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That Glassdoor reference on Netflix software engineer salaries is wrong/outdated from my understanding - I don’t know a single Netflixer making less than $300k.
by Bahamut 9y ago
That Glassdoor reference on Netflix software engineer salaries is wrong/outdated from my understanding - I don’t know a single Netflixer making less than $300k.
Netflix seems to have an unusually open culture in general, including topics such as salary - they put their money where their mouth is and basically egg everyone on to beat them. Gotta respect that a company is willing to do that (I don’t work for them, but I do work for one of the big public tech companies listed in those charts)
- baddox 9y agoSurely you have some selection bias in your Netflix-employed acquaintances. I would imagine their average/median salary is lower than that.
- brogrammernot 9y agoI also don’t know a single engineer whose total comp is below $300k at Netflix. They get paid well and the caliber of talent is top tier.
- baddox 9y agoI could certainly be wrong! That feels shockingly high as an average, but good on Netflix for valuing talent. Something to aspire to. ;)
- eitally 9y agoIt is shockingly high, but it's true. It's also a produce or leave environment where folks don't stick around who aren't, as the previous poster says, "top tier."
- fro0116 9y agoBy "top tier", do you also mean people who are willing to put in longer than normal hours and deal with a super-competitive culture and the office politics and drama that come with it? Or am I reading too much into the quotations? I'm honestly just interested in hearing more about what the culture at Netflix is like.
- jlesk 9y agoNetflix employee here. You can find out a lot about our culture from our culture page: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture It's not just marketing fluff. It really does a good job of reflecting what it's like to work there, and is taken seriously by everyone from the top down. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's not a competitive environment, and I've experience very little politics and drama. Those things are explicitly counter to the culture. As for long hours, while the work day can be pretty intense, the office is usually empty by 5-6pm. Hope that helps.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago> the office is usually empty by 5-6pm. (because the bus to San Francisco leaves at 4:30pm) At what point do you tell your employees that they live in the wrong city? Sacramento?
- fro0116 9y agoThanks, that was really helpful! Do you have any kind of remote working allowance? Or are you expected to be in office all the time?
- richardknop 9y agoWhere should I send my CV? :D
- nonamechicken 9y agoA while back, I remember reading something about how Netflix will periodically re-interview their employees and if they fail, fire them. Is it (still) a thing? Also, what about stories such as this: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/03/437291792/how-the-architect-of-netflixs-innovative-culture-lost-her-job-to-the-system http://www.npr.org/2015/09/03/437291792/how-the-architect-of... "Today, Netflix offers unlimited vacation time, high salaries. This company doesn't care how long you're in the office, but they do care about what you produce. And you have to produce. Here's another slide. We are a team, not a family. We are a pro sports team, not a kids recreational team. Netflix fires people, even hard-working people. HENN: How many people have you moved on? MCCORD: Oh, hundreds. HENN: I talked to a lot of former employees were OK with this deal. I mean, after all, Netflix pays well. But some talked about a culture of fear - always been worried about being fired. Patty says the company's culture is a big reason for its success. She says it keeps Netflix lean and nimble."
- baddox 9y agoI wonder how their management (whoever has the authority to fire) measures performance. Hopefully it’s not as naive as hours in the office, as other commenters have suggested, because naive measurements must lead to perverse incentives. I would suspect and hope that, given such high salaries, their retain-or-fire decision is more sophisticated than that. I think that software engineering productivity is a fairly difficult thing to measure quantitatively. Any simple objective quantitative measure (like hours spent working, lines of code contributed, or tickets resolved) is bound to be too naive. Software engineering seems like one of those things where it’s easy to subjectively identify very good and very poor performers, but difficult to draw a hard line or even compare two similarly productive programmers.
- kevinr 9y agoNetflix explicitly have a policy of trying to pay the best in the industry, as I was told when I interviewed there. Turns out it works!
- obmelvin 9y agoIn addition to what others have said, Netflix doesn't hire interns or new grads or engineers with low experience. So obviously it's much easier to have a low end of 300k if your most inexperienced person's previous experience if 5 years at google (made up example)
- astrange 9y agoWhat do they do all day? Pressing play and getting video already works, and you can’t program your way out of Netflix’s existential threat of nobody renewing their streaming licenses.
- zo7 9y agoI feel like maintaining the infrastructure for the mammoth amount of data they must serve each day would be quite a lot of work on its own. They can't really afford hiccups in service, and I don't recall the site ever being down or a video not loading recently.
- jldugger 9y agoCost optimization via more efficient software, customer engagement via better predictive analytics, etc.
- miranda_rights 9y agoNetflix does a lot of work on reliability/availability and are known for being good at it - they've actually open-sourced a lot of their tooling too.
- brutus1213 9y agoThat's right. Search for Netflix OSS. Their infra tooling for the cloud is amazing, and something to aspire too. I'm an outsider and have always admired them.
- Bahamut 9y agoIf anything, I have reason to suspect my Netflix friends might be on the lower end of software engineers there based on some things I've been told & their roles in particular. They really do pay incredibly well. That said, that is total comp - they give you mostly cash by default and you can choose to allocate some of your cash comp into stock if you want.
- BeetleB 9y agoAbout 7 years ago, I recall they were paying software folks 40-50% more than the competition (Google, etc). Netflix is known for a few things: They pay really well. They don't tolerate drops in performance. The two go hand in hand (they're open about it). And as someone else mentioned, they encourage their employees to interview elsewhere, and they make it their goal to try to match any higher offer the employee gets. I think their culture is the type that self-selects. People who don't want the stress of being a top performer all the time tend not to apply, or leave very quickly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brailsafe 9y agoIf this is true, as someone who is unemployed and doesn't watch Netflix, I can't even wrap my head around that number. On the other hand, I'm kind of happy to see that they're making real money by charging real money (unlike others where your information is the only product) and passing that on to the people who make it good.
- dilemma 9y agoNetflix is in the red, I believe.
- mikeyouse 9y agoNah, they reliably make ~$100M per quarter in net income and have a few billion in cash reserves. They're on very stable financial footing.
- ravenstine 9y agoincome =/= profit
- dmoy 9y agoIsn't net income == net profit?
- ravenstine 9y agoA person can have an income of $300k a year but spend every penny of it on debt and necessities. That's generally not considered making a profit. EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood something. Netflix has indeed been making a profit.
- dmoy 9y agoSure but if a corporation makes 300k a year that's called revenue, the revenue minus costs are profit, no?
- pmiller2 9y agoAren't they also an extremely cutthroat culture? Being open about that doesn't make it any more appealing to me.
- jlesk 9y agoAs a Netflix employee, I wouldn't really describe our culture as cutthroat at all. My experience in 5 years has almost entirely devoid of politics. For example, from our culture page: "We have no bell curves or rankings or quotas such as “cut the bottom 10% every year.” That would be detrimental to fostering collaboration, and is a simplistic, rules-based approach we would never support." https://jobs.netflix.com/culture https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Our culture can feel intimidating, especially if you have any degree of imposter syndrome, but with very few exceptions, my colleagues and managers have always been supportive and really great to work with.
- sramam 9y ago> Our culture can feel intimidating, especially if you have any degree of imposter syndrome Could you elaborate?
- PakG1 9y agoI imagine that it's like playing on a professional sports team. If you can't hack it in the NBA, NHL, NFL, etc, you'll know inside of you. Guys that make it to The Show have very little doubt in themselves as to what they're capable of doing, and even the superstars are mostly working their butts off to get even better, and that goes double for the benchwarmers. See any YouTube video on Kobe Bryant's work ethic. But even the benchwarmers know that they belong if they put in the work.
- swissarmy 9y agoYou are describing "confidence". Yes you need that to work there.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
- icelancer 9y agoI know an engineer making less than $300k in total comp, but it's just barely under that, so your overall point is definitely reinforced.
- cletus 9y agoYou need to make sure you're comparing apples to apples here. Netflix has high salaries but doesn't (for normal employees anyway) give equity. The other big tech companies do. And equity can be a significant part of your total compensation especially given tech stock performance. I think there's no bonus either but I'm not certain of that part. Note that some will consider paying straight salary an advantage. It's certainly more straightforward.
- chaostheory 9y agoAren’t bonuses are taxed at a much higher rate compared to salary?
- razwall 9y agoNo, bonuses are taxed at the same rate as salary. The withholding calculations are different, so you tend to have a bigger chunk taken out of your bonus check. But if that chunk is greater than your actual tax rate, you'll get the difference back in your tax refund.
- jrockway 9y agoYeah, that sounds nice. Getting paid in stock is a huge hassle. You have to deal with special brokerage accounts. You have to remember to enroll for autosale if you want to get paid during "silent periods". There is an extra hour of paperwork to do every year for your taxes. Given that stock was like half my compensation, I wasn't going to give it up to avoid the hassle. But next time, no thanks. edit: just noticed your username, hah.
- ehnto 9y agoEquity has so many complications. I would take a solid salary over a not great salary any day. Maybe you miss out on a million dollar payday when the stocks perform well, but at $300,000/year salary, you're not far from it anyway, and at least that's a guarantee.
- noir_lord 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jondubois 9y agoThat's a very high number for a full time position. I wonder what engineers actually do at Netflix? Seems like most of the work would be behind them... I feel like a lot of big tech companies these days pay engineers to sound smart rather than for doing actual work. The interview processes at these companies would certainly indicate that.
- chrisco255 9y agoBehind them? Like, Netflix is through, no need to expand it's offerings? No need to improve it's UX? Introduce new features?
- nihonde 9y agoTheir front-end apps are awful, and wildly inconsistent from platform to platform. Streaming performance is best in class, as far as I can tell, though. I guess their focus is on the latter.
- empath75 9y agoCheck out spinnaker.
- luckydude 9y agoStuff like filling a 100Gbit pipe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15367421 I think that's some studly work, so much so that I'm sitting at the FreeBSD conference at Netflix right now. I'm retired but some people got me interested in this stuff and I asked netflix for some hardware to look at numa performance issues. I showed up and they just handed me a 2U server, 2 Haswell sockets, 14 cpus (unthreaded) per socket, 256GB, 26TB of SSD. Neat machine :) So far, from what I've seen, Netflix seems like they are close to what they describe on their culture page (that's been linked on this page) but it's early on for me. I can say that playing with the hardware, learning about the issues, talking to people about kernel work has got me pretty pumped. Fun problems, fun people.
- 1024core 9y agoThis (high Netflix salaries) has the effect of raising salaries in other companies (which do provide RSUs/options on top of that)! I know people who left $BigCo for NetFlix; stuck around for a few months, and then went right back to $BigCo, but this time with a salary matching their Netflix salary.
- bluetwo 9y agoAverage household income of 200k in Los Gatos, and average house price over a million (according to city web site). I guess I would need 300k to live there.
- marssaxman 9y agoWhen you say "making less than $300k", are you referring to actual salary or to some nebulous "total compensation" estimate?