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I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find t

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now. The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers. This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform. They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. The teams are fairly lean so you can't really float by doing the bare minimum.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.
- thoth 9y ago
  You could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)... >Is there much left? You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.
- phamilton 9y ago
  Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Can you be more specific? Do you mean producing their original content? Or rendering renditions for each bitrate, and then pushing those renditions out to their custom CDN appliances? (OpenConnect) I can most definitely get behind original content production being hard. But pushing a couple hundred TB (or even low double digit PB) of data out to CDNs doesn't require a fleet of devs.
    - phamilton 9y ago
      Total content is likely closer to 100 PB. The "25% of consumer bandwidth" is a proxy for how heavily Netflix is used. Take a look at some of their open source projects and their tech blog to get a feel for the problems they solve at their scale. https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://medium.com/netflix-techblog https://medium.com/netflix-techblog Some things I find personally interesting: They run a 5000 node Cassandra cluster. They can failover an entire datacenter in 27 minutes.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Akamai can do that for you just fine.
    - phamilton 9y ago
      Apparently, Akamai does about 30 Terabits/s[0]. Netflix does "tens of terabits per second"[1]. Essentially, Netflix is about as big as Akamai when it comes to content delivery. [0] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp [1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  I just read through the OP's other post about PMCs, and I would beg to differ: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2....
- drewg123 9y ago
  I work on "serving bits". It is not quite a simple as it sounds at our scale. I've specifically worked on optimizing our FreeBSD kernel, along with several other engineers on my team. We're at point where we can serve over 90Gb/s of TLS encrypted traffic (many tens of thousands of TCP streams) from a single-socket 16 core Xeon, without any crypto offloads. There are a lot of challenging problems in any industry once you dig deep enough. There are tons of brilliant people around me, doing super cool things that I can barely fathom (like the recommendation system). Any one of those things can be trivialized, but each is somebody's pride and joy, and a marvel of design and engineering.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment. Netflix makes it look easy, so from my outside perspective, its easy to dismiss the problems as "solved".
- pfarnsworth 9y ago
  This is such a naive, ignorant statement that no wonder you would never get a job at Netflix.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bmwe30is 9y ago
  > Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? I didn't want to answer your question right away since it felt like you were trolling at first. But here's my answer. There's indeed, quite a bit more than just serving bits and title suggestions. The "left over" portion includes things such as getting those bits to move effortlessly to the multitude of TV's, set-top boxes, and streaming sticks, not to mention the effort and engineering to get those movies and shows streaming effortlessly to your mobile devices. We attempt to optimize every part of the user experience so you can get to watching your shows immediately regardless of what device you choose to pick up.
pmiller2 9y ago
Don't forget that "turnover" includes people who aren't engineers, as well.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.

thoth 9y ago
You could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)... >Is there much left? You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.
phamilton 9y ago
Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Can you be more specific? Do you mean producing their original content? Or rendering renditions for each bitrate, and then pushing those renditions out to their custom CDN appliances? (OpenConnect) I can most definitely get behind original content production being hard. But pushing a couple hundred TB (or even low double digit PB) of data out to CDNs doesn't require a fleet of devs.
  - phamilton 9y ago
    Total content is likely closer to 100 PB. The "25% of consumer bandwidth" is a proxy for how heavily Netflix is used. Take a look at some of their open source projects and their tech blog to get a feel for the problems they solve at their scale. https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://medium.com/netflix-techblog https://medium.com/netflix-techblog Some things I find personally interesting: They run a 5000 node Cassandra cluster. They can failover an entire datacenter in 27 minutes.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Akamai can do that for you just fine.
  - phamilton 9y ago
    Apparently, Akamai does about 30 Terabits/s[0]. Netflix does "tens of terabits per second"[1]. Essentially, Netflix is about as big as Akamai when it comes to content delivery. [0] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp [1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
nathan_f77 9y ago
I just read through the OP's other post about PMCs, and I would beg to differ: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2....
drewg123 9y ago
I work on "serving bits". It is not quite a simple as it sounds at our scale. I've specifically worked on optimizing our FreeBSD kernel, along with several other engineers on my team. We're at point where we can serve over 90Gb/s of TLS encrypted traffic (many tens of thousands of TCP streams) from a single-socket 16 core Xeon, without any crypto offloads. There are a lot of challenging problems in any industry once you dig deep enough. There are tons of brilliant people around me, doing super cool things that I can barely fathom (like the recommendation system). Any one of those things can be trivialized, but each is somebody's pride and joy, and a marvel of design and engineering.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment. Netflix makes it look easy, so from my outside perspective, its easy to dismiss the problems as "solved".
pfarnsworth 9y ago
This is such a naive, ignorant statement that no wonder you would never get a job at Netflix.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bmwe30is 9y ago
> Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left? I didn't want to answer your question right away since it felt like you were trolling at first. But here's my answer. There's indeed, quite a bit more than just serving bits and title suggestions. The "left over" portion includes things such as getting those bits to move effortlessly to the multitude of TV's, set-top boxes, and streaming sticks, not to mention the effort and engineering to get those movies and shows streaming effortlessly to your mobile devices. We attempt to optimize every part of the user experience so you can get to watching your shows immediately regardless of what device you choose to pick up.

pmiller2 9y ago

Don't forget that "turnover" includes people who aren't engineers, as well.