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Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

Reed is taking that into account. Reed and Netflix have been creating software for many years. They certainly have had "Rockstars" who could bust out functional but unmaintainable code. Those people are not valuable to Netflix because Netflix is looking for long term success.

A 100x engineer exists in the context of a global company like Netflix. Because if a developer makes something just 1% better that translates into millions of dollars of savings or increased revenue because on the margins just 0.001% increase of new subscribers is thousands of customers.

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Netflix doesn't win or lose customers based on programmer performance, they win by having content that people actually want to watch. I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch.

The only reason I've ever considered dropping Netflix is "why am I paying for this when there is nothing I want to watch". Fortunately, they have come through with some interesting content recently, and I'm still paying them. But give it a month or two with nothing I want to watch, and I'm pulling that plug, and no amount of 100x programmers will be able to keep me as a customer.

Ditto. I do wonder what 100x developers get them. I don't know if Amazon Prime or Disney+ have 100x developers, but their streaming experience is similar to Netflix. Maybe Netflix is 5-10% faster. I can't say.

The point is, with a service like Netflix, it's absolutely the content that matters. People happily watch pirated cam copies of movies because they want the content so much.

Then again, the salaries of 10x developers are a lot lower than 10x creators (directors, showrunners, actors, etc)

> I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch.

It's not a coincidence that they happen to have stuff that you want to watch. You're aware Netflix also applies data insights to decide what to make?

>You're aware Netflix also applies data insights to decide what to make?

Of course I give something thumbs up or down depending on if I liked it - why would you assume I don't know what they do with that?

But they've still made some barely watchable crap, too, in spite of themselves, so I do have to question if rating things even matters.

The thumbs up/down is just one signal among many. They know in aggregate what people watch, how much of a movie/episode they watched, the kinds of devices they watched on, how much binging/pausing they did, when and where they watched it...

> they've still made some barely watchable crap, too

To you. That crap was undoubtedly entertaining to someone. Not to mention a 100% hit rate is nearly impossible in the creative biz.

https://old.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/cj4rrp/was_another_l...

Netflix's "Another Life" was so bad that people wonder if it was made bad on purpose. It was absolutely awful, and anyone that thinks it was good loses any credibility about what's good or bad sci-fi.

And I've been developing webpages for many decades, and even worked quite a long time at a precursor to what Netflix is today - yes, an online movie streaming service. So please don't talk down to me like I don't know what any of this is about. You're seriously wasting your time explaining any of that to me.

I didn't intend to "talk down" to you, sorry if it came off that way. I just didn't agree with your original statement that programmers' performance has little/nothing to do with why people use Netflix. I still think you're completely wrong about that.

> I've been developing webpages for many decades

It can't have been that many decades, the WWW has only existed for 3 decades.[1] Even I've written at least one webpage in every single one of those decades. :-P

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web#History

"When I look for a streaming video service, I want to make sure their programmers are the best. The content isn't as important as the user interface or the algorithms that tell me what to watch."

Do you realize how absurd that sounds? Content is King. If Netflix had crap content, it wouldn't matter how good their programmers are, because the content would still be crap. I can tell you from experience that if Netflix ever folded, their contracts with studios would be worth 100x more than whatever code they developed is worth.

> I've been developing webpages for many decades

>>It can't have been that many decades,

The "WWW" was created in August 1991, and I was on it in 1992, so yeah, practically 3 decades. I was wishing for Javascript in a web browser years before it ever existed, back when I was using lynx to browse the web. And I was coding long before that. Yeah, I'm old. I've been around. I don't need you explaining anything to me.

> Content is King. If Netflix had crap content, it wouldn't matter how good their programmers are

I don't think I ever once said "content doesn't matter". If they only had dynamite content and a shitty user experience people would simply pirate the content and not pay for it.

> Yeah, I'm old. I've been around. I don't need you explaining anything to me.

I try every day to not become like that.

>If they only had dynamite content and a shitty user experience people would simply pirate the content and not pay for it.

Most people have no clue how to pirate anything. Out of 100 people in your life, including all your relatives, honestly, how many of them are willing and capable of pirating content? If you think it's over 25% you will have me ROFLOL. And all of those people will be just fine with a less flashy UI than Netflix has to watch content they want to watch. I mean, they've been using cable boxes for years and those absolutely SUCK for finding content - but they still watched, because there is content they want to watch, or not, so they don't watch.

You're really making some very weak arguments.

> If you think it's over 25% you will have me ROFLOL.

Laugh it up then: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/17/18412159/game-of-thrones-...

Even if you're right, you're admitting a good UX gets at least 25% of the people to pay money instead of pirating.

That link doesn't support anything you're arguing about. Why continue this when you're just flailing around making ridiculous claims. People like you are why I left reddit.

Netflix programmers can help you find what you want to watch. All the content in the world won't help them if you spend your time staring at the home screen while bad algorithms recommend the wrong things.

Not true at all, because in spite of all their content, and being able to find it, they still don't have anything new that I want to watch. I've already seen everything I wanted to watch. Now I debate leaving them because there is no new content. And after all "Content is King".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/21/why-con...

>All the content in the world won't help them if you spend your time staring at the home screen while bad algorithms recommend the wrong things.

Their algorithms only optimize for the least profitable use case. It doesn't matter what the algorithm wants to suggest if they don't have the content I want to watch, or I've already watched anything worth watching.

Know what their algorithm suggests to me now? Sci-fi in foreign languages that I'm just not interested in because of its low production value and bad writing. But it's all they have left to suggest to me. That and everything I've already watched.

"Content is King".

> All the content in the world won't help them if you spend your time staring at the home screen while bad algorithms recommend the wrong things.

What? I can read about quality shows to watch on any number of websites or recommendations from people I know, and just search for the title of the show.

On the other hand, if you fill up your inventory with 99% garbage, like Netflix has, it doesn’t matter how good your algorithm is, since it’s going to come back with garbage.

I don’t notice any performance difference between HBO Max, Apple TV+, Netflix, or Amazon Prime. I press play, and it plays. What I do notice is most of the content is garbage, so I just wait to hear about good shows, and then once a sufficient number of people claim it’s worth watching, I go and play specifically that.

I'm perpetually frustrated with nf's UI, and tend to rag on them a bit. But then, my partner got subscriptions to other services. Disney, crave, amazon, showtime... holy shit is it actually difficult to remember what I've watched and take me to the next episode? I'll still crab about nf, but the competition is hot garbage.

I wish everyone would just license and retheme Kodi or Plex and be done with it.

Just in case: Netflix is 15% of the Internet traffic world-wide and about 1/3 of the traffic in the US (these figures can be a bit obsolete). So the engineering challenges I'd imagine are not so much about UI and recommendation engine as it is about pushing bytes efficiently.

Latter should be serious problem but Netflix improves both.

The guys doing money printing machine control software must be 100'000x engineers.

The starts at Netflix are the procurement people that ensnare good movies while drinking fine wine on Manhattan or whatever. I would not say it is an engineering company like say, IBM or Oracle.

>A 100x engineer exists in the context of a global company like Netflix. Because if a developer makes something just 1% better that translates into millions of dollars of savings or increased revenue because on the margins just 0.001% increase of new subscribers is thousands of customers.

This dumb developer multiplier has really taken on a whole bunch of different convenient meanings.

The original idea had absolutely nothing to do with company success. It's not even useful now and it was questionable before.

> Because if a developer makes something just 1% better that translates into millions of dollars of savings or increased revenue because on the margins just 0.001% increase of new subscribers is thousands of customers.

Generally, the idea of an Nx programmer is comparing programmers on their output, not their outcomes.

Otherwise you go from trying to compare levels of skill to levels of luck.

Yeah, you can do terrible programming work on an extremely popular product, or do good programming work on a product that nobody wants or cares about. And no one is 100% correct about what customers want 100% of the time.

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