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Comment by tolbish | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why Netflix frequently gets mentioned in the same context as Apple, Google, and Amazon. I think I hear more about it than Microsoft on here. Can anyone explain this to me? Surely they aren't the only newish company that tries to employ smart people by paying well.

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When Cramer coined the FAANG acronym, Netflix was included. That group of companies was grouped together by investors due to their performance and marked dominance at the time, which has by and large continued.

In addition to their stock price, these companies also pay very well. In fact, if you are lucky to get an offer from Netflix, their aim is to pay you and keep you at "top of personal market". That is, they do not believe anyone will pay you more in total comp. Netflix does mostly, if not all, base salary as opposed to equity grants.

From all my friend in FAANG, this has seemed to be true, Netflix employees make more than anyone else I know in tech.

You can choose how much of your comp to take in equity, if you work in countries where that is allowed (most of them.)

We pay enough that your compensation is not a reason you want to leave (or stay — we don’t pay more than the best you could possibly get elsewhere.) because our philosophy on compensation is such, it has a few ripple effects - there aren’t limited budgets for raises, instead we ask for each person did the market move for your role, or did you substantially change roles? This avoids the common shenanigans / pitfalls of comp elsewhere.

I personally believe that our early move to the cloud, early adoption of micro services and our open source contributions also help our “tech brand”.

It’s the best place I have worked.

You mean Netflix here that's interesting and more tax efficient.

How is this structured in the UK where US companies have difficulty offering tax efficient employee share schemes.

Not looking for a Search Director are you :-) my senior band 7-6 opportunity with the uk civl service seems to have disappeared with covid.

Plus, FAAG may not be the best acronym.

I prefer FAGMAN.

It’s unfortunate, but this is useful in that it’s easier to pronounce than any other alternative. I guess MANFAG is just as good and saves the spice for the end.

I think that is really a myth(highest pay). I know that bytedance pays more than netflix(stock + cash), also hedge funds, citadel and DE Shaw pay way more than netflix does. 500k-700k all cash, I just chatted with their recruiters the past month and this is what they saying comp packages for senior+ engineers go for.

Netflix median engineer comp is about $500k, if I recall correctly. They can go significantly higher. It's really not a myth that they'll typically beat out the rest of FAANG.

Trading firms can beat Netflix, but the variance in pay is much higher and in my experience they tend to be more selective (and there are fewer roles available). I wouldn't say the typical engineer at DE Shaw is earning "way more" than the typical engineer at Netflix.

Source: I have friends at Netflix, Citadel and DE Shaw, including a director at Netflix and a VP at DESCO.

Pay per hour is less at hedge funds and/or income is more volatile. Plus I would put a hefty quality of life premium for being able to live on the west coast over being stuck in NYC/Chicago.

Agree, any of the companies I mentioned I would never work at. Bytedance does 996, 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. Netflix has a keep looking over your back attitude which to me seems super toxic(have had 3 friends work there, and all three would not recommend it). Lastly hedge funds require work in places I would never live at: NYC, CHI, etc and have a cut throat culture that to me is not worth the positives(salary).

I have not had much volatility when working at a hedge fund, or even finance more generally. It might be different in a pure front office role where your bonus pool is directly tied to the profit you generate, but being in a tech role, you can generally expect to get what you got last year, plus a little (for varying values of little) more than you got last year. At worst my comp stagnated during the financial crisis.

Hours can vary widely between teams/projects but I generally don't have an issue with the hours- like all companies we have our crunch times, but the general day to day is pretty much 9-6.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. But I always thought Netflix's scope was relatively narrow compared to the others mentioned above.

Sure a skilled software developer with an interest in networks or media platforms would have no trouble finding a job there. But what about other types of engineers like product, kernel, and embedded engineers? The companies I mentioned have divisions like Oculus, Alexa, and Chromebooks for those engineers. The comparison to Netflix in areas like those is where my confusion comes from.

For employment purposes it's because they pay in the same league. There aren't that many companies that are both recognizable names and high paying with more than a few dozen engineering jobs.

Netflix's development scale seems to be legitimately massive considering their reach across platforms, scale, customers and etc.

At a larger scale than Microsoft though?

Seems unlikely, but I'm not sure why MS is being compared.

For some context of scale: Netflix is between 12-19% of all internet bandwidth

Probably because of FANG association. FANG = Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google

I find it strange that Netflix is associated with them considering the breadth of subdivisions and acquisitions that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have.

Netflix pays exceptionally well, even in that group of companies.

FANG was originally a Jim Cramer thing [0, 1] about very high-growth tech stocks that somehow evolved into being about the big, high paying tech companies. The original didn't even have Apple but people started using FAANG to include it.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100436754

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fang-stocks-fb-amzn.asp

Fun fact: if you have listened to Cramer and invested $10K in each of these stocks on 02/06/2013 you would be at $441K right now (+1011%)

It's really FAAMG.

Isn't there another "A" in there for "Apple"?

Arguably you could include a third for alibaba

FANG was just a term coined by Jim Cramer for high growth tech stocks. Apple wasn't included at that point. People have re-purposed it to mean big tech companies that pay a lot and modified the acronym.

And the acronym is less pleasant if you leave out the "N".

Very likely Netflix is in your investment portfolio, even if you've handed control over to a mutual fund.

It's probably because they are a 200B+ company

While high, nearly an order of magnitude lower than all the others in FAANG. Microsoft is a 1.5T+ company yet remains excluded. Imo, FAANG means 'sexy millenial tech company with a gigantic retail investment interest' moreso than anything about the size and significance of the actual companies.

Nowadays, FAANG includes Microsoft, it's just the M doesn't fit into the acronym as nicely. As far as I understand, it's a high profit margin, high paying, high growth business with the ability to scale at extremely low marginal costs and collect lots of rent, hence lots of upside.

They have a more active social campaign or are including HN in that campaign?

Very little on social media is organic if it pertains to a large corporation.

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