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Comment by mattiemass | Hacker News Reader

Very cool article. Amazing how much tooling Netflix has built themselves.

What's amazing is that Netflix let their teams develop solutions from scratch. Usually at big companies when their developers say something like, "can't we just build a solution ourselves?" they're laughed out of the room or, more likely, marked down as candidates in the next round of layoffs.

It helps that they have repeatedly proven this strategy works. When the CTO goes to the CEO and says "we're going to build this, not buy it," the CEO obviously trusts his decision making because he's seen him successfully execute his strategy so many times.

It sounds like Netflix engineering culture is built a lot around trust. Management trusts that only top engineering talent works there, and the sink-or-swim culture, coupled with performance bonuses and a rising stock price, ensures that the engineers are making the best decisions for the company. It's a lot easier to approve a "build" vs "buy" decision when you know that the interests of the engineers pushing for it are actually aligned with the company business interests.

Contrast this to a company with a large separation of incentives between the stock price and the engineers. In that scenario you end up with a bunch of engineers who are bored and want to prematurely optimize systems because there is no clear personal cost to doing so.

> It helps that they have repeatedly proven this strategy works.

I laughed at this because you can't "repeatedly prove" you're capable of developing your own solutions if you're never allowed to do it in the first place!

The enterprise mantra is: COTS or it doesn't happen.

Fairly new Netflix employee here (started last November). From what I can see so far the "highly aligned, loosely coupled" culture here works very well. The company has a clear focus, we all get it, and we all work to make it happen. Teams have freedom to accomplish their goals they best way they see fit. There is quite simply not a lot of focus on particular means, the focus is on outcomes.

I've been in so many places where that response would be the correct one. I've spent a lot of time decommissioning some rather horrible outcomes of "can't we just build it ourselves".

When companies treat engineers like disposable commodities they should expect solutions that will be disposed.

NIH is the opposite of "disposable engineers".

It's saying your engineers are so much more precious and able than the barbarians outside the gate, that they should write their own test harness/DOM selection library/insert commodity software genre here.

To be fair most COTS solutions made for enterprises are absolute crap. It doesn't take much to improve upon them.

Enterprise tools are well-known to have absolutely horrible user experiences, extremely complicated configuration and architecture, and even worse documentation. I don't blame any manager/PM for thinking, "we can do better" with an internal team.

Netflix cares about "it works" and they have to have tools.

They also seem to have technical management as well. That makes a huge difference in building out and maintaining your own tools and also in hiring and retaining effective engineering talent.

I think it's more interesting to note that they couldn't exactly buy that from anyone else.

"let's wait for the community to fix the opensource code we rely on".

I've heard this a lot in my career (even academia)

Do they? The only big company I've been at (Amazon) has an absolute monster of an inhouse build and deployment/pipelining system. Although it could just be that they've been around longer than open source alternatives.

I believe at least some parts of the tooling were developed by an embedded team from Pivotal Labs.

Not that I am aware of. It's possible they contributed to some of our OSS efforts, but I don't believe anything used internally was developed in that manner.

Pivotal ( the company that engulfed Pivotal Labs and Spring ) did contribute the Cloud Foundry integration in Spinnaker. This is not used at Netflix, though.

Huh? The article describes a massive system and there is a lot of abstraction here, are you suggesting Pivotal was a part of the large abstraction or just grabbing credit for some minor part?

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