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Comment by vineyardlabs | Hacker News Reader

The interesting thing about this thought experiment is that you assume Netflix would have slightly above average employees if they have slightly above average compensation. Now what happens to the experiment if Netflix has ridiculously above average, end of the bell curve compensation (as they do)? Serious question, I do not and have not worked for Netflix.

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I was really giving them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think Netflix had anything special above and beyond any other Silicon Valley software company. They just pushed this narrative and nobody questioned them.

Netflix as a business isn’t even way ahead of competition anymore. It’s not better than Hulu or Max or anything else.

Netflix’s platform crumbled handling live streaming a boxing match, while Amazon and the rest of the legacy media companies have no issues streaming NFL games every weekend, and I’m supposed to believe that Netflix engineers are better than the ones at Paramount+ who never made me wait for a buffer to watch Premier League or NFL on CBS.

Yeah perhaps times have changed. When I was an intern at JPL 10 years ago they brought some senior Netflix folks in to talk about their CDN reliability efforts and it was really impressive. I believe it was called Chaos Monkey and it effectively would take down data centers in production at random, forcing their network to be extremely reliable. Pretty wild idea.

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