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Comment by remh | Hacker News Reader

I made the mistake of watching it. Don’t. The first half is about him commenting to his followers a Meme video of a product manager to a software engineer. The second part is about how they implemented the fact that for black mirror they wanted the first season to be displayed to be season 4 instead of season 1. Might be just personal taste but I found the streamer insufferable.

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Something that is interesting (even if you don't like the streamer's style), is that Netflix had a seemingly simple requirement:

For a particular show, instead of recommending to viewers to start at S01E01 (which might put people off the show due to that particular episode being distastefully vulgar to some), by default start at S04E01 (which was actually the first episode produced by Netflix after they acquired the show).

It turned out that this seemingly simple requirement went against a very deeply ingrained (almost fundamental) assumption in many places in their systems, that shows always start at the earliest available episode.

In the end, implementing this seemingly simple requirement landed up being (according to the streamer) a 4 month project.

Only a very poorly run org like Netflix would need four months to have a show start in season 4 instead of season 1.

Season 1 episode 1 was one of the best of the show... Netflix dumbed the show down later.

Thank you for describing this so the rest of us don't have to watch it.

But he's a Netflix engineer, so he's gotta be smart!

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