment with no junior developers since it would deprive me of that perk. I'd imagine Netflix misses out on other senior engineers for the same reason. It's also interesting considering a quote I remember from Google about their preference for junior engineers..."fewer bad habits to break."
• dominotw 10y ago
  I asked that in an interview with Netflix, why they were building their own vs open source. The answer I got was "It doesn't work at the scale that Netflix operates" , not quite sure what that means but I didn't press him further.
  • buro9 10y ago
    I work at Cloudflare, since joining almost 3 years ago I've seen multiple pieces of technology get deployed and then replaced because "it just doesn't work at our scale". It feels kinda weird to say that, but then I see what our DNS servers are doing, or I learn about some customers that struggle to consume their own logs due to the speed at which we produce them, and things that you think are not an area of concern become that... when you have enough traffic flowing through your systems. Pretty much the only thing that has really stood out is Kafka. Kafka does work at scale.
  • Diederich 10y ago
    It's rather rare to see off the shelf technologies (open or closed) that scale to the top 5%. This makes sense because the techniques required at that level are pretty different, and don't apply well to other situations. So, making an off the shelf product that actually does scale to the top 5% rarely makes sense, since, at best, the customer base will be limited. In the average case, though, the customer base will be almost nil, because of the per-site quirks and customization that are always present. I experienced this on a weekly basis in the late 1990s and early 2000s at WalMart, where we were centrally managing a network with well over 10 million nodes. Every vendor ever constantly tried to get in with us, so we had to come up with a triage system or an enormous portion of our time would be spent evaluating. Even those best of breed would almost never work for us, because of our unprecedented scale (at the time). In the rare case where an off the shelf product was selected and successful, it had to be heavily customized. I am of course talking more about 'framework' kinds of tech, or, I guess, things that work at scale. A lot of off the shelf tech was and is used that isn't scale related.
    • sofaofthedamned 10y ago
      Funny you should mention Walmart. I went to visit them in ~1992 when they were the biggest user of Teradata at the time. Never used Teradata after that, but i'm interviewing with them in the UK next week...