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Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

Netflix seems to operate like a tech start-up that is trying to glue together a ragtag collections of often unsuitable solutions because of limited funding. It is a deeply perplexing company.

Similar is LinkedIn, as an aside -- despite being fairly formidable now, I regularly have entire feeds disappear, their caching is abhorrent, they can't markup text properly, and so on. It seems very amateur hour, yet they regularly publish "how it's done" documents that see wide applause despite often completely contradicting their prior missives.

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Netflix overhires quite a bit. They also pay their (very good) engineers very high salaries (possibly highest in the valley) which results is very low attrition.

The net result is a lot of engineers having a lot of time and all these engineers experiment away on technology. In fact, they have quite a bit of NIH syndrome internally because the engineers have nothing to do.

I don't think you have those reasons in proper order. I think the ability of the engineers to experiment and use new tools is why they have the high level of retention. I've seen plenty of places that pay much higher than the competition yet have very high turnover due to the a conservative culture which dictates the tools and doesn't encourage experimentation.

"An idle mind is a devil's workshop". I have seen this over and over again when you give engineers a free run. They micro-optimize things. They start rewriting javascript to c++ and c++ to c and asm when the speed improvements are at best marginal and the cost of maintenance of produced code is extremely high.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that these optimizations are bad. In fact, these engineers measure things properly and then rewrite. It's just that there is no business case for all this time spent. It's like writing web servers in C. Sure, it's possibly the faster than everything else but seriously? Who maintains all this.

Experimentation is good, but perhaps there is too much going on at some companies? Finding the right balance is a hard problem.

Curious, do you have some anecdotes about that? I've generally heard from coworkers who were at Netflix that they have pretty high attrition at the lower levels, with the "fire the bottom 10% every X months" rules.

The bottom 10% has it hard in any company, let alone netflix. Almost every company I know has stringent rules for the bottom 10% (read: a step by step approach until they get fired). But if you are a decent engineer you have nothing to worry about.

I know I'm being a cocky asshole, but, are their engineers that good?

> It’s unclear why Express.js chose not to use a constant time data structure like a map to store its handlers.

Well, it was blindingly clear to me and the top commenter in this thread.

I'm not judgmental that it was unclear to the author of this article, after all, I'm unclear on things that should've been stupidly obvious to me all the time. I am totally judgmental that no one on the team proofread the blogpost before publishing it and was like "uh, dude, what would the keys in the map be, regexes?"

Well, the same engineer who didn't figure that out went ahead and profiled things, drew some pretty graphs, actually bothered to write a blog post to put his thoughts for public review. IMO, that is all some good engineering :-)

But you made me think what I said. I would say this sort of gets into the programmer / engineer debate. Netflix has good progammers like most companies. Good engineers (in my books) are very hard to find. These people are good at being at peace with tradeoffs and understand the requirements of a business at a much deeper level than programmers. Programmers just want to have fun with computers (and there is nothing wrong about that).

NIH ?

Not invented here. Redoing stuff which already exists.

Sometimes it's okay to eliminate dependencies: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

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