Surely you have some selection bias in your Netflix-employed acquaintances. I would imagine their average/median salary is lower than that.
Or am I reading too much into the quotations? I'm honestly just interested in hearing more about what the culture at Netflix is like.
https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
It's not just marketing fluff. It really does a good job of reflecting what it's like to work there, and is taken seriously by everyone from the top down.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's not a competitive environment, and I've experience very little politics and drama. Those things are explicitly counter to the culture.
As for long hours, while the work day can be pretty intense, the office is usually empty by 5-6pm.
Hope that helps.
(because the bus to San Francisco leaves at 4:30pm)
At what point do you tell your employees that they live in the wrong city? Sacramento?
Do you have any kind of remote working allowance? Or are you expected to be in office all the time?
"Today, Netflix offers unlimited vacation time, high salaries. This company doesn't care how long you're in the office, but they do care about what you produce. And you have to produce. Here's another slide. We are a team, not a family. We are a pro sports team, not a kids recreational team.
Netflix fires people, even hard-working people.
HENN: How many people have you moved on?
MCCORD: Oh, hundreds.
HENN: I talked to a lot of former employees were OK with this deal. I mean, after all, Netflix pays well. But some talked about a culture of fear - always been worried about being fired. Patty says the company's culture is a big reason for its success. She says it keeps Netflix lean and nimble."
Top Tier in the sense that they have very good technical skills, paired with the right attitude for Netflix’s culture. I haven’t them be unreasonable for the standards they set but they want the very best and want you to work hard everyday. The difference is they don’t seem to stockpile talent, they cut when someone doesn’t meet that bar and have paid them incredibly well till that point.
I would suspect and hope that, given such high salaries, their retain-or-fire decision is more sophisticated than that.
I think that software engineering productivity is a fairly difficult thing to measure quantitatively. Any simple objective quantitative measure (like hours spent working, lines of code contributed, or tickets resolved) is bound to be too naive.
Software engineering seems like one of those things where it’s easy to subjectively identify very good and very poor performers, but difficult to draw a hard line or even compare two similarly productive programmers.
Netflix is known for a few things: They pay really well. They don't tolerate drops in performance. The two go hand in hand (they're open about it). And as someone else mentioned, they encourage their employees to interview elsewhere, and they make it their goal to try to match any higher offer the employee gets.
I think their culture is the type that self-selects. People who don't want the stress of being a top performer all the time tend not to apply, or leave very quickly.