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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

> If it is, I'm leaving my FAANG role for Netflix - it's very refreshing to hear people might be motivated by larger causes.

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.

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“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.”

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.

But we aren't comparing them to a random company, we are comparing them to the rest of FAANG. Do they have a much stronger engineering culture than Google/etc?

Pound for pound I would probably say yes.

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.

> What's the larger cause here?

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.

I strongly disagree. It doesn't "just work"; it has a very specific target, for whom I don't doubt it works, but it costs a lot to the rest.

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.

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