WFH naturally allows more flex into your real life. This will not vibe well with Netflix's culture IMO.
One week he might work 60 hours and the next he might work 20. But he is the best developer in my group of friends. And he makes in a year what I make in 10.
Question about your last statement (I may need this clarification because English is not my first language). The statement might mean that he makes 10x more money than you, or that his output is 10x greater than yours (or both!). Based on the context of your reply, I think it means his output is 10x greater than yours. Is that correct?
Now, if they opted into the ESPP and stock options programs with a $1M TC, remember NFLX has 5-6X'd in the last 3 years. Someone who allocated a lot of their TC towards equity could easily be making $3M/yr today.
Unless they're counting stock gains. In which case that could easily be a SWE. Netflix lets you choose your stock/cash ratio in your comp, and if you went stock heavy you could be at $3M a year if you've been there a while.
I don't get how people in SV can make this much and not be financially set after a few years of working.
That house will cost $2M at least if you want to be near the office, which means, assuming you can collect the $400,000 down payment, will leave with a mortgage/tax/insurance payment of about $9,000 a month, or $108,000 a year. The tax man will also take about 1/2 of your earnings.
That leaves you with less than $200,000 a year. You'll spend probably at least $50,000 on food, clothes, activities, etc for the kids and yourself.
So now you're saving $150,000 a year, if you're super frugal.
Let's assume you're ok with retiring out of the Bay Area. You'll still need a couple million to retire on. At that rate, it will still take you decade to do it.
All that being said, I have a friend who did exactly that. He worked as a senior/principal engineer for about a decade, was single the whole time, lived super frugal, and retired back to Kansas. I hear he just sits at home working on open source, going to the bars every night.
My firstborn however, now that went a bit too far.
The stock program was based on options you purchased with a strike price 2x the current price. You could direct between 0-100% of your salary to it.
If you can wait it’s a great way to make a lot of money.
Unless they changed it, the option price was 40% of the strike and the strike was the current price on purchase day, which was monthly. Gave a nice dollar cost average. But you could only put in up to 50% of your salary, plus you got an automatic 5% of your salary put into the stock program.
When I worked there the price was 20% of the strike and you could do 100% of your salary. I had friends who did 100% of their salary, which are now worth tens of millions.
Not sure where you heard that, but it's not true. There is no such thing as a "performance cycle" at Netflix. Performance is evaluated continuously by your manager. There is a once a year process where anyone can give feedback to anyone else, and it's expected that your manager give you feedback, but nothing in that feedback should be a surprise.
1. https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Unlik...
> All I'd say is; Netflix have a pretty extreme culture[1]
> 1. https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
> You question actions inconsistent with our values
> You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
> You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews: our first promotion case in 2 years is the colleague who performatively did no work for months while the manager was out, bullied me for continuing to schedule and work with our partner teams, and encouraged another co-worker to have a meltdown about it that cost them significantly.
I don't get it. What's the larger cause here? Netflix is not doing anything special for the society. If you talk about engineering, they certainly have an excellent engineering culture, but I don't think they're implicitly more talented than many other companies.
I actually see it (but obviously, it's my opionion) as a very skilfull marketing targeted at outstanding but naive engineers (that is, people who sacrifice their work/life balance for the company). In a cynical way, it's like the nigerian scam, but oriented at intelligent people.
> Most of my last week was spent trying to avoid fallout from our team's massively skewed performance reviews
A company like Alphabet is more than 10x the size of Netflix. Politics and inefficiency is pretty much inevitable at those magnitudes.
If we took a random sample of Netflix engineers and compared them to a company with weak engineering cultures, like Blockbuster, I’m sure we could agree that Netflix engineers are more talented.
Netflix is often where the best of the best aspire to be even if they have already done rotations at FB/Google.
At least in my field (infrastructure, big data, etc) this mostly holds true.
Delivering high-quality entertainment people enjoy watching, and doing it in a way that "just works?"
I don't know if that's the larger cause as they pitch it to engineers but as a Netflix subscriber, it sure seems like they care a lot about that cause; and as a cinephile I think it's definitely doing something special for society. Not unique, but special: these production-and-streaming companies are revolutionizing film art, and happen to also employ a lot of my friends.
But... I probably wouldn't work there as a techie.
Until a short time ago, you couldn't even directly remove entries from the "Continue watching" row, unless you used the sledgehammer approach of marking a series as never watched (which, conceptually, doesn't make sense - I may want to stop watching a movie, but still retain the information that I've watched it).
Row categories don't have a fixed position; sometimes I have to scroll to find the "Continue Watching".
It's impossible to remove movies/series already seen from the interface. Not only that, but the interface has a row with movies already watched.
There's no management concept, I mean, even very basic functionality (the only concept is starring).
Searching movies requires navigating through undesirable entries (in particular, already watched ones), rather than helping the user finding new content.
This is a intentional design, and a clever one. However, it's shoved-in-the-throat fast-food rather than slow food. It's not random that they've introduced the speedup functionality. I believe that Netflix is meaningful to society as much as McDonald is; it's fast and cheap, but I wouldn't classify this as a benefit to the food culture.
Even if all the above was false, the movies catalogue is relatively small. I can tolerate the above (although I don't, really), but as a cinema lover, I need a very large catalogue.
I admit that the culture was daunting, and even after going through an L5 -> L6 promo at Google, I was worried about not being able to cut it at Netflix. I was very nervous about this the first year, until the first performance cycle, after which time nobody I knew had been let go. There is honestly much less turn over around me than at Google, for example. To me, this means most people are pretty happy here.
I'm not aware of any stack ranking. If there was, then 95% of my group must have been above average for the last 5 years since almost nobody has been let go. To be clear, yes, people in my group have been let go. However, I was seldom surprised when somebody was let go.
I ask because I can’t remember the last bug, visual artifact, or non-intuitive UI design from anything Netflix related, even in my awful Roku TV. What I don’t understand is how it’s possible for management to exist that understands how much of an achievement that is, and how much man time that takes (assuming here).
If only you had said "never" ...
Most companies have a set of values. Some, like Amazon, actively encourage questioning things that go against those values. In my company, we haven't as deeply enshrined the notion of questioning things that go against the claimed company values. As a result, no one cares for the values, and people tend to ignore any org/department leader espousing any value (company or otherwise). The common refrain is "That's just talk, and few follow it." A company where you can actively question people's actions when they are inconsistent with the claimed values would be quite refreshing.
> You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than what is best for yourself or your group
First, to clarify different interpretations: They're likely saying to avoid decisions that will benefit you/your team/your department at the expense of the company as a whole. If that's the case, I understand the sentiment, and most companies claim the same. Mine definitely does. However, again, it's rarely practiced and the company is full of folks who do things to benefit themselves while hurting their team/department/company. If Netflix's culture solves this, then this is great! In any case, even if they fail at this, the statement is in line with most companies.
> You accomplish amazing amounts of important work
Well, a lot of companies want that. Probably few actually follow through like Netflix. I agree I probably wouldn't want to work there because of this, but I also don't think there is anything wrong with it. They're up front about it, pay a lot, and from what I hear they pay generous severance pay - the idea being that you're getting fired is not meant to be a statement about your abilities.
If you have to conform to it, but can't contribute to it, question it or change it, it's a cult.
that naturally results in what i anecdotally heard - anytime some corporate BS (which basically means anything not helping delivery as delivery is the most important thing at Netflix - again according to what i heard) is being pushed onto the employees there, the employees upon quickly mentally weighting "rejecting the BS vs. suffering performance hit and failing the delivery and loosing the half-million (or frequently even more) cash comp as the result" forcefully and successfully reject the BS most of the times :)
And those caveats are that (a) you have a substantial and enforced amount of employee empowerment (ability to push back on poor tasking from above) & (b) you have an incredibly objective and ungameable performance evaluation system.
If you're going to all in on measuring people by performance, then you'd better be really good at actually measuring performance (and preventing managers from influencing measurements).
That's not employee empowerment, that's an employee incentive. To the extent that the person doing the tasking remains a the company and the IC doesn't when this happens, that's not empowerment.
Empowerment is an ICs ability to effect change, not whether they're sufficiently motivated to.