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Comment by drieddust | Hacker News Reader

Professional players gets paid millions for a few years and then ends up into retirement. For analogy to work Netfix should pay that well.

Seems they were bonkers from the start. Why they thought competition will not catch up with them? What is their business moat?

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Pretty sure the early employees did make millions from stock grants and Netflix was always known for high salaries. $250K - $500K a year not unheard of.

> $250K - $500K a year not unheard of.

More like $500k minimum. Netflix mostly hires senior engineers – until recently it was only seniors – and those seniors make over $500k.

So they might be paying 2x-3x. Does that justify professional player analogy?

Yes Netflix does pay top of market. But they pay in cash - not RSUs. Recently from what I heard, they give employees the option of cash and RSUs.

BTW, $250K - $500K is about average for BigTech developers.

They pay with cash and options, not RSUs options that are fully vested and granted monthly at 40% value.

Given the current state of the stock market, it's even better.

Professional footballers can make that in a week.

Which footballers are making $26M a year? Only the best of the best.

Doesn't Netflix pay very well relative to the field?

Yes, they pay top 1% and (according to them, but not disputed by anyone who actually works there that I've seen) they reassess every year and adjust according, to stay in the top 1%. Furthermore it's almost all cash, very minimal stock, so no huge unintentional pay cuts like basically every other large tech company that can only pay the way they do by giving out generous stock grants.

Yeah, that was exactly my impression. Sounds consistent with their sports star analogy.

Median pay in the MLB is just over $1m. [0] Median pay for a Netflix senior software engineer is $500k. [1] Doesn't really seem that different to me.

[0] https://en.as.com/en/2021/10/08/mlb/1633685987_178363.html

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Netflix/salaries/Software-Eng...

Professional players lose the ability to play at that level after a few years. Programmers can usually find another job after staying a few years at Netflix.

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