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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

Are they still proud of high turn-over rate and the "culture of fear"?

What makes you think the Netflix turnover rate is high?

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.

Thanks for replying. Those of us on the outside only have sensationalized news articles to go by, and journalists love to push the "Cutthroat Netflix Culture" narrative.

Those stories get clicks and sell ads, but they aren't really true.

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.

Our TPM worked at Netflix for 2 years and she said that she personally saw about 20 people let go during her time.

I could understand this if interviews were broken (in a different way) at Netflix - is this the case? i.e. is it ridiculously easy to get a job there?

There are plenty of highly capable people who are quite unproductive once settled in to a job.

I wouldn't say it's easy to get a job here. I've been working here for nearly 2 years now.

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.

> They want good engineers to solve challenging problems.

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.

You could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)...

>Is there much left?

You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.

Supplying sufficient video to be responsible for 25% of consumer internet bandwidth is a different story.

Can you be more specific? Do you mean producing their original content? Or rendering renditions for each bitrate, and then pushing those renditions out to their custom CDN appliances? (OpenConnect)

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.

Total content is likely closer to 100 PB. The "25% of consumer bandwidth" is a proxy for how heavily Netflix is used.

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.

Akamai can do that for you just fine.

Apparently, Akamai does about 30 Terabits/s[0]. Netflix does "tens of terabits per second"[1].

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-...

I just read through the OP's other post about PMCs, and I would beg to differ: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-04/the-pmcs-of-ec2....

I work on "serving bits". It is not quite a simple as it sounds at our scale. I've specifically worked on optimizing our FreeBSD kernel, along with several other engineers on my team. We're at point where we can serve over 90Gb/s of TLS encrypted traffic (many tens of thousands of TCP streams) from a single-socket 16 core Xeon, without any crypto offloads.

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.

Definitely appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment. Netflix makes it look easy, so from my outside perspective, its easy to dismiss the problems as "solved".

This is such a naive, ignorant statement that no wonder you would never get a job at Netflix.

> Serve bits. Suggest movies based on coarse signals. Is there much left?

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.

Don't forget that "turnover" includes people who aren't engineers, as well.

I think part of it depends on what you call "personally saw". I've been here 4 years, and I can name a lot of people that were let go. But it's a biggish company and there are just lots of people you know "of" without really working with that closely. In Silicon Valley 4 years is about how long it usually takes for complete turnover at a company, when you look around and there's nobody left that was there when you started. It's nothing like that for me, though, I'd say about half the people I interact with typically have been around about as long or longer than I have.

A colleague already commented, but I too haven't personally experienced a high turn-over rate or a culture of fear. The culture is really great. On my team we're mostly the same as we were when I joined 3 years ago. We've added a few, and lost one. There is a turn-over rate, but what does one mean by high?

By "culture of fear," do you mean the way they stated their willingness to let anyone go if doing so better meets the company's needs than retaining them? That's just what all large companies do; they're just making it explicit.

As humans we do all sorts of things that it would be monstrous to state as explicit policy. Be careful with this justification.

Is it more monstrous do do a bad thing then lie about it or to do a bad thing and own up to it, including the criticism?

Can we even say firing slackers is bad?

Lying and full transparency are rarely your only options.

Nope: some companies, such as Chase, have programs to retain employees and find them other roles within the company when there are layoffs. Chase specifically gives their employees 6 months notice before eliminating the position to give people time to move around.

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.

those programs are just a justification to fire people more easily most of the time. Have you got a different first hand experience in the company that you mentioned?

Do you know that or are you just being cynical?

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.

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