
Working at Netflix - hepha1979
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-01-20/working-at-netflix.html
======
RayVR
I had a wildly different experience interviewing at netflix.

I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my
original schedule with them...) for one of my interviews and she spent half
the time telling me why the stock price was so low "We were high on a $300
share price and thought we were gods." Then, the other half telling me her
favorite firing stories. I don't know what the purpose of all of this was but
it gave me the impression that HR/head of HR needed to demonstrate how
important they are in the company.

One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question.
I successfully answered it. He then asked me to rewrite it with some
restrictions. I did this. Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't
familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is
True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of
familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the
interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science.

I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions
wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that
it's a valid reason not to hire someone. However, because of this feedback,
and the fact that the people at netflix generally liked me, they wanted me to
work on some sort of data warehouse management team. I'm not sure why they
would offer me a job so wildly different from what I was contacted to apply
for, or why the syntax from one language would be considered representative of
my knowledge of CS.

Overall, I think the experience of one person at a company is nothing more
than an anecdote that can be entertaining, perhaps moderately informative, but
it's not a complete picture. There are many stories out there about people
interviewing with or working for Netflix. If you are seriously interested in
the company, read a lot of those stories, discount all of them as biased, and
then see for yourself by talking to them.

~~~
bogomipz
I also met with this same woman who talked about both the stock price and
firing people. She also said something to the effect of "just because you have
a job now doesn't mean you will have one in six months" and made a comparison
to players being traded in professional sports. I remember feeling very put
off by her. I too did not understand what the point in this bit of bravado
was. It sounds like it's her standard candidate speech though which is just
weird. The other thing that put me out was the first person who interviewed
wasn't wearing shoes and insisted on sitting indian style with his feet
pointed out to wards me. I am no stranger to a casual work environment but
that is just gross. Lastly on the way to a conference room on the second floor
I walked a fair amount through the office and what was notable to me was that
I didn't see anybody smiling or even anyone who looked like they might be
enjoying what they are doing. Ultimately I didn't get an offer because the job
turned out to be a different description than the one I had interviewed about
on the phone. I think that says it all.

~~~
orbitur
> Lastly on the way to a conference room on the second floor I walked a fair
> amount through the office and what was notable to me was that I didn't see
> anybody smiling or even anyone who looked like they might be enjoying what
> they are doing

Please don't ever make this assumption. I referred an acquaintance from school
to my workplace (he was a great project partner, and I was the first of us to
get hired after graduation, so why not?), and apparently when he passed
through everyone was just... doing work. That was a telltale sign that
everyone was grumpy to him.

I had to explain that we basically don't work at all on Friday afternoons
because we're too busy drinking, we play pingpong religiously, frequent out of
office events on the weekends, and in general it's just an enjoyable crowd.
Random conversations happen all the time.

But nope, that one time he came through the office, everyone looked unhappy.
Because they were working, I guess.

~~~
unwind
_[...] frequent out of office events on the weekends [...]_

That sounds ... very strange. Weekends aren't generally speaking "office
hours", and more importantly also not "working hours". Having an "out of
office event" in my world is when you're doing work, i.e. it's during normal
working hours, but you're not _at_ work.

Having frequent work-related "events" on weekends sounds like a total bummer.

~~~
orbitur
Totally voluntary. Work just pays for them. A number of people opt out and no
one judges them.

~~~
jonny_eh
How do you know what your coworkers think?

~~~
hueving
Because everyone that works at Netflix thinks the same way. They ensure that
with their hiring practice that alienates anyone that thinks differently.

------
fecak
"If hiring is broken, what else is broken?"

I've seen quite a few articles on HN recently where what we call "candidate
experience" during the hiring process was a theme. Whether this writer chose
to list "Recruiting" as the first topic because of chronology (recruiting was
first experience with company) or to emphasize the importance is unknown, but
candidates today seem to assume that a broken hiring process is indicative of
flaws in culture and how the company values employees.

Companies that simply play the numbers game and don't consider improving
candidate experience are running the risk of reducing their brand as an
employer, regardless of how the public regards their products or services.

~~~
brendangregg
It's chronological, although I did want to emphasize this issue in
recruitment.

First impressions count.

It's hard to know what a company is really like without knowing some insiders.
Searching on the Internet may find opinions pointing every which way. And
then, you meet their recruitment team, and get your first -- and maybe last --
firsthand exposure to the internal workings of the company.

Hiring the right staff is obviously very important. So any issues with the
hiring process that cannot be fixed is deeply worrying. Does the company not
value hiring? Why can't it be fixed? Who will my co-workers be? What else is
broken? etc.

I regret that I didn't walk out during the misaligned interviews, to save
everyone's time. I did eventually tell recruiters not to contact me anymore,
but that seemed to make them more interested, and I was handed to a different
team. (In the end, I picked Netflix anyway, and am very happy I did.)

Netflix recruiting was awesome, and I think other companies can do the same.
Don't put up with recruiting problems -- help fix it. It may be your company's
first and last impression.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Do Netflix's interviews have any trick questions (e.g. manhole covers) or
coding questions that have nothing to do with the job (e.g. Write a function
that can detect a cycle in a linked list)?

I would never interview at major tech' companies because from what I've read
of their interview process, it is all about knowing random Computer Science
trivia and studying a book of trick questions.

I like more traditional corporations/business who give you questions actually
applicable to the job and your experience. Silicon Valley interviews are
pretty insufferable, due to their pseudo-intellectual elitism.

Companies should take their interview, and then give it to what they consider
their most successful employees. If the employees wouldn't be "hired" then the
interview process is completely broken.

~~~
jspiral
Can I ask for your thoughts on the cycle in a linked list question?

I asked someone that today, and it didn't go very well. I gave him the hint to
start with writing code to print out all of the children of a node, then when
that stack overflowed, he was able to make progress.

Do you think there are senior generalists engineers who would be great who
could struggle with that question? Its hard for me to put myself in those
shoes but I believe it could be possible.

The goal of that question from my perspective is to watch them solve a problem
that requires recursion. I've always found that people who do well on that
stuff tend to get stuck less designing software in general.

I do worry that it cuts out people who would actually be good.

I'm very interested to hear thoughts on this from others.

~~~
justrudd
The problem I see with your question is that you have a bias towards a
solution.

"The goal of that question from my perspective is to watch them solve a
problem that requires recursion"

I wouldn't use recursion for my solution. It takes up stack space for no
reason. If I'm going to be allowed to use more space, I'd just loop through
the list, add them to a set, and check if I've already seen it. No recursion,
but extra space. Is it more space than another stack frame? Depends on the
type of set I'm using. But at least I know I won't blow up the stack (maybe
the heap :-)

Since you are asking for opinions from others, I'm going to assume you
wouldn't be upset with me solving it this way. So am I less of an engineer
because I didn't immediately go for recursion?

With that said, everyone has a baseline - answers they expect to see. But
everyone has to keep an open mind.

My company is trying to come up with a corpus of questions and answers to
those questions at the junior, normal, and senior level. I've voiced my
opinion that it is a slippery slope. If you get someone who isn't a skilled
interviewer, and the interviewee doesn't use one of the prescribed 3 answers,
what happens to that candidate? Granted it is one data point in the loop, and
not the only data point. But as I stated, it becomes easier to be "lazy"
during the interview.

~~~
jspiral
>So am I less of an engineer because I didn't immediately go >for recursion?

No, not at all. a stack is a stack, whether it's the call stack or one you
maintain in code.

Its not the recursion that's important to me, it's holding a problem of
moderate complexity in your head in order to be able to come up with a
solution. Problems that lend themselves to recursion seem to present a bar
that some engineers struggle with, and others find easier, in my anecdotal
experience.

I know I said recursion is important all over the place, clearly my thinking
is sloppy on this and needs to improve.

I have this idea that there is a class of problem, that lends itself to
recursion, that separates the wheat from the chaff in some ways. maybe that's
nonsense.

What I really want to test for is the ability to juggle abstractions while
working through code problems. there's probably a better way to do it.

Thinking about this corpus of questions and answers, I guess the common idea
of fixing broken code might have a bit more merit because it removes the risk
of an interview focusing too much on judging the approach and turning it into
a trivia contest (have you seen this before and do you remember how to do it).

~~~
RogerL
You are trying to measure what?

I'm going to assume your answer is "on the job performance". If not, this is
going to be a difficult conversation, and I'd ask why you are trying to
measure for something you aren't going to be paying for.

The best predictor of on the job performance is ... on the job performance.
Everyone but the most junior person has experience. Look at that.

All of these exam type questions usually rely on knowing a trick, or being
recently well versed. I TA'd a graduate course in Algorithms. That's rather
relevant, I would think, since you aren't offered that if you don't have
ability. Yet you know the last time I've done, say, dynamic programming? It's
been awhile. I know about it, I know when to decide whether to pull it out,
but ask me to do it, in a high pressure interview (all interviews are high
pressure), and well, I'll probably fail. I'm working on other things like
Bayesian inference. Bet you'd fail doing that stuff, even though it is just
simple multiplications and such, when you get down to the implementation.
Unless, of course, you are working on that sort of stuff right now.

I find the situation in SV somewhat ridiculous. To go out and interview means
a _lot_ of prep. Google recommends spending a month reviewing algorithms
before applying. You know, I have an actual job, and I have open source side
projects, and I have a family, and hobbies, and an old dog I want to spend all
my time with. It is trivial to find out my skills by looking at what I have
done and asking me questions about it. Have me give you a 1-2 hour tech talk,
for example (I like public speaking, most don't so that is not a universal
solution). Have me write some code with you, if you must. I work at a very
high level, but I am not necessarily 'clever' at seeing the right trick in 10
seconds under pressure in an interview.

Also, how important is that sort of thing, really? For some jobs it is,
undoubtedly. If you want me to write a load balancer for your cloud
infrastructure, there are some algorithms I need to understand. Even then, not
knowing something now is not evidence I can't do the job. I can learn - it's
how I've done everything up to now. I can learn your thing too. More
importantly (to my mind) - am I a hard worker? Can I mentor others? Can I lead
a team? Can I put a schedule together, and recognize when that is appropriate
and not appropriate? Can I make a budget? Can I talk to clients? Do I meet my
deadlines? Do I solve problems - not implement the cards in this sprint - but
see friction of some sort at work and engineer a solution? Do my peers like
working with me? Do I get shit done? Is my code maintainable, readable,
modular, commented? Can I write? Can I teach? Can I work with the CEO?

I've been to so many interviews where they don't even try to learn any of that
latter stuff, where they show no interest in what I have done, where they
don't try to figure out if I can do the actual job they are doing, but are
deeply interested in if I can program a smart pointer, from scratch, to some
arbitrary set of requirements. It is all just deeply puzzling to me.

~~~
jspiral
I understand what you mean about ridiculous SV interview practices. And your
point that all we should really be measuring is on the job performance is an
important one.

All I'm really going for is to ask someone to write some code live, on their
laptop with their tools, so I can watch how they debug, how they think through
things, etc. I want the problem to be hard enough that the person has to model
execution in their head and that it's challenging to do so.

I have found that there are people who can code decently well but get badly
stuck when the complexity hits a certain level. I'm trying to not hire them in
senior positions.

For example, I had a recent project where we were analyzing user data and
producing a bunch of edges representing potential connections detected between
users, as a way of sniffing out fraud rings.

One feature associated with this was a banning UI, allowing loss prevention
types to navigate through the graph, select groups of users according to
certain criteria, and generally look for patterns that are evidence of fraud
rings manually, to supplement the automatically generated analysis.

There are a lot of front end people who will go into brainlock on this kind of
thing. I need to make sure I have some people around who don't.

When making senior hires, I want people who can write code for this sort of
thing without making a huge mess or just getting stuck for weeks.

Presenting a real sample from a problem like this needs way too much context
though.

I'm going to keep thinking about how to precisely define the type of task that
i'm really talking about here. My fuzzy definition about ability to model
execution of X complexity in one's head is obviously weak and probably flat
out wrong.

------
mhomde
You know the longer I work in the industry that more one thing has becomes
apparent. There are afaik no "dream" company which also are of sufficient
size, except maybe Pixar (My theory is that if you work with products aimed at
children it keeps your soul from corrupting)

Google started as a Xanadu everyone wanted to job for, but more and more tales
about bureaucracy and people jocking for power keeps coming into light.

Apple has for long time seemed to be a very demanding employer where you sign
away your life to the company the day you start working.

Microsoft was the original power employer but for a long time seems to have
been paralyzed by department infighting and middle management.

Valve long claimed to have a unique and awesome culture but other accords has
described it as being dysfunctional an ineffective.

I'm not sure whether Facebook is good or bad or has corrupted at this point.

Anyways, the point seem to be that the bigger the company the more business
people and management who will corrupt the company. The more employees the
more rules and bureaucracy is needed to enforce them.

It certainly is possible to avoid this but it seems the bigger the company the
faster the entropy slide into oblivion and the more energy it takes to
counteract it... and not many do. The "Bozo explosion" as Jobs described also
was very apt.

------
nhayden
Is having a "high performance culture" a subtle way of saying they fire people
very quickly for not producing enough results?

~~~
jandrewrogers
Yes. It is one of the few companies I've worked at where I saw substandard
engineers get fired for being substandard. At most companies, they just
shuffle substandard engineers around into a role where they won't cause too
much damage.

~~~
23david
Essentially it's a culture of elitism. Reminds me of Ivy League. It can work,
but it's hard to scale and in my experience it's very hard to avoid a
monoculture.

How diverse is the population of engineers at Netflix compared to other public
tech companies at a similar stage?

A high-performing culture that emphasizes mentorship is better IMO.

~~~
_delirium
It drives off a reasonable number of high-performing people as well, though
obviously not all. One of the problems systems like stack ranking have
encountered is that some proportion of people who are _really good_ and not
the intended target of the system end up very stressed out by it. Varying
reasons: some people underestimate their own skills, some are worried about
the system's false-positive rate, some are stressed out by worries about
coworkers being fired even if not worried about their own job, etc.

------
jay_kyburz
I was reading through the culture deck and I love The Values. I even like the
idea of regularly letting people go who are not contributing to the success of
the company.

However, there were a few points that are a little disconnected from reality,
or perhaps they are not being entirely honest about the employee / employer
relationship.

When I'm working for somebody I give them everything, my heart and soul. My
passion. My success is the companies success.

But I think it's honest to be clear that I am giving up _time_ with my family
or _time_ working on my own projects to bring home a salary. There is a big
difference between my heart and soul for 20 hours a week, or 40 hours a week,
or 60 hours a week. Hours do matter. Hours are my side of the bargain, and in
return for hours I get paid cash.

I think its a form of dishonesty to gloss over this and wave your hands around
and say hours don't matter, just come in when you want and do your best and if
you perform well you won't be fired. When I hear this I think the employer
doesn't expect you to have anything else in your life other than your job, and
that what they really want is _all_ your hours in exchange for your salary.

I don't think that's necessarily bad, just say so and be upfront about it.

Having no holiday policy also artificially creates a grey area, or a point of
conflict between an employee or employer. If I were a cynical old bastard I
would suggest that the no holiday policy is actually so that holidays don't
accrue from year to year. In my experience young engineers don't really take
holidays and if you don't force them out of the office they end up with months
and months of leave saved up.

~~~
seanp2k2
Check out "10\. What happens to my earned and accrued but unused vacation if I
am discharged or quit my job?" at
[http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_vacation.htm](http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_vacation.htm)

------
hammerdr
Just as a single data counterpoint, my recruiting experience with Netflix was
below par. It may have been the way that I was approached (from a friend who
was also an engineer) . However, the 'process' took over 3 months to get
nowhere. After many re-schedulings and me having to restart the process
myself, I just gave up. Never heard from them after I had given up, either.

~~~
markhelo
Curious to hear what team you were applying for?

------
pm90
"hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults"

This. If I had one advice for every company out there, its to try and do this.
Being adult doesn't have to do with your age. People who are responsible,
curios and always willing to learn and work out differences... these are the
kind of people that you really want.

Admittedly that's hard to do. Perhaps that's why many people like to hire
within their network.

~~~
mathattack
A lot of people make excuses based on generations, but it's more about what
management is willing to tolerate.

------
pmcgrathm
I've been at NFLX for 7 months now. I agree with much of what Brendan has
discussed here in terms of culture. If you are confident in your abilities it
really is a great place to be and you really do get to work with some of the
brightest minds in the valley.

The whole firing average performers thing is, in my opinion, really a means of
making sure that only those applicants who feel strongly that they have
something to bring to the table should apply. This is not where you go for job
security, it is where you go to work on something that excites you. That being
said, it is _extremely_ rare to see someone let go who did not have some sort
of fair warning or multiple indications that their work was somehow below par.
I believe the multiple claims on glass door are remnant of the culture when
this company was under serious duress in 2012/2013.

Of course, as with any organization, mileage may vary. One of the negative
aspects of this culture is that as you get some very smart, very confident,
very opinionated minds into a room - you are of course going to get into some
head butting. Sometimes the overarching business strategy may change before a
team can adapt to that change, and then persons may become defensible about
their territory. While Netflix as an organism does a great job of eliminating
this threat, it does take some time to formally fix the mojo within a
deprecated organization / way of doing things.

------
nowarninglabel
Most of this jives with what I have heard from two Netflix engineers, except
for the work/life balance. Both folks that I talked to said that Netflix was
very much a place where they tried to work you as hard as possible until you
burned out, but that this was balanced by the exceptional compensation. I
wonder if the culture has changed or if only certain roles are like that?

~~~
jedberg
Netflix has definitely afforded me the most work/life balance I've ever had.
If you are still here at 6pm, it's pretty much empty.

~~~
reledi
You HN bio says

 _> Now I hang out and enjoy technology, advise startups and some other stuff
(including working at Netflix as the Site Reliability Lead)_

Which gives me the impression you work part time (or at least reduced hours)
at Netflix. If that's the case, it may not be a good work/life comparison to
other experiences you've had.

~~~
jedberg
Nope, definitely full time. :) The rest of that is extracurricular.

------
DigitalSea
Netflix sounds like a pretty clued on place in terms of hiring and culture.
Which considering their size is no small feat. I don't like their clever
wording around what they call a "high performance culture" which basically
means that if you don't meet the level they expect, you get fired. Which is
fine, but they should be a little more honest about the fact without burying
it behind creative HR speak.

I would love to know more about their hiring process though. You mentioned
that you didn't have to answer questions unrelated to your job (something I
personally experienced during a job interview on a bad scale recently). Do
they make you solve puzzles and other pointless indicators that some companies
use to determine if a developer is any good or not? More specifically maybe a
front-end focused role, not a back-end one.

Would love to know more about the process (as much as you can without getting
into trouble).

~~~
sanderjd
I must just be an outlier on this, but I hate the idea of only getting
interview questions that pigeonhole me into some narrow role, because it
suggests that the job will be similarly pigeonholed, which I think is awful. I
much prefer lines of questioning that attempt to suss out how well I can
participate on a team, learn and adapt, and think creatively, because they
suggest that they hope for me to be doing those things a lot, which is great.

~~~
DigitalSea
Let me elaborate. Recently I went for a job that was being advertised as a
front-end developer position. The recruiter who briefed me on the position
also informed me that it was a front-end only role and that there would be a
test on various front-end things; HTML, CSS and Javascript for the most part.

As it turned out, the interviewer had plans to test me on a few front-end
related things, but then proceeded to ask me questions about Java, databases,
server administration and complex Javascript puzzles. Keep in mind this was a
position for a front-end developer, their job listing didn't mention Java,
databases or server administration. Looking at their current site, they are
abusing jQuery pretty badly, aren't minifying their CSS/JS or tonnes of other
things, so it felt weird I was being asked super complicated and mostly
irrelevant questions when their site seemed so poorly developed.

I think it is important you not only get quizzed on things relating to your
job, but also other things not directly relating to your job (but still
important and within reason). I showed up for a particular job as a front-end
developer and was asked questions that you would ask a DBA, Java developer and
front-end developer. It was not the role being advertised.

This is a mistake that I discovered seems to happen at quite a fair bit. The
hiring process is definitely broken at a lot of companies.

~~~
sanderjd
I'm with you, and it sucks and is very nerve-wracking to have the wrong
expectations going into an interview. Having said that, my reaction to that
would have been more like "oh good, I'm glad they're also interested in what I
know about a bunch of other stuff, I was afraid they just wanted me to be the
HTML, CSS, and JS guy". Specialization is a good thing, but I prefer jobs
where I'm hired because they think I'll be generally useful to the company,
perhaps on things they haven't even foreseen working on yet, rather than for a
really narrow role.

A farther flung interview suggests an interest in hiring a person rather than
a set of skills.

~~~
DigitalSea
I admire your optimism. Perhaps I have been in the industry for too long, but
these days I much prefer being a specialist in a particular niche as opposed
to be known as the guy in the office who gets emailed when the printer breaks,
a server goes down, a Wordpress site needs to be built or someone has a
question about why their email is broken.

I have been in that situation a few times in my career, when I worked at a
digital agency especially. My job varied from Javascript, CSS and HTML, to
developing HTML newsletters, building Wordpress websites, setting up
servers/databases and tonnes of other things. At the time it was an invaluable
learning experience, but also meant I worked long hours because my list of
responsibilities was longer, friendships suffered because I worked a lot of
weekends/late nights. As a result of that job, I didn't feel like it made me
an expert in one particular thing. I was good at many things, but not truly
great at front or back-end development. I felt like I had to learn outside of
work hours to get good enough to specialise in my chosen field (my day-to-day
job was obviously also a factor).

If I went for a job advertised as one thing, but then discovered that they
expect you to be good at a lot of other things it would make me think twice
(at least now I do). When I first started out, I was willing to do anything
because I was young, naive and excited I had a job doing what I wanted to do
in life.

My initial thoughts would be, "Please, not again. I don't want the
responsibility of wearing multiple hats. I've worked hard to get to the point
where I want to specialise in a chosen field", followed by, "This company is
trying to get a combination stir-fry developer so they can cheap out and not
have to hire a separate database administrator or back-end developer."

If you want a developer who knows a lot of things and is expected to work with
a tonne of different languages, deploy a server and make coffee: there is
nothing wrong with that, just be upfront and honest about it, so people like
myself don't waste your time and have their time wasted. Don't lure candidates
in with a misleading job description only for them to discover the job is
actually more than you initially led on.

~~~
sanderjd
Thanks for the great response! You're right, I would definitely be suspicious
of people marketing one thing and delivering another, so to speak. I haven't
had the experience of getting a software development job and finding myself
fixing printers, so perhaps that's a danger I should learn from your kindly
shared experience to be more wary of. I suppose our experiences and
frustrations have simply developed differently!

------
brown9-2
_It 's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other,
and use their roles to conduct political warfare.

It's not the kind of company where bad mistakes are frequently made, and no
one is held accountable._

These are aspects of "culture" that are really easy to boast of but hard to
actually prove that you have. Some more data on how Netflix avoids inter-
personal conflict between those with power would be really interesting.

~~~
erikb
They say how they do it: Hire smart people that match with our philosophy. And
that might be all you can do.

------
thrw1away
Just as a counter point - I had a different experience with these guys. Got
approached by a hiring manager who set up the first screening call that went
fairly well. Then got contacted by the Recruiter ...

Things went downhill fast after that point - the recruiter was very casual in
her approach towards anything related to skills or compensation but very
aggressive about how they value performance, what an honor it was to work at
Netflix how lucky I am to be in the interview "pipeline"...

I had never met a bunch of folks so enamored by their own culture. I probably
said something like "I have worked at quite a few places that have very good
supportive cultures as well" towards the end.

The process ended after that call...thankfully.

[posting from a throwaway to avoid the fairly easy googling identification]

------
jasondc
Senior Software Engineer @ Netflix: $210,157/year/avg. Netflix seems to have
some high salaries, even for the bay area.

[http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Netflix-
Salaries-E11891.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Netflix-
Salaries-E11891.htm)

------
shill
> It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other,
> and use their roles to conduct political warfare.

Political warfare isn't always obvious to a newcomer with several months on
the job.

------
serve_yay
I used to work at a place where studying organizations was important to the
business itself, so we focused a lot on things like Netflix's culture slide
deck. One of my favorite parts of that deck is how it points out that a
company's culture is what happens every day, not what is painted on the wall
in fancy letters. It made me reflect on the discrepancy between what my
employer at the time said, and how they acted.

~~~
mc32
Ideology is what people do. What they say they do is their belief.

~~~
serve_yay
I agree! I wish I knew you in real life.

------
jessegavin
I interviewed for a role on the website UI team in spring of 2013. I thought
the interview process was one of the best I have experienced. My would-be
manager initially reached out to me (not a recruiter) and we had a few nice
phone conversations about what they were looking for. They flew me out for a
two day interview. If they know it isn't a fit on the first day, they don't
have you come back for the second.

I met with 3 developers, a hiring specialist and a development manager on the
first day and they asked very domain-relevant questions within my area of
expertise. No silly programmer brain teasers. I had plenty of time to ask
questions of my own.

On day two I met with non-developers. Business, designers/UX, etc. I was able
to get a very good idea of the people I would be working with and the types of
problems I would be solving.

I ended up deciding to take another offer, but it was a very positive
experience overall. I didn't encounter any jerks like some others have.

------
auganov
brendangregg is one of The People in performance analysis. Netflix would be
foolish to pass on him. So the experience is most likely not representative of
the average hire. The description sounds like it's still the honeymoon phase.
Or was Joyent THAT bad? (-;

~~~
tacoman
Came here to say this. He's been the closest thing to a rockstar sysadmin for
as long as I can remember and even before he taught the world how to use
Dtrace.

------
mwcampbell
I know this piece is mostly about what it's like to work at Netflix, but the
more technical part leads to an obvious question: If FreeBSD is so great for
performance analysis, and Netflix is already using it at scale, then why not
also use it on the EC2 instances? Seems like they could gradually move toward
FreeBSD-based instances. Or is Linux really that much better as an EC2 guest?

~~~
brendangregg
As jedberg said, we're heavily invested in Linux on the cloud, which means
there's a large cost associated with the move (porting infrastructure
software, tools, and testing).

But FreeBSD has been improving on EC2, such as PVHVM support. If the benefit
was big enough, it might outweigh the cost. I'd like to do a little FreeBSD
EC2 perf testing this year (as I would for any tech that might pay off)...

~~~
bmoyles
We've been talking about the same thing in engtools over the last few weeks...
we should set up a meeting :)

------
eyeareque
I wonder if he will still be in love with his job after another 12 months
pass. :)

~~~
cpwatson
As with the other hires on my team I'm thrilled to have Brendan onboard. I
would also hope that if he happens to leave Netflix due to issues with the
culture he will share that experience as well, publicly.

------
click170
Thank you to the people who are sharing their Netflix stories as well.

I'm curious about the time frame though. The author of the post noted that he
started several months back, to anyone who is sharing their story here can you
please also note the approximate time frame for when your story takes place?

I'm curious to see if the company has corrected the problems that some people
have hit while maneuvering through the recruiting process.

------
blazespin
"It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate each other,
and use their roles to conduct political warfare." Laugh!

------
AtmaScout
I would like to know parts of the company that he doesn't like or would like
to see changed. Can anyone chime in?

~~~
brendangregg
At companies where "stupid things happen, but can't be fixed", it's easy to
make a list of things that people would like to see fixed, since they've been
irritating everyone forever. Netflix isn't like that, and we have the freedom
to fix stupid things anyway. So it's a hard question to answer. :-)

There have been technologies that I haven't liked, and I've had the freedom to
work on them, change them, improve them, and have. I can list many of those,
but it's not too different to what I've been putting in my blog during the
past 10 months.

~~~
AtmaScout
Thanks for the response. I was thinking certain technology might have been in
the list of improvements. I'm glad to hear that you are free to work on them
and improve them.

------
nbevans
Considering it's all built on well-known and tested (provided you follow the
best practices) cloud services (AWS right?) I often wonder what they do all
day. Netflix platform strikes me as something you invest heavily in at day 1
but then only need a boilerplate team of developers to keep it ticking over
and responding to user feedback.

They love to bleat on about their Chaos Monkey this and Chaos Monkey that. But
come on, they wrote a read-only cloud-hosted and distributed video streaming
service that leans on standard cloud services and best practices for 90% of
the hard parts. Chaos Monkey just smacks of writing a integration test for a
third party component you don't own.

Frankly I wouldn't want a job at Netflix simply because the problem domain is
not interesting enough. Read-only highly-resilient distributed systems are not
particularly hard to create and test. It's only becomes an interesting problem
when you need to do a comparable amount of write-ops at the same time as those
read-ops.

------
fffernan
Does Netflix have a culture of giant powerpoint slides? This thing is
massive....

~~~
jedberg
Ha! No, not usually. That is by far the biggest powerpoint I've seen at
Netflix in my 3+ years there.

------
eyeareque
One thing to remember is that one person's experience at a company can be
vastly different than others. For example your job happiness can be either
great or terrible depending on your manager.

------
barrystaes
I really like the 9 values, i do seem to align. Except for the "analysis
paralysis" bit. It perfectly describes two recent weeks.. so i put the coin-
phrase on a sticky. :)

------
iamleppert
I also interviewed with the talent woman, who gave me the baseball team
analogy and that fact they love to fire people. A little off-putting for a
candidate to hear, no?

------
blazespin
Riiiiiiight: "It's not the kind of company where managers or departments hate
each other, and use their roles to conduct political warfare."

------
utopkara
As George Costanza said, "it's not a lie if you believe it".

------
brownbat
> We aren't winning by unsavory sales, legal, or marketing tactics.

Online distribution of content is pushing inexorably towards battles over hit
exclusives. Some would consider that anti-consumer, and an unsavory tactic,
though admittedly it doesn't fall cleanly in the sales, legal, or marketing
arena. It's a little of all three.

I'm also worried about what's happening behind the scenes to push the service
away from DVDs.

I used to have a video store around the corner that had a massive library of
indie and foreign films. I have eclectic tastes in film, or at least don't
just want the latest hits, so I rented there frequently. It's been driven out
of business by online streaming. That was supposed to be ok, because, Chris
Anderson, said, Netflix would stock even deeper content.

Unfortunately, Netflix doesn't have the time or inclination to fight the
licensing battles required for streaming rights on anything approaching a deep
DVD library. As negotiations over blockbusters and fights with Amazon over
exclusives dominate the time of their lawyers, it's going to be even rarer to
find gems from the long tail on the site.

Already we end up with Academy Award winners and nominees that are
conspicuously absent. The 80 of 86 films on Spike Lee's "essential films" list
that are unavailable. Giant holes in the catalog for major directors, like
Hitchcock. Netflix has The Lady Vanishes and nothing else. That's one of over
fifty films, many of which are classics, some of the best films of all time.
(That one is fine but probably not his best or most noteworthy.)

To make it worse, Reed Hastings seems to hate physical discs, even though
licensing for them is automatic, so he keeps trying to spin off or kill that
service. So over the last year, the number of scratched discs I've received in
the mail has increased, and most of the DVDs I request are on "very long
wait," often dropping out of the collection entirely.

So now, even with their DVD service, pivotal noir films, like The Glass Key
with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, or The Blue Lamp, which won the BAFTA for
best British film in 1949, Netflix just doesn't know these exist. Yoji
Yamada's "The Hidden Blade," one of the best samurai dramas of all time, just
not there. There's basically nothing available by legendary Taiwanese wu xia
director King Hu.

Sure, the Internet is the future, and shipping bits is phenomenally cheaper
than shipping plastic. But there are different legal regimes here, and
sometimes law trumps technology. The first sale doctrine allows DVD rentals
without costly rights negotiations. So consumers get access to more content.
Content owners argued for a few decades that rental stores were driving them
out of business, it didn't happen.

Netflix isn't an archive, but it did knock a few of them out of business. It
has a huge number of titles, but when you go through the list of really
important films, it's 90% holes.

I understand they're chasing a dream to foster streaming of content. Along the
way they've killed something that I don't think we can easily get back.

------
k_bx
Author mentions:

> Bad News syndrome

What is that precisely? (in context of tech companies)

------
trustfundbaby
page isn't loading :\

~~~
gibbonsd1
Cache:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150120211415/http://www.brenda...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150120211415/http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2015-01-20/working-
at-netflix.html)

------
calimac
Netflix hired an in house P.R. Consultant.

------
calimac
This can't be real.? I have family who worked at netflix.

Netflix must have brought their P.R. Consultant on full time for the last 3
months to write this post.

------
par
Many of the benefits op describes come from having a company which is growing.
As soon as Netflix starts floundering and questioning its future you will
definitely see political warfare and all kinds of time burning endeavors.

This is basically an HR approved Netflix puff piece.

~~~
cestep
I understand why you would be skeptical, it seems like more rah-rah crap from
a successful tech company. However, it is not a puff piece, it's completely
accurate. Political "warfare" or other malicious actions are not tolerated at
any level at Netflix. Netflix only looks for sharp people that are also a
cultural fit. If you are smart and negative, you won't last long.

~~~
tw04
I don't think that counters what OP is saying. Netflix is publicly traded.
Their CEO, who sets the cultural tone, only lasts as long as the shareholders
allow him to last. If they start floundering for enough consecutive quarters,
I guarantee you Reed will be gone and a PHB who will "maximize shareholder
value" will replace him.

If the Mikes can be ousted from RIM, you can bet your rear that Hastings can
be ousted from Netflix. And once "maximizing shareholder value" becomes the
goal, "culture" becomes an afterthought.

~~~
svachalek
Exactly. Because anything can happen, Netflix could be a terrible place to
work in the future, and therefore it is definitely not a good place to work
now.

~~~
tw04
That's not the point, and not what OP or I said. He said that the benefits
Brendan describes are more a result of being a growing company than "being
Netflix". He didn't say it wasn't a good place to work now, and he didn't say
it would be a terrible place to work in the future. You did.

------
utefan001
In case anyone from Netflix is reading here. Why does Netflix make it so easy
for my 2nd grader to watch shows like Orange is the new smut? The only way I
know to prevent her having access is to set my user to "Teen". If mine is set
to "Adult", all she needs to do is click my Netflix user button. If you think
2nd graders are not watching that show, that is bull. I have a friend from
another country whose daughter was watching it and bragged about it to a
substitute teacher.

~~~
feld
It's called "Orange is the New Black" and you shouldn't expect a tech company
to be a parent for you.

