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Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.

In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.

Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.

After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.

And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.

Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.

Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.

I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.

Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.

Any other google news alerts you have running?

In a sense, Wall St. is creating "economic activity" in the hope of future growth and rewards which ends up benefiting common man with digital abundance. Whether Govt does it directly or indirectly in a top down manner, the end result is the same. This is like building digital roads.

Stock market was one of worse inventions of humanity...

> They offered me a job years ago but on the stipulation that I (and everyone else) worked out of their Los Gatos office.

Netflix has a major office in Los Angeles, and it has software engineering staff. I'm aware of at least a couple others. So it's most definitely not "everyone".

I would imagine if you're working on their core tech, they would want you in HQ though.

> As far as I've ever heard they never do RSUs

The CEO of Netflix has gone on record as saying that they pay their employees a high salary so they can invest in what they believe in. If that's Netflix, they're more than welcome to do so.

It's up to you to read into the intentions there or decide the truthiness, but that's the official stance.

> I knew Los Gatos was well known for being an incredibly wealthy zip code but I had no idea it was pretty much the #1 most expensive city in the USA.

How is Los Gatos remotely the #1 most expensive city in the USA? Even just in the Bay Area, there are many pricier places (Atherton, Woodside, Portola Valley, Palo Alto, ). Then there's Beverly Hills, many other parts of LA, NYC, Hamptons, Cape Cod, etc.

Regardless, Los Gatos pretty close to much less-expensive areas, including areas like San Jose, which have lots of dense housing. These areas are pricier than most of America, but they're among the more affordable parts of the Peninsula/South Bay.

Possible they mixed up Los Gatos and Los Altos? Los Altos is much wealthier.

True, especially Los Altos Hills. But how do you research the wrong city when you’re house hunting? Wouldn’t you be checking distances to the office and realize that everything is 25 mins away, on the freeway?

Even Los Gatos gets relatively affordable up in the hills.

> “Netflix is such an interesting company.”

An often forgotten fact is that Netflix started Roku as a product & spun it off.

Seems all true to me. Apart from being I did not find Netflix projects gem. In my usage and looking at their code, they seem like overwrought Java enterprise projects. The place I work they are slowly replacing Netflix OSS with other products.

Its no surprise that Netflix lately moving to Spring Boot framework for all their Java based services. This is preferred choice for typical, run-of-the-mill enterprise projects.

My resume has the (dis)pleasure of converting all of Netflixes OSS projects to run in containers. JVM or not. I have golang services that run at 80Mb, I have rust services that run at 20Mb. Every JVM service? I have to literally define its memory consumption with command line flags (-jvmx? I forget, its my weekend) on each deployment. Running JVMs in k8s is hilarious. I'm not grey beard Linux level yet (soon) but my god. It's hilarious how poorly they perform.

Agree. I maybe wrong but I think it was Netflix first which normalized generating one web service call generating 1MB worth of logs. In our place finance is kind of whopping ass of teams which are generating extensive logging and monitoring as Splunk cost goes through roof.

everyone's weekend at the same time you realise

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend#History

Almost, but not quite.

(I'm linking the "history" section because it has a nice map. There is a table further down.)

I'm reading this on Monday :)

You never know. Some countries have work week starting on Sunday

Spinnaker

It amazes me, that Netflix is capable of such top of the line engineering things (really mindblowing stuff, one machine that streams nearly 1 Terabit pers second), but is for the love of god unable to stream HD Content to my iPhone (newest firmware, all up2date). Tried everything gigabit wifi, cellular, multiple ISPs ...

It is better for me to pirate their content, play it with Plex and be happy. I pay for Netflix, but still have to download it, to see it an acceptable quality. Absurd. The support couldn‘t help. It doesn’t affect me, because I have my Torrent/Plex Setup, but for 99.9% of people it is a subpar experience.

I think the best years are over for Netflix. The hard awakening is here to make content that the users want and they are a movie/tv content company, not primarily a „tech company“.

I don’t understand what the expense of los gatos has to do with anything

did you go work for Netflix? was it enough to live on in los gatos?

what a random selection of non sequiturs

Obviously nobody needs to live in Los Gatos. You could probably commute from Gillroy although it'd be a pain.

Or the other way, toward Santa Cruz (Scott's Valley always struck me as nice and "affordable" compared to the Bay Area).

> I've ever heard they never do RSUs

Well...I'm surprised you didn't bother doing google search. You choose what percent of the 500k cash if stock. 0% or 90% if you want.

I don't get why you are complaining about the location - all the bay is expensive and you can easily afford a 2 million dollar home on a 500k salary.

depending on where one is coming from, $2M house in the SF Bay area can be surprisingly small.

Very much so. A $4M home is sort of an average sized house, in Palo Alto.

And with barely any land.

Ok... so what? Netflix is in Los Gatos. 2M also won't get you too much for an apartment facing central park in NYC

So? The OP didn't talk about buying a mansion