11 ms·

Netflix is such an interesting company. They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office.

by swozey 3y ago

Netflix is such an interesting company. They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. Netflix pays their engineers a ton of money, no equity. We're talking 300-500k cash. As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs. I absolutely dreamed that one day I'd be capable enough to work for Netflix or Pixar on high end network lowest throughput-we-can-accomplish infra. Now it's all a joke to me. I don't even have Netflix account anymore. I've attempted to launcha a multitude of Netflix OSS projects like ConsoleMe and Conductor. I have never ever, and I'm saying this as someone who hopped onto Kubernetes version 1.1 in 2015. I have never had a worse open source experience than Netflix OSS projects. They basically shoot them out then abandon them and never touch them again. This post made me hit up their Github again and there are (possible) gems like Zuul, Falcor, Chaosmonkey.. but seriously, go try and deploy them. It's embarassing. https://github.com/netflix https://github.com/netflix

geodel 3y ago
Seems all true to me. Apart from being I did not find Netflix projects gem. In my usage and looking at their code, they seem like overwrought Java enterprise projects. The place I work they are slowly replacing Netflix OSS with other products. Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.
- swozey 3y ago
  My resume has the (dis)pleasure of converting all of Netflixes OSS projects to run in containers. JVM or not. I have golang services that run at 80Mb, I have rust services that run at 20Mb. Every JVM service? I have to literally define its memory consumption with command line flags (-jvmx? I forget, its my weekend) on each deployment. Running JVMs in k8s is hilarious. I'm not grey beard Linux level yet (soon) but my god. It's hilarious how poorly they perform.
  - tough 3y ago
    everyone's weekend at the same time you realise
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - arwineap 3y ago
      I'm reading this on Monday :)
    - progbits 3y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History Almost, but not quite. (I'm linking the "history" section because it has a nice map. There is a table further down.)
    - ponector 3y ago
      You never know. Some countries have work week starting on Sunday
  - geodel 3y ago
    Agree. I maybe wrong but I think it was Netflix first which normalized generating one web service call generating 1MB worth of logs. In our place finance is kind of whopping ass of teams which are generating extensive logging and monitoring as Splunk cost goes through roof.
  - sharts 3y ago
    Spinnaker
tiffanyh 3y ago
> “Netflix is such an interesting company.” An often forgotten fact is that Netflix started Roku as a product & spun it off.
ksey3 3y ago
Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content. In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head. Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter. After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash. And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers. Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo. Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
- kbarmettler 3y ago
  I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
  - ksey3 3y ago
    Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
    - zigman1 3y ago
      Any other google news alerts you have running?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yieldcrv 3y ago
I don’t understand what the expense of los gatos has to do with anything did you go work for Netflix? was it enough to live on in los gatos? what a random selection of non sequiturs
- dboreham 3y ago
  Obviously nobody needs to live in Los Gatos. You could probably commute from Gillroy although it'd be a pain.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Or the other way, toward Santa Cruz (Scott's Valley always struck me as nice and "affordable" compared to the Bay Area).
deaddodo 3y ago
> They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone". I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though. > As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so. It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.
google234123 3y ago
> I've ever heard they never do RSUs Well...I'm surprised you didn't bother doing google search. You choose what percent of the 500k cash if stock. 0% or 90% if you want. I don't get why you are complaining about the location - all the bay is expensive and you can easily afford a 2 million dollar home on a 500k salary.
- sramam 3y ago
  depending on where one is coming from, $2M house in the SF Bay area can be surprisingly small.
  - b112 3y ago
    Very much so. A $4M home is sort of an average sized house, in Palo Alto. And with barely any land.
    - google234123 3y ago
      Ok... so what? Netflix is in Los Gatos. 2M also won't get you too much for an apartment facing central park in NYC
  - google234123 3y ago
    So? The OP didn't talk about buying a mansion
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- swozey 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - google234123 3y ago
gnicholas 3y ago
> I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc. Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.
- lisper 3y ago
  Even Los Gatos gets relatively affordable up in the hills.
- sdan 3y ago
  Possible they mixed up Los Gatos and Los Altos? Los Altos is much wealthier.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    True, especially Los Altos Hills. But how do you research the wrong city when you’re house hunting? Wouldn’t you be checking distances to the office and realize that everything is 25 mins away, on the freeway?
    - swozey 3y ago
      [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
swozey 3y ago
[flagged]
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Amen. HN is becoming increasingly brain dead, and the discourse stupid.
BonoboIO 3y ago
It amazes me, that Netflix is capable of such top of the line engineering things (really mindblowing stuff, one machine that streams nearly 1 Terabit pers second), but is for the love of god unable to stream HD Content to my iPhone (newest firmware, all up2date). Tried everything gigabit wifi, cellular, multiple ISPs ... It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience. I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.

by swozey 3y ago

geodel 3y ago

Seems all true to me. Apart from being I did not find Netflix projects gem. In my usage and looking at their code, they seem like overwrought Java enterprise projects. The place I work they are slowly replacing Netflix OSS with other products. Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.

swozey 3y ago
My resume has the (dis)pleasure of converting all of Netflixes OSS projects to run in containers. JVM or not. I have golang services that run at 80Mb, I have rust services that run at 20Mb. Every JVM service? I have to literally define its memory consumption with command line flags (-jvmx? I forget, its my weekend) on each deployment. Running JVMs in k8s is hilarious. I'm not grey beard Linux level yet (soon) but my god. It's hilarious how poorly they perform.
- tough 3y ago
  everyone's weekend at the same time you realise
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - arwineap 3y ago
    I'm reading this on Monday :)
  - progbits 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History Almost, but not quite. (I'm linking the "history" section because it has a nice map. There is a table further down.)
  - ponector 3y ago
    You never know. Some countries have work week starting on Sunday
- geodel 3y ago
  Agree. I maybe wrong but I think it was Netflix first which normalized generating one web service call generating 1MB worth of logs. In our place finance is kind of whopping ass of teams which are generating extensive logging and monitoring as Splunk cost goes through roof.
- sharts 3y ago
  Spinnaker

tiffanyh 3y ago

> “Netflix is such an interesting company.” An often forgotten fact is that Netflix started Roku as a product & spun it off.

ksey3 3y ago

Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content. In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head. Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter. After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash. And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers. Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo. Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.

kbarmettler 3y ago
I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
- ksey3 3y ago
  Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
  - zigman1 3y ago
    Any other google news alerts you have running?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

yieldcrv 3y ago

I don’t understand what the expense of los gatos has to do with anything did you go work for Netflix? was it enough to live on in los gatos? what a random selection of non sequiturs

dboreham 3y ago
Obviously nobody needs to live in Los Gatos. You could probably commute from Gillroy although it'd be a pain.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Or the other way, toward Santa Cruz (Scott's Valley always struck me as nice and "affordable" compared to the Bay Area).

deaddodo 3y ago

> They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office. Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone". I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though. > As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so. It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.

google234123 3y ago

> I've ever heard they never do RSUs Well...I'm surprised you didn't bother doing google search. You choose what percent of the 500k cash if stock. 0% or 90% if you want. I don't get why you are complaining about the location - all the bay is expensive and you can easily afford a 2 million dollar home on a 500k salary.

sramam 3y ago
depending on where one is coming from, $2M house in the SF Bay area can be surprisingly small.
- b112 3y ago
  Very much so. A $4M home is sort of an average sized house, in Palo Alto. And with barely any land.
  - google234123 3y ago
    Ok... so what? Netflix is in Los Gatos. 2M also won't get you too much for an apartment facing central park in NYC
- google234123 3y ago
  So? The OP didn't talk about buying a mansion
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
swozey 3y ago
[flagged]
- google234123 3y ago

gnicholas 3y ago

> I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA. How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc. Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.

lisper 3y ago
Even Los Gatos gets relatively affordable up in the hills.
sdan 3y ago
Possible they mixed up Los Gatos and Los Altos? Los Altos is much wealthier.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  True, especially Los Altos Hills. But how do you research the wrong city when you’re house hunting? Wouldn’t you be checking distances to the office and realize that everything is 25 mins away, on the freeway?
  - swozey 3y ago
    [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

swozey 3y ago

[flagged]

alephnerd 3y ago
Amen. HN is becoming increasingly brain dead, and the discourse stupid.

BonoboIO 3y ago

It amazes me, that Netflix is capable of such top of the line engineering things (really mindblowing stuff, one machine that streams nearly 1 Terabit pers second), but is for the love of god unable to stream HD Content to my iPhone (newest firmware, all up2date). Tried everything gigabit wifi, cellular, multiple ISPs ... It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience. I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.