Working at Netflix 2017
brendangregg.com
brendangregg.com
Why does the author only have a pretty small desk directly at a (what I assume) small recreational area? Is this considered a normal desk at a top SV tech firm? I'd probably go nuts after a few days because people are constantly passing by and are talking while I want to concentrate on work.
I'm from Germany where more and more companies try to implement the same open-office plans. Everybody I know that works in such an environment considers them as hostile to productivity. Somebody is constantly talking about useless stuff and disturbs others by that and using headphones is deemed as rude and anti-social.
I don't know what happened to private offices in SV. Sun Microsystems had a private office for every engineer, but Facebook tore them down when they took over. (I gave a talk at Facebook and included a floor plan from the Sun days: https://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-bpf-superpower... )
Maybe not shady, but surely controversial.
[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
[1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/18/drm-for-the-web-is-a-bad...
What could they do? They could not laud DRM on their blog. They could say they are reluctantly adding it. They could probably have pushed for 1080p in Chrome, etc. They could make their own stuff DRM free and publish piracy/subscription stats to show how much DRM helps.
Their choices aren't just "fully embrace it" or "go out of business".
Yes, if we ever possessed the technology to pirate movies, everyone would watch them and the industry couldn't survive.
It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet. But it has happened in the past. There are videos games that are single player and can't be played without an active connection back to the publisher. What happens when the publisher doesn't like you or mislabels you as a pirate? What if you just want to play the video game you bought and payed fro without an Internet connection?
There were music stores that only played music through special software after getting decryption keys from an active connection to the Internet, and some of those stores shut down. What happened with the millions of dollars paid into those stores? What about the songs? Did you know that decrypting a song you bought and paid for is a crime?
Consider: https://xkcd.com/488/
I would rather get out in front of this entirely artificial problem before I have to support my friends and family who don't understand the nature of this problem.
I do agree with you for purchases that have DRM, but this is a subscription service - you watch when you pay, not when you don't.
But why can't I use their service on a device of my choosing at a resolution of my choice? Why is my perfectly capable Ubuntu machine limited to 720p and a windows machine isn't?
Having some kind of standardized access where I didn't have to put up with their BS would go a long way towards making that easier for me to deal with.
The only way this makes sense is if the purpose of this blockade is to push people towards devices and operating systems that are completely locked down with DRM, from the software to the hardware. I can't think of any other reason — if Netflix does serve me 1080p and 4K streams, would that cause a sudden increase in the amount of pirated releases available?
I can already get everything on Netflix, in 1080p, if I really want just by visiting the usual pirate haunts! So what exactly is gained by degrading my viewing experience by only allowing me 720p as long as I choose to run a free operating system instead of a fully locked down platform?
I wish Netflix would give an honest answer on their DRM strategy, because it is driving me away.
I could understand if this was done because of licensing issues, but Netflix has decided on a blanket ban of 1080p and higher for their customers on free operating systems and anyone else who wants to use Chrome or Firefox.
According to Wikipedia, Netflix had about 3500 employees in 2015. That's a pretty large company, and I assure you, the content producers pushing Netflix originals are going to a) have been hired out of that conservative Hollywood culture, b) be laterally very far away from the enlightened engineers in the Netflix corporate structure. Also c), the upper management above the engineers and the content producers who could resolve this kind of dispute, probably don't have enough exposure to an issue (1080p and 4k streams of Netflix Originals content to Linux-only customers) which affects a small minority of their customers.
Wait, really? I did not know that. I'm watching Netflix with Chrome on mac OS and always assumed that they use a poor bitrate for what I thought was 1080p content. This explains a lot. Any workaround on mac other than using Safari?
Yes, The Pirate Bay. If users don't vote with their money nothing will ever change.
DRM, ironically, promotes piracy.
... are you from some kind of parallel universe? They're incredibly successful from an awards and audience perspective.
House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, as you mentioned but I'm not sure how you've missed their others like...
A Series of Unfortunate Events, Narcos, The Crown, Stranger Things, The OA, Sense8, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Grace and Frankie, Santa Clarita Diet, BoJack Horseman...
.. and that's without mentioning their extremely successful original kids programming or co-productions (like Lillyhammer, or the new Degrassi, or Dirk Gently) and of course their continuations (Fuller House, Arrested Development, Trailer Park Boys, Black Mirror.. etc).
I mean.. just look at that line up.
That's a solid response.
Personally, I would rank convenience in this descending order: 720p Netflix on Chrome (my browser of choice); 1080p Netflix on a supported browser; piracy.
Maybe for the HN power user demographic the current DRM methodology is pushing users away, but for average joe (many of whom don't even know this is a thing) will happily plug along using Netflix.
That's a sensible goal. But Netflix is more convenient and has DRM.
They aren't mutually exclusive. They probably are for purchases of media (in fact... I'd say certainly are) but for streaming it's not.
The big thing with streaming is speed of access to the content and Netflix/et al are much better than piracy at that (it's instant vs waiting, even a short while, for a BT download... once you find it).
Streaming services main downside vs piracy is the catalog - piracy wins there, but by less in practical terms than you might expect.
* Open sexual harassment culture
* Building spy software for the government
* Selling censorship tools to governments
* Selling your private data to advertisers
* Allowing advertisers to target a person's emotional state
* Profiting off of fake news and click bait
* Tracking people across the web
* Using monopolies to limit competition in other realms
* Strong arming third parties to keep them from using your competitors' products
Somehow, limiting streaming to 720p on non-supported platforms seems pretty benign.
Edit: Tried to separate list from closing comment.
Edit: I rather ask than make an assumption. Thanks for the confirmation.
On the other hand, if Netflix has managed to reimplement the NSA's dragnet internally, I'm going to be really impressed by their engineers' productivity.
Not sure I agree, FWIW.
With that said, I don't want to just single you out since this is a common practice, so I went ahead and found sources for you:
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... [1]https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti... [2]https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveill... [3]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr... [4]http://mashable.com/2017/04/30/facebook-leaked-report-advert... [5]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11... [6]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530741/the-murky-world-of... [7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [8]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160920/07021035568/hp-la...
Asking for a source makes sense for controversial, or hard to find information. Not when it's so commonly reported that it's the first link on google on every single topic.
They did fix that though, i think.
Further, they make it essentially impossible to to create a local routing rule to bypass the VPN for them alone. You're stuck whitelisting the whole of AWS.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that I have not personally experienced it. I've been at Netflix for a little less than 2 years. We've had zero turnover in my immediate group (the team that runs the OS used on the OpenConnect Appliance), and very little turnover in adjacent teams. I experienced far more turnover at Google.
Yes, it is easier to fire someone at Netflix than elsewhere, but it doesn't happen all that more often than anywhere else, and it's also easier to hire, promote and give raises to them. So it all balances out.
The interview process is as challenging as it needs to be to find the right people for the job. This varies from team to team. We don't follow a corporate set of rules to hire engineers.
This company is more adamant about letting folks go whom don't get the work done or aren't able to perform.
They want good engineers to solve challenging problems. The teams are fairly lean so you can't really float by doing the bare minimum.
Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left?
Netflix is not SpaceX nor Tesla; its an online Blockbuster Video. Serving video in 2017 is not complicated.
>Is there much left?
You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.
I can most definitely get behind original content production being hard. But pushing a couple hundred TB (or even low double digit PB) of data out to CDNs doesn't require a fleet of devs.
Take a look at some of their open source projects and their tech blog to get a feel for the problems they solve at their scale.
https://netflix.github.io/ https://medium.com/netflix-techblog
Some things I find personally interesting:
They run a 5000 node Cassandra cluster.
They can failover an entire datacenter in 27 minutes.
Essentially, Netflix is about as big as Akamai when it comes to content delivery.
[0] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/facts-figures.jsp
[1] https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
There are a lot of challenging problems in any industry once you dig deep enough. There are tons of brilliant people around me, doing super cool things that I can barely fathom (like the recommendation system). Any one of those things can be trivialized, but each is somebody's pride and joy, and a marvel of design and engineering.
I didn't want to answer your question right away since it felt like you were trolling at first. But here's my answer. There's indeed, quite a bit more than just serving bits and title suggestions.
The "left over" portion includes things such as getting those bits to move effortlessly to the multitude of TV's, set-top boxes, and streaming sticks, not to mention the effort and engineering to get those movies and shows streaming effortlessly to your mobile devices.
We attempt to optimize every part of the user experience so you can get to watching your shows immediately regardless of what device you choose to pick up.
Can we even say firing slackers is bad?
Netflix's culture involved letting people go when they were away on short-term disability: that's not business as usual, that's a particularly harsh and unforgiving culture.
Chase's program saves them money that would have been spent on on boarding and off boarding employees. I also know people who have gotten new internal jobs via Wells Fargo's program.
These are real programs that result in retaining people.
It is a world of difference between this model of 6 months notice and the chance for a new role and Netflix's we'll fire you if you're sick or away from the office for too long.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Netflix-Senior-Software-Eng...
You can argue that glassdoor and other online surveys are self-selecting and suffer from this or that bias, but at least they (presumably) are trying to back their results up with data. Multiple online sites agree that a median & average Senior Software Engineer BASE salary in the Bay area is between $130K and $140K [1] [2]. If you want to say this is wrong, fine, come in with some other actual data rather than just hearsay and doubt casting. If you want to say "but that's just base salary" also fine, but show some total comp data with a sample size greater than N=1.
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-senior-soft...
2: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Senior_Software_Engi...
No?
That is why it's not commonly shared and proven like you are asking for. Try putting yourself in the other person's shoes.
Everyone takes whatever time off they need. There's no guilt associated - we always shun folks that check email and chat channels when they take vacation.
I personally appreciate cash directly in my pocket versus a gym, yoga rooms, and toys scattered about in the office.
I come to the office to work, not play. I don't need nor want the company buying things that don't help me get my work done effectively.
I also appreciate the sense of mobility in my career. I don't have to wait four+ years for stock options to vest. Four years is a very long time in any tech company. I also don't want my compensation tied to stock performance.
On the flip side, you also don't want to be faced with a massive drop in your take-home pay after the 4th year (once salary+RSU becomes just salary), forcing you to jump ship. I've been to a few "vesting parties" for co-workers where they quit after exactly 4 years to the day. I'm told some companies are known to do "evergreen grants" to help mitigate this effect.
The expectation everywhere I have been is that you will get refresher grants not just at the end of year four but earlier than that. Anywhere from 6 months to 2 years.
Either way I don't care what they do. If my compensation changes for the worse for the worse (knock on wood has never happened) or my stock isn't performing then I deal with it then.
I value options from every company that gave me them at zero and 2/2 I was right. Hell they had negative value at one since I exercised and I really think I will be lucky if I even get that money back. Getting crammed at every financing event sucks. Live and learn I guess.
As in, maybe there's another workstation to the right of the chair positioned in symmetry (open to the left and shelf to the right).
The chair by the window looks like belonging to the hallway in front of the pictured workstation.
Just speculating though.
You mentioned FreeBSD; what are your thoughts on the state of DTrace on Linux vs FreeBSD?
ps: I love your DTrace book! It's sitting on my desk now.
Thanks for getting the book! DTrace is invaluable for solving a set of needs, and we're using it on our FreeBSD CDN. Over time, Linux has been adding capabilities that can solve the same set of needs, although using different technologies.
Right now, the Linux kernel (4.9+) can do the same things as DTrace, but the interface we're using (bcc/BPF) is currently 10+ times more verbose and much more difficult to use. Who does that hurt the most? At Netflix, me, as it's my job to add advanced observability to our analysis GUIs, and actually write the bcc/BPF.
So far I've given conference talks on bcc/BPF at Performance@Scale, USENIX LISA, linux.conf.au, BSidesSF, and SCALE. Next is Velocity Conf.
Love your work on DTrace.
Have you seen / configured a system that keep the FTRACE/DTRACE log data in memory during a crash/ reboot cycle for postmortem kernel crash type analysis?
If so, love the see any reference to how to setup something like that for typical x86 Linux.
Did that long time (10+years) ago on MIPS+vxwork/Linux with someother trace log type system. Miss that capability.....
Thanks
The cricket ball on the desk then helped, with the "G'day" on the front page of his site proving it. :)
Why does a corporate company need to invent some ridiculous "culture" is beyond me. You pay me I do work, thats all the culture I need.
>>Then while working here, staff cite the culture deck in meetings for decision making advice.
These meetings sound like fun.
What is wrong with these people.
Wouldn't the "nasty game" be to hire them then fire them after a few weeks because they don't bring the level of intrinsic motivation that the environment requires?
Or are you saying that no employer should be able to demand this level of motivation, even if they're totally up-front about it?
Companies have culture, but it's learned through word of mouth or trial and error. Writing it down and sharing it in public before you join the company is really beneficial.
Page 61 says dishonesty and harassment are intolerable.
Neither nor the company have any illusions this is anything other than business relationship: I make code I get money, done.
I don't want to fail because I need to drag dead weight around.
I try to be equally clear when I'm hiring. I make it clear to the candidates that this is not a place for individualism, not a place for innovation, not a place for cutting edge tech. We are heavily team oriented, process oriented, CRUD application maintaining, older stable tech platforms with interchangable teams. I want to make that clear, not because I want to "horrify" candidates (though no doubt many on HN are horrified) but so that people who want the exciting startup lifestyle aren't bamboozled by some swarmy HR position description that tries to sell something that isn't.
I respect that Netflix is willing to step up and make their expectations clear as well!
Thanks for making this stuff clear. While it's disappointing to me that so much of the field has gone down this kind of path, it's good to know up front.
I apologize for not expanding my view with a detailed analysis, but damn.
The update you guys promoted like half a year in advance made it even worse.
There is a probably a bimodal distribution on happiness, but they only optimize for the bigger curve instead of both, to reduce complexity. So while you, and an advanced user, might want a lot of advanced features, those same features scare away the majority of casual users. So it's a business decision to cater to the majority at the expense of the minority to reduce overall development cost.
The most annoying thing maybe is that I can't hide stuff from the lists. Like when I watch 2 minutes of something and decides that I will never ever watch that crap again - that piece of crap will forever haunt my interface.
After a while I started to think maybe they aren't optimizing for what we might expect.
By providing a UI that makes it slightly harder to find shows, displays as few shows at a time as possible and one that lures you into watching whatever is on the screen at the moment (even if just for a minute) they are effectively increasing the value of each piece of content and increasing the odds that you will watch whatever is on the screen while at the same time decreasing the odds that you will fall into choice paralysis.
This also might make it seem like they have more new/relevant content than they really do.
I'm not really well versed in this area, but I'd love to see an analysis of this hypothesis by someone who is more competent in this kind of design.
Was in the car with my fitness obsessed gf, she'd never heard of pizza rolls. I said "Tontinos pizza rolls" near the device (potentially googled it but I doubt it) on her iPhone 6. Hulu from the device when we got back from car ride. First advert, Tontinos...
Despicable.
It's a pretty awesome feature.