It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix.
Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.
I do think there is some temporal logic already present in Google’s algorithm which wasn’t part of the challenge.
[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/5-things-to-know-abou...
Where the CDN boxes go, you can't always just throw more hardware. There's a limited amount of space, it's not controlled by Netflix, and other people want to throw hardware into that same space. Pushing 800gbps in the same amount of space that others do 80gbps (or less) is a big deal.
Most companies maintain internal calculations of these sorts of things, and make rational decisions.
When you say that companies maintain internal calculations of the benefits, would you say that it’s (extremely roughly) something like: $10M benefit, need 5 core engineers + benefits + PM + testing lab etc etc -> we can spend up to $500k per eng give or take.
Or is the $10M one number (that would be held somewhat secretly internally at the company) and the salaries mostly represents where the market is? Does the (salary) market take into account the down-the-line $10M value?
Basically, could those engs negotiate to be paid more, or are they already sort of paid close to exactly what the group they’re part of generates in terms of revenue?
Thanks!
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I see that you said $10M per person, not for the “network optimization group”. Hmm. So it would be fair to say that the engs are definitely not paid according to the value they generate..? I wouldn’t be surprised by that but just to confirm.
In terms of negotiation, it really depends on how differentiated your skills are. Short answer is that if you can convince management that it would be difficult to find other engineers who could deliver the optimizations you're delivering, yes, you have leverage.
Very highly skilled engineers in specific niches can basically price themselves like monopolists, because the company can easily figure out how much money they are leaving on the table by not hiring them. This is not like "feature work" engineers, whose value is very nebulous and unknown.
Secondly, yes $10M per employee of revenue or cash flow is pretty reasonable for similar companies. The prioritization is NOT “how many employees per $MM.” The allocation is “what opportunity is the highest $MM return per available employee.”
Is that all of Disney or just Disney+?
It doesn't seem like that would be a useful statistic if that includes completely unrelated positions (e.g. does that 20x statistic include Disney employees working at Disney Land/World serving up hotdogs? Because they probably don't contribute much to the streaming service)
Walmart's market cap per employee is probably much, much lower than Disney or Netflix, too. That doesn't mean Walmart is doing anything wrong.
I've done a lot of video processing professionally (the server side stuff, exactly what Netflix does) and Netflix is by far the worst of all the streaming providers. They absolutely sacrifice the quality of the video to save bandwidth costs in aggregate and it shows (or more accurately it doesn't show, all the fidelity is lost).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...