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If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. Most of my last week was spent tryin

If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.

verticalflight 6y ago
FAANG = Netflix
- anoncareer0212 6y ago
  Dropping the N seemed both potentially confusing and offensive - you can rest assured I'm not pining for Netflix from Netflix :p
pizza234 6y ago
> If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies. I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people. > Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.
- andreilys 6y ago
  “If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.” If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
  - gaadd33 6y ago
    But we aren't comparing them to a random company, we are comparing them to the rest of FAANG. Do they have a much stronger engineering culture than Google/etc?
    - jpgvm 6y ago
      Pound for pound I would probably say yes. Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google. At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
- biztos 6y ago
  > What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends. But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
  - pizza234 6y ago
    I strongly disagree. It doesn't "just work"; it has a very specific target, for whom I don't doubt it works, but it costs a lot to the rest. Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it). Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching". It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched. There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring). Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content. This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture. Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.
drewg123 6y ago
I have worked for Netflix for over 5 years, and its the best place I've ever worked. It has the no-bullshit feel of a small company combined with the advantages (pay, benefits) of a big company. Almost everybody I've worked with is amazing. I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here. I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.
- nomel 6y ago
  You might not be able to answer this, but what’s the QA culture there? How do project timelines work there? Are there project managers for all projects? I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
- stareatgoats 6y ago
  > seldom If only you had said "never" ...
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Not everyone's a good fit for their job, and dealing well with low performers is critical to building and maintaining a well-oiled organization. I've worked at a company that consistently failed to "deal well with poor performers" and man, it took a village to get poor or toxic folks walked. All the meanwhile they were crapping up the place.
  - drewg123 6y ago
    The only surprises I have had is for people that have run into socially, but are in other groups that I don't work with, and hence have no personal knowledge of their performance.
Google234 6y ago
If you are Google, one bad peer review can probably end that promotion.

verticalflight 6y ago

FAANG = Netflix

anoncareer0212 6y ago
Dropping the N seemed both potentially confusing and offensive - you can rest assured I'm not pining for Netflix from Netflix :p

pizza234 6y ago

> If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes. I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies. I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people. > Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.

andreilys 6y ago
“If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.” If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
- gaadd33 6y ago
  But we aren't comparing them to a random company, we are comparing them to the rest of FAANG. Do they have a much stronger engineering culture than Google/etc?
  - jpgvm 6y ago
    Pound for pound I would probably say yes. Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google. At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
biztos 6y ago
> What's the larger cause here? Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?" I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends. But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
- pizza234 6y ago
  I strongly disagree. It doesn't "just work"; it has a very specific target, for whom I don't doubt it works, but it costs a lot to the rest. Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it). Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching". It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched. There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring). Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content. This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture. Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.

drewg123 6y ago

I have worked for Netflix for over 5 years, and its the best place I've ever worked. It has the no-bullshit feel of a small company combined with the advantages (pay, benefits) of a big company. Almost everybody I've worked with is amazing. I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here. I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.

nomel 6y ago
You might not be able to answer this, but what’s the QA culture there? How do project timelines work there? Are there project managers for all projects? I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
stareatgoats 6y ago
> seldom If only you had said "never" ...
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Not everyone's a good fit for their job, and dealing well with low performers is critical to building and maintaining a well-oiled organization. I've worked at a company that consistently failed to "deal well with poor performers" and man, it took a village to get poor or toxic folks walked. All the meanwhile they were crapping up the place.
- drewg123 6y ago
  The only surprises I have had is for people that have run into socially, but are in other groups that I don't work with, and hence have no personal knowledge of their performance.

Google234 6y ago

If you are Google, one bad peer review can probably end that promotion.