22 ms·
Working at Netflix
- par 12y agoMany of the benefits op describes come from having a company which is growing. As soon as Netflix starts floundering and questioning its future you will definitely see political warfare and all kinds of time burning endeavors. This is basically an HR approved Netflix puff piece.
- calibraxis 12y agoYes, I never trust what company people say about their workplaces, unless: I know them, it's in private and they have sharply critical minds. (Usually called "disgruntled".) - If I don't know them, they have little incentive to tell me the truth. - If it's not private, then selection bias: glowing affirmations (or pseudo-critique: "Yeah we have our problems, but...") will obviously be the voices we hear. Not only are those maybe rewarded, but cold enough critiques are swiftly punished. For obvious reasons. - If they're not sharply critical types, they miss what should be obvious, because they drink the koolaid or are just plain fine with whatever silliness. (Why the emphasis on critique? Because one's job is solving problems, and real companies have such egregious problems. I'll accept fairly wrong critique in preference to correct bragging, because critique's usually missing and at least something not-too-wrong is a string to pull on during research.)
- poopsintub 12y agoCritical type here. There's something missing from his review. The company seems to fire people on the spot for little mistakes, from what I've read above. There has to be a lot more dirt, he just hasn't encountered yet.
- cldellow 12y agoGenerous severances (of the sort that might accompany the dirt) usually come with a generous non-disclosure agreement, so that makes sense.
- tptacek 12y agoNetflix is over 15 years old, has floundered numerous times and reinvented itself at least once while retaining the same management. I don't know if this post is an "HR approved Netflix puff piece", but your comment is a textbook middlebrow dismissal.
- cestep 12y agoI understand why you would be skeptical, it seems like more rah-rah crap from a successful tech company. However, it is not a puff piece, it's completely accurate. Political "warfare" or other malicious actions are not tolerated at any level at Netflix. Netflix only looks for sharp people that are also a cultural fit. If you are smart and negative, you won't last long.
- tw04 12y agoI don't think that counters what OP is saying. Netflix is publicly traded. Their CEO, who sets the cultural tone, only lasts as long as the shareholders allow him to last. If they start floundering for enough consecutive quarters, I guarantee you Reed will be gone and a PHB who will "maximize shareholder value" will replace him. If the Mikes can be ousted from RIM, you can bet your rear that Hastings can be ousted from Netflix. And once "maximizing shareholder value" becomes the goal, "culture" becomes an afterthought.
- richardking 12y agoWell, yeah, if the company isn't doing well and leadership changes, obviously that'll trickle down to employees and culture. No one said it'll be like this forever at Netflix, but it does sound like they put a heavy emphasis on "culture" now.
- svachalek 12y agoExactly. Because anything can happen, Netflix could be a terrible place to work in the future, and therefore it is definitely not a good place to work now.
- tw04 12y agoThat's not the point, and not what OP or I said. He said that the benefits Brendan describes are more a result of being a growing company than "being Netflix". He didn't say it wasn't a good place to work now, and he didn't say it would be a terrible place to work in the future. You did.
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- gargarplex 12y agoI liked the information about salary negotiation.
- nowarninglabel 12y agoMost of this jives with what I have heard from two Netflix engineers, except for the work/life balance. Both folks that I talked to said that Netflix was very much a place where they tried to work you as hard as possible until you burned out, but that this was balanced by the exceptional compensation. I wonder if the culture has changed or if only certain roles are like that?
- tzakrajs 12y agoThe culture at Netflix is discontinuous (more specifically: Customer Service vs Engineering) and has peaks and valleys as you navigate the landscape. Some teams work harder than others. There were definitely top engineers that worked less than 40 hours and top engineers that worked more than 40 hours.
- jedberg 12y agoNetflix has definitely afforded me the most work/life balance I've ever had. If you are still here at 6pm, it's pretty much empty.
- erobbins 12y agobut what time do you arrive in the morning?
- jedberg 12y agoLately around 11 because I just had a baby, but before that between 9 and 10 usually. If you get here before 10 you can get still get prime parking. People basically work 9 to 5. Yes, some people will put in a couple hours at home or on the weekend, but the nice thing is that no one expects you to be there, so you can definitely get all your "group work" done from 9 to 5.
- ma2rten 12y agoAt which location is that?
- trustfundbaby 12y agopage isn't loading :\
- nhayden 12y agoIs having a "high performance culture" a subtle way of saying they fire people very quickly for not producing enough results?
- burke 12y agoYup. They're pretty open about that in some presentations I've seen.
- cgh 12y agoI searched for the phrase "high performance culture" in the article and couldn't find it. Was it edited after you read it? He does talk about "performance engineering", which basically means "make video streaming work really fast". Can anyone comment on Netflix's backend architecture?
- saurik 12y agoIt is implied by the summary slides, but the phrase can be seen exactly as stated in the title of slide 38 (the last of the slides on this topic, starting on slide 18), "Our High Performance Culture Not Right for Everyone.
- cgh 12y agoOkay thanks. I only read the article, not the slide deck. Hopefully "high performance culture" isn't a synonym for "sweatshop".
- jandrewrogers 12y agoYes. It is one of the few companies I've worked at where I saw substandard engineers get fired for being substandard. At most companies, they just shuffle substandard engineers around into a role where they won't cause too much damage.
- 23david 12y agoEssentially it's a culture of elitism. Reminds me of Ivy League. It can work, but it's hard to scale and in my experience it's very hard to avoid a monoculture. How diverse is the population of engineers at Netflix compared to other public tech companies at a similar stage? A high-performing culture that emphasizes mentorship is better IMO.
- serve_yay 12y agoI used to work at a place where studying organizations was important to the business itself, so we focused a lot on things like Netflix's culture slide deck. One of my favorite parts of that deck is how it points out that a company's culture is what happens every day, not what is painted on the wall in fancy letters. It made me reflect on the discrepancy between what my employer at the time said, and how they acted.
- AtmaScout 12y agoI would like to know parts of the company that he doesn't like or would like to see changed. Can anyone chime in?
- brendangregg 12y agoAt companies where "stupid things happen, but can't be fixed", it's easy to make a list of things that people would like to see fixed, since they've been irritating everyone forever. Netflix isn't like that, and we have the freedom to fix stupid things anyway. So it's a hard question to answer. :-) There have been technologies that I haven't liked, and I've had the freedom to work on them, change them, improve them, and have. I can list many of those, but it's not too different to what I've been putting in my blog during the past 10 months.
- AtmaScout 12y agoThanks for the response. I was thinking certain technology might have been in the list of improvements. I'm glad to hear that you are free to work on them and improve them.
- pm90 12y ago"hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults" This. If I had one advice for every company out there, its to try and do this. Being adult doesn't have to do with your age. People who are responsible, curios and always willing to learn and work out differences... these are the kind of people that you really want. Admittedly that's hard to do. Perhaps that's why many people like to hire within their network.
- mathattack 12y agoA lot of people make excuses based on generations, but it's more about what management is willing to tolerate.
- fecak 12y ago"If hiring is broken, what else is broken?" I've seen quite a few articles on HN recently where what we call "candidate experience" during the hiring process was a theme. Whether this writer chose to list "Recruiting" as the first topic because of chronology (recruiting was first experience with company) or to emphasize the importance is unknown, but candidates today seem to assume that a broken hiring process is indicative of flaws in culture and how the company values employees. Companies that simply play the numbers game and don't consider improving candidate experience are running the risk of reducing their brand as an employer, regardless of how the public regards their products or services.
- mathattack 12y agoCustomer satisfaction is disproportionately tied to the sales experience. I still resent the guys who sold me my Toyota. It stands to reason that how we are recruited also directly impacts how we feel about the company after we join.
- sandworm 12y agoI'm still angry about about a 96 Jeep I bought new. A little untruth by the sales guy about a minor feature, that was important to me, has turned me off all jeep products ever since. Nearly twenty years later I cannot look at any jeep one without remembering that profound disappointment when my new vehicle was not as I had expected.
- brendangregg 12y agoIt's chronological, although I did want to emphasize this issue in recruitment. First impressions count. It's hard to know what a company is really like without knowing some insiders. Searching on the Internet may find opinions pointing every which way. And then, you meet their recruitment team, and get your first -- and maybe last -- firsthand exposure to the internal workings of the company. Hiring the right staff is obviously very important. So any issues with the hiring process that cannot be fixed is deeply worrying. Does the company not value hiring? Why can't it be fixed? Who will my co-workers be? What else is broken? etc. I regret that I didn't walk out during the misaligned interviews, to save everyone's time. I did eventually tell recruiters not to contact me anymore, but that seemed to make them more interested, and I was handed to a different team. (In the end, I picked Netflix anyway, and am very happy I did.) Netflix recruiting was awesome, and I think other companies can do the same. Don't put up with recruiting problems -- help fix it. It may be your company's first and last impression.
- hammerdr 12y agoJust as a single data counterpoint, my recruiting experience with Netflix was below par. It may have been the way that I was approached (from a friend who was also an engineer) . However, the 'process' took over 3 months to get nowhere. After many re-schedulings and me having to restart the process myself, I just gave up. Never heard from them after I had given up, either.
- markhelo 12y agoCurious to hear what team you were applying for?
- mwcampbell 12y agoI know this piece is mostly about what it's like to work at Netflix, but the more technical part leads to an obvious question: If FreeBSD is so great for performance analysis, and Netflix is already using it at scale, then why not also use it on the EC2 instances? Seems like they could gradually move toward FreeBSD-based instances. Or is Linux really that much better as an EC2 guest?
- jedberg 12y agoUntil very recently, it's been hard to get FreeBSD to work well on EC2. When I started at Netflix 2.5 years ago, I asked them same thing. I think we're finally at a place where we might be able to start looking at making the move. But to be honest, we're pretty heavily invested in the Linux ecosystem at this point.
- brendangregg 12y agoAs jedberg said, we're heavily invested in Linux on the cloud, which means there's a large cost associated with the move (porting infrastructure software, tools, and testing). But FreeBSD has been improving on EC2, such as PVHVM support. If the benefit was big enough, it might outweigh the cost. I'd like to do a little FreeBSD EC2 perf testing this year (as I would for any tech that might pay off)...
- bmoyles 12y agoWe've been talking about the same thing in engtools over the last few weeks... we should set up a meeting :)
- DigitalSea 12y agoNetflix sounds like a pretty clued on place in terms of hiring and culture. Which considering their size is no small feat. I don't like their clever wording around what they call a "high performance culture" which basically means that if you don't meet the level they expect, you get fired. Which is fine, but they should be a little more honest about the fact without burying it behind creative HR speak. I would love to know more about their hiring process though. You mentioned that you didn't have to answer questions unrelated to your job (something I personally experienced during a job interview on a bad scale recently). Do they make you solve puzzles and other pointless indicators that some companies use to determine if a developer is any good or not? More specifically maybe a front-end focused role, not a back-end one. Would love to know more about the process (as much as you can without getting into trouble).
- sanderjd 12y agoI must just be an outlier on this, but I hate the idea of only getting interview questions that pigeonhole me into some narrow role, because it suggests that the job will be similarly pigeonholed, which I think is awful. I much prefer lines of questioning that attempt to suss out how well I can participate on a team, learn and adapt, and think creatively, because they suggest that they hope for me to be doing those things a lot, which is great.
- DigitalSea 12y agoLet me elaborate. Recently I went for a job that was being advertised as a front-end developer position. The recruiter who briefed me on the position also informed me that it was a front-end only role and that there would be a test on various front-end things; HTML, CSS and Javascript for the most part. As it turned out, the interviewer had plans to test me on a few front-end related things, but then proceeded to ask me questions about Java, databases, server administration and complex Javascript puzzles. Keep in mind this was a position for a front-end developer, their job listing didn't mention Java, databases or server administration. Looking at their current site, they are abusing jQuery pretty badly, aren't minifying their CSS/JS or tonnes of other things, so it felt weird I was being asked super complicated and mostly irrelevant questions when their site seemed so poorly developed. I think it is important you not only get quizzed on things relating to your job, but also other things not directly relating to your job (but still important and within reason). I showed up for a particular job as a front-end developer and was asked questions that you would ask a DBA, Java developer and front-end developer. It was not the role being advertised. This is a mistake that I discovered seems to happen at quite a fair bit. The hiring process is definitely broken at a lot of companies.
- RayVR 12y agoI had a wildly different experience interviewing at netflix. I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my original schedule with them...) for one of my interviews and she spent half the time telling me why the stock price was so low "We were high on a $300 share price and thought we were gods." Then, the other half telling me her favorite firing stories. I don't know what the purpose of all of this was but it gave me the impression that HR/head of HR needed to demonstrate how important they are in the company. One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question. I successfully answered it. He then asked me to rewrite it with some restrictions. I did this. Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science. I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone. However, because of this feedback, and the fact that the people at netflix generally liked me, they wanted me to work on some sort of data warehouse management team. I'm not sure why they would offer me a job so wildly different from what I was contacted to apply for, or why the syntax from one language would be considered representative of my knowledge of CS. Overall, I think the experience of one person at a company is nothing more than an anecdote that can be entertaining, perhaps moderately informative, but it's not a complete picture. There are many stories out there about people interviewing with or working for Netflix. If you are seriously interested in the company, read a lot of those stories, discount all of them as biased, and then see for yourself by talking to them.
- deeviant 12y agoThe official story told often at big companies is that the interview process should be tilted towards false negatives over false positives. The truth of the matter is you could probably get statistically similar results from a voodoo witch doctor reading chicken entrails. Ok, maybe not, but I really get the feeling that most hiring systems are arbitrary and are less "tilted toward false negatives" and more just plain random. In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term.
- eyeareque 12y agoI wonder if he will still be in love with his job after another 12 months pass. :)
- cpwatson 12y agoAs with the other hires on my team I'm thrilled to have Brendan onboard. I would also hope that if he happens to leave Netflix due to issues with the culture he will share that experience as well, publicly.
- eyeareque 12y agoOne thing to remember is that one person's experience at a company can be vastly different than others. For example your job happiness can be either great or terrible depending on your manager.
- shill 12y ago> It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other, and use their roles to conduct political warfare. Political warfare isn't always obvious to a newcomer with several months on the job.
- auganov 12y agobrendangregg is one of The People in performance analysis. Netflix would be foolish to pass on him. So the experience is most likely not representative of the average hire. The description sounds like it's still the honeymoon phase. Or was Joyent THAT bad? (-;
- tacoman 12y agoCame here to say this. He's been the closest thing to a rockstar sysadmin for as long as I can remember and even before he taught the world how to use Dtrace.
- blazespin 12y ago"It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other, and use their roles to conduct political warfare." Laugh!
- blazespin 12y agoRiiiiiiight: "It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other, and use their roles to conduct political warfare."
- jasondc 12y agoSenior Software Engineer @ Netflix: $210,157/year/avg. Netflix seems to have some high salaries, even for the bay area. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Netflix-Salaries-E11891.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Netflix-Salaries-E11891.htm
- calimac 12y agoNetflix hired an in house P.R. Consultant.
- calimac 12y agoThis can't be real.? I have family who worked at netflix. Netflix must have brought their P.R. Consultant on full time for the last 3 months to write this post.
- thrw1away 12y agoJust as a counter point - I had a different experience with these guys. Got approached by a hiring manager who set up the first screening call that went fairly well. Then got contacted by the Recruiter ... Things went downhill fast after that point - the recruiter was very casual in her approach towards anything related to skills or compensation but very aggressive about how they value performance, what an honor it was to work at Netflix how lucky I am to be in the interview "pipeline"... I had never met a bunch of folks so enamored by their own culture. I probably said something like "I have worked at quite a few places that have very good supportive cultures as well" towards the end. The process ended after that call...thankfully. [posting from a throwaway to avoid the fairly easy googling identification]
- utefan001 12y agoIn case anyone from Netflix is reading here. Why does Netflix make it so easy for my 2nd grader to watch shows like Orange is the new smut? The only way I know to prevent her having access is to set my user to "Teen". If mine is set to "Adult", all she needs to do is click my Netflix user button. If you think 2nd graders are not watching that show, that is bull. I have a friend from another country whose daughter was watching it and bragged about it to a substitute teacher.
- feld 12y agoIt's called "Orange is the New Black" and you shouldn't expect a tech company to be a parent for you.
- nbevans 12y agoConsidering it's all built on well-known and tested (provided you follow the best practices) cloud services (AWS right?) I often wonder what they do all day. Netflix platform strikes me as something you invest heavily in at day 1 but then only need a boilerplate team of developers to keep it ticking over and responding to user feedback. They love to bleat on about their Chaos Monkey this and Chaos Monkey that. But come on, they wrote a read-only cloud-hosted and distributed video streaming service that leans on standard cloud services and best practices for 90% of the hard parts. Chaos Monkey just smacks of writing a integration test for a third party component you don't own. Frankly I wouldn't want a job at Netflix simply because the problem domain is not interesting enough. Read-only highly-resilient distributed systems are not particularly hard to create and test. It's only becomes an interesting problem when you need to do a comparable amount of write-ops at the same time as those read-ops.
- jessegavin 12y agoI interviewed for a role on the website UI team in spring of 2013. I thought the interview process was one of the best I have experienced. My would-be manager initially reached out to me (not a recruiter) and we had a few nice phone conversations about what they were looking for. They flew me out for a two day interview. If they know it isn't a fit on the first day, they don't have you come back for the second. I met with 3 developers, a hiring specialist and a development manager on the first day and they asked very domain-relevant questions within my area of expertise. No silly programmer brain teasers. I had plenty of time to ask questions of my own. On day two I met with non-developers. Business, designers/UX, etc. I was able to get a very good idea of the people I would be working with and the types of problems I would be solving. I ended up deciding to take another offer, but it was a very positive experience overall. I didn't encounter any jerks like some others have.
- brown9-2 12y agoIt's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other, and use their roles to conduct political warfare. It's not the kind of company where bad mistakes are frequently made, and no one is held accountable. These are aspects of "culture" that are really easy to boast of but hard to actually prove that you have. Some more data on how Netflix avoids inter-personal conflict between those with power would be really interesting.
- erikb 12y agoThey say how they do it: Hire smart people that match with our philosophy. And that might be all you can do.
- click170 12y agoThank you to the people who are sharing their Netflix stories as well. I'm curious about the time frame though. The author of the post noted that he started several months back, to anyone who is sharing their story here can you please also note the approximate time frame for when your story takes place? I'm curious to see if the company has corrected the problems that some people have hit while maneuvering through the recruiting process.
- jay_kyburz 12y agoI was reading through the culture deck and I love The Values. I even like the idea of regularly letting people go who are not contributing to the success of the company. However, there were a few points that are a little disconnected from reality, or perhaps they are not being entirely honest about the employee / employer relationship. When I'm working for somebody I give them everything, my heart and soul. My passion. My success is the companies success. But I think it's honest to be clear that I am giving up _time_ with my family or _time_ working on my own projects to bring home a salary. There is a big difference between my heart and soul for 20 hours a week, or 40 hours a week, or 60 hours a week. Hours do matter. Hours are my side of the bargain, and in return for hours I get paid cash. I think its a form of dishonesty to gloss over this and wave your hands around and say hours don't matter, just come in when you want and do your best and if you perform well you won't be fired. When I hear this I think the employer doesn't expect you to have anything else in your life other than your job, and that what they really want is _all_ your hours in exchange for your salary. I don't think that's necessarily bad, just say so and be upfront about it. Having no holiday policy also artificially creates a grey area, or a point of conflict between an employee or employer. If I were a cynical old bastard I would suggest that the no holiday policy is actually so that holidays don't accrue from year to year. In my experience young engineers don't really take holidays and if you don't force them out of the office they end up with months and months of leave saved up.
- seanp2k2 12y agoCheck out "10. What happens to my earned and accrued but unused vacation if I am discharged or quit my job?" at http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_vacation.htm http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_vacation.htm
- erikb 12y agoExactly my thinking. Maybe they literally don't expect you to put in more hours. But if there is no specific limitations others will spend more hours to "out-star" you, because the star stays and the others have to go. And because the other guy is doing it, you also have to do it. And in the end everybody works 80 hour weeks. I love counting working hours and holidays because in the end it means I really can take this time off.
- pmcgrathm 12y agoI've been at NFLX for 7 months now. I agree with much of what Brendan has discussed here in terms of culture. If you are confident in your abilities it really is a great place to be and you really do get to work with some of the brightest minds in the valley. The whole firing average performers thing is, in my opinion, really a means of making sure that only those applicants who feel strongly that they have something to bring to the table should apply. This is not where you go for job security, it is where you go to work on something that excites you. That being said, it is extremely rare to see someone let go who did not have some sort of fair warning or multiple indications that their work was somehow below par. I believe the multiple claims on glass door are remnant of the culture when this company was under serious duress in 2012/2013. Of course, as with any organization, mileage may vary. One of the negative aspects of this culture is that as you get some very smart, very confident, very opinionated minds into a room - you are of course going to get into some head butting. Sometimes the overarching business strategy may change before a team can adapt to that change, and then persons may become defensible about their territory. While Netflix as an organism does a great job of eliminating this threat, it does take some time to formally fix the mojo within a deprecated organization / way of doing things.
- iamleppert 12y agoI also interviewed with the talent woman, who gave me the baseball team analogy and that fact they love to fire people. A little off-putting for a candidate to hear, no?
- fffernan 12y agoDoes Netflix have a culture of giant powerpoint slides? This thing is massive....
- jedberg 12y agoHa! No, not usually. That is by far the biggest powerpoint I've seen at Netflix in my 3+ years there.
- barrystaes 12y agoI really like the 9 values, i do seem to align. Except for the "analysis paralysis" bit. It perfectly describes two recent weeks.. so i put the coin-phrase on a sticky. :)
- mhomde 12y agoYou know the longer I work in the industry that more one thing has becomes apparent. There are afaik no "dream" company which also are of sufficient size, except maybe Pixar (My theory is that if you work with products aimed at children it keeps your soul from corrupting) Google started as a Xanadu everyone wanted to job for, but more and more tales about bureaucracy and people jocking for power keeps coming into light. Apple has for long time seemed to be a very demanding employer where you sign away your life to the company the day you start working. Microsoft was the original power employer but for a long time seems to have been paralyzed by department infighting and middle management. Valve long claimed to have a unique and awesome culture but other accords has described it as being dysfunctional an ineffective. I'm not sure whether Facebook is good or bad or has corrupted at this point. Anyways, the point seem to be that the bigger the company the more business people and management who will corrupt the company. The more employees the more rules and bureaucracy is needed to enforce them. It certainly is possible to avoid this but it seems the bigger the company the faster the entropy slide into oblivion and the more energy it takes to counteract it... and not many do. The "Bozo explosion" as Jobs described also was very apt.
- brownbat 12y ago> We aren't winning by unsavory sales, legal, or marketing tactics. Online distribution of content is pushing inexorably towards battles over hit exclusives. Some would consider that anti-consumer, and an unsavory tactic, though admittedly it doesn't fall cleanly in the sales, legal, or marketing arena. It's a little of all three. I'm also worried about what's happening behind the scenes to push the service away from DVDs. I used to have a video store around the corner that had a massive library of indie and foreign films. I have eclectic tastes in film, or at least don't just want the latest hits, so I rented there frequently. It's been driven out of business by online streaming. That was supposed to be ok, because, Chris Anderson, said, Netflix would stock even deeper content. Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't have the time or inclination to fight the licensing battles required for streaming rights on anything approaching a deep DVD library. As negotiations over blockbusters and fights with Amazon over exclusives dominate the time of their lawyers, it's going to be even rarer to find gems from the long tail on the site. Already we end up with Academy Award winners and nominees that are conspicuously absent. The 80 of 86 films on Spike Lee's "essential films" list that are unavailable. Giant holes in the catalog for major directors, like Hitchcock. Netflix has The Lady Vanishes and nothing else. That's one of over fifty films, many of which are classics, some of the best films of all time. (That one is fine but probably not his best or most noteworthy.) To make it worse, Reed Hastings seems to hate physical discs, even though licensing for them is automatic, so he keeps trying to spin off or kill that service. So over the last year, the number of scratched discs I've received in the mail has increased, and most of the DVDs I request are on "very long wait," often dropping out of the collection entirely. So now, even with their DVD service, pivotal noir films, like The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, or The Blue Lamp, which won the BAFTA for best British film in 1949, Netflix just doesn't know these exist. Yoji Yamada's "The Hidden Blade," one of the best samurai dramas of all time, just not there. There's basically nothing available by legendary Taiwanese wu xia director King Hu. Sure, the Internet is the future, and shipping bits is phenomenally cheaper than shipping plastic. But there are different legal regimes here, and sometimes law trumps technology. The first sale doctrine allows DVD rentals without costly rights negotiations. So consumers get access to more content. Content owners argued for a few decades that rental stores were driving them out of business, it didn't happen. Netflix isn't an archive, but it did knock a few of them out of business. It has a huge number of titles, but when you go through the list of really important films, it's 90% holes. I understand they're chasing a dream to foster streaming of content. Along the way they've killed something that I don't think we can easily get back.
- k_bx 12y agoAuthor mentions: > Bad News syndrome What is that precisely? (in context of tech companies)
- utopkara 12y agoAs George Costanza said, "it's not a lie if you believe it".