male_salmon

This New York Magazine article might help: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/they-were-quirk...

I might agree with you if Netflix ran their DVD business in a few other countries. That is not the case however. The DVD business is still profitable. Reed said it's unlikely he'll sell it for a long time.

With billing, most of us already maintain different accounts with different e-commerce sites. One more is not that bad. Ratings on either Qwikster or Netflix will benefit you because of the improved recommendations. Yes, it's a shame they won't be integrated, but overall the split will benefit the company and its customers.

As Reed says, the streaming business is global, but the DVD business is US-only. Maintaining code that services functions that apply in some locales but not others will slow down Netflix's ability to innovate.

Just out of curiosity, why would maintaining two accounts be so painful? If that were so, wouldn't it be equally painful to maintain different social network accounts (assuming you have two or more).

In Singapore, the drinking age is 18, so he actually would've been fine.

Not true. You can opt for family coverage but there are more out-of-pocket costs for the employee. I don't know how this compares with other companies though.

You can watch instantly using a variety of browsers including Firefox and Chrome on Windows and OS X.

Not true. I have health benefits (incl. dental and vision), FSA, free lunch, coffee, snacks, soda, etc.

Not true. I have health benefits from Netflix.

I work at Netflix and I cannot say that my experience reflects this particular review. I like working here because my coworkers are intelligent and I get to work on exciting projects. The slides we have on the jobs page are fairly accurate.

That said, I can't completely discount other people's experience since I only have my own experience to go on. It would seem that folks are let go because their skills are no longer relevant or they don't perform to par. This does not necessarily indicate that the person is a poor employee, but that he/she was not able to deliver given a particular context.

Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-...

Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.

I have no direct knowledge of how we use that survey, but I suspect that an outlier such as yourself would not affect the results of the survey. If there is a wide-spread drop in quality, I think the survey would pick that up. It's hard to design the perfect survey though, but I'll see if the powers-that-be can improve the survey.

Also, we're hiring: http://www.netflix.com/Jobs

I like that this resurfaces from time to time. Here're the comments from when I submitted the link to the deck to HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740524

I think the reason you're hired is because they think you can perform at the same level of said peers. And you accept the job because you think you can. And want to.

I'd say the average employee age skews towards 35+. No young whipper-snappers here! Except for a few :) Most everyone seems to have a family they need to take care of, which means leaving early some days.

Mailing out DVDs is big business! You have no idea how important Netflix is to people's happiness. I think that's closer to changing the world than most other companies. Just do a search of Netflix on twitter and you'll see what I mean.

I understand what you say about motivation, but I don't think Netflix is about that. My belief is that they expect you to be intrinsically excited about working there - because you are a professional adult. You should already be learning on your own and already "self-actualized". Paying you well just validates what they believe you should be.

Not all companies are like that, and that's why working at Netflix takes a bit of a mindset re-org.

My guess would be a few months but I don't have any hard evidence on hand. Based on my limited experience, I wouldn't put the duration at more than a year.

Actually this is the opposite of what you're suggesting. Working for Netflix doesn't require that you sacrifice a work/life balance. Implicit is the agreement that you'll perform up to the standard that is expected of you, but from what I've seen, most people here can handle it admirably.

oh really.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/228/519444730_4eb3859a9a_o.jp...

"This machine has Windows 2000 with 256MB ram installed."

http://www.hightechdad.com/2008/04/16/bart-ticket-kiosks-run...

Yes

From Wikipedia: From time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e., building airstrips, control towers, etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower.

second

Blizzard's no longer in the research park though. They've moved to a complex near the Spectrum.

I thought from the first paragraph the article was going to talk about how H1-Bs can start their own company but really it was about how startups can hire H1-Bs. Well, I'm already in that situation so it's not of much use to me.

I think most H1-Bs think that they have to stick with the same company for years until their green cards get approved. Well, that's not really true. It didn't seem too risky to transfer my H1-B to my second company when I had to. And when I needed to move to my current company, I could even transfer my green card application because the AC21 rules state that if my I-485 has been in processed for 6 months (or something like that), I could transfer that too. What all this means is that I don't think H1-Bs are beholden to the companies they are currently at. They can switch if their new companies are willing to process the legal documents for them. And even if they can't pay the fees, it shouldn't amount to too much (~$1k).

Isn't this exactly what PG said in his Cities and Ambition - http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html - essay?

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

I thought this article was about how Flex was the favored technology for RIAs (as opposed to AJAX).