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I recall seeing a technical presentation by one of these larger organizations (probably Netflix), where they explain that they have to do these tech talks in or

I recall seeing a technical presentation by one of these larger organizations (probably Netflix), where they explain that they have to do these tech talks in order to spread the knowledge enough so that they can find people to hire to work on their stuff. Staffing was explicitly the reason they were speaking so freely about details other shops typically consider proprietary.

pc86 9y ago
What sorts of things does one need to learn to get a software engineering job at a place like Netflix? Where would you even go to learn that type of thing (other than Netflix)? As someone who spends most of their day writing C# web apps for clients, something like a job at Netflix seems like an impossibility at this point.
- eropple 9y ago
  Netflix is, mostly, just a Java shop. They follow good practices in a lot of ways (circuit-breaker patterns, abstracted access to data stores, etc.) but it's still a Java shop. Their infrastructural/cloud ops teams are broader in the proper nouns they wrangle, but that's a different kettle of fish and is totally learnable outside of Netflix: understand AWS (when to build versus buy), understand how systems talk to one another (networking, HTTP for online queries versus queues for offline jobs), and how systems scale and repair after failure (horizontal versus vertical scaling, quorums for decisionmaking, when to use CP versus AP datastores, that kind of thing). And Netflix open-sources enough of their internal tooling that, once you have a baseline in the infrastructural field, you can probably do a good job of figuring out what the missing bits are. I'm sure, having not worked there but worked on fairly large systems, that Netflix has its own wacky problems, but they're the things that baseline understanding of this stuff enables you to learn. It's all just digital plumbing.
- joubert 9y ago
  We have many different teams that work in different domains and use different technologies. You can take a look at https://jobs.netflix.com https://jobs.netflix.com to see if there's anything you would love doing. My team, for example, builds the user interface for TV devices. It is a single page app that we craft using JavaScript and React. The same code runs on hundreds of different devices, including game consoles, smart TVs, cable boxes, and other HDMI-connected devices. The TV UI team looks for seasoned software engineers who build UIs and we come from a variety of backgrounds: web, desktop, mobile, embedded devices.
hmschreck 9y ago
So their plan for getting people who better understand their (likely best) practices for admin is to share their knowledge of how to administer a system like theirs? That's actually pretty interesting, and loads of respect to them for it.

pc86 9y ago

What sorts of things does one need to learn to get a software engineering job at a place like Netflix? Where would you even go to learn that type of thing (other than Netflix)? As someone who spends most of their day writing C# web apps for clients, something like a job at Netflix seems like an impossibility at this point.

eropple 9y ago
Netflix is, mostly, just a Java shop. They follow good practices in a lot of ways (circuit-breaker patterns, abstracted access to data stores, etc.) but it's still a Java shop. Their infrastructural/cloud ops teams are broader in the proper nouns they wrangle, but that's a different kettle of fish and is totally learnable outside of Netflix: understand AWS (when to build versus buy), understand how systems talk to one another (networking, HTTP for online queries versus queues for offline jobs), and how systems scale and repair after failure (horizontal versus vertical scaling, quorums for decisionmaking, when to use CP versus AP datastores, that kind of thing). And Netflix open-sources enough of their internal tooling that, once you have a baseline in the infrastructural field, you can probably do a good job of figuring out what the missing bits are. I'm sure, having not worked there but worked on fairly large systems, that Netflix has its own wacky problems, but they're the things that baseline understanding of this stuff enables you to learn. It's all just digital plumbing.
joubert 9y ago
We have many different teams that work in different domains and use different technologies. You can take a look at https://jobs.netflix.com https://jobs.netflix.com to see if there's anything you would love doing. My team, for example, builds the user interface for TV devices. It is a single page app that we craft using JavaScript and React. The same code runs on hundreds of different devices, including game consoles, smart TVs, cable boxes, and other HDMI-connected devices. The TV UI team looks for seasoned software engineers who build UIs and we come from a variety of backgrounds: web, desktop, mobile, embedded devices.

hmschreck 9y ago

So their plan for getting people who better understand their (likely best) practices for admin is to share their knowledge of how to administer a system like theirs? That's actually pretty interesting, and loads of respect to them for it.