Hard to believe anyone is getting contacted more now than in 2020. But I agree with the general sentiment. I'll do nothing and if I get replaced then I get replaced and switch to woodworking or something. But if LLMs do not pan out then I'll be ahead of all the people who wasted their time with that.
New parents did sometimes take a couple of months, but typically no. Some people would do 4-5 weeks in the summer. If could get your work done and set things up to run without you, it wasn't a problem.
You had unlimited vacation, but you still had to get your job done.
“Unlimited” means there is no limit, so logically it means a few months should be fine. If a few months not fine, I think a reasonable request would be to define the limit and claim that instead of “unlimited”.
I work at place with about 5 work weeks off, which is a lot for the US, and there’s never any question about whether you can use your time or not because the number of days is exactly specified. I like that better than a vague “unlimited” (but not actually) policy.
Like most policies at Netflix, or for that matter most workplaces anywhere, judgement is required.
The policy is unlimited. You are welcome to take a year of vacation a week after you start. However, there are other factors, such as remaining employed. You most likely won't be meeting your job duties if you're on vacation for a year.
Not really sure how you got that from what I wrote.
You're expected to do your job to remain employed. You are welcome to take as much paid time off as you want, in which you would ignore your job.
Assuming you did your job well, this won't be a problem. You either set things up to run on their own in the short term, or you've sufficiently cross trained someone else who isn't on vacation to cover for you.
What I'm saying is that if you try to take a year of paid vacation a week after you start the job, it's unlikely that you've set up either of those things before you go.
We have an actual unlimited unpaid time off policy. I have several colleagues who have taken 6+ months off (even repeatedly). Obviously I suspect that wouldn't be well-received within the "unlimited" paid leave at Netflix (but perhaps I'm wrong, I just can't imagine it).
I quite like the unlimited unpaid policy, is there a reason it's rare? I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?
>I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?
No one is strictly necessary. You can bring value to the company and it still doesn't mean that the company would go bankrupt if you left for half a year.
It sounds stupid but the killer feature for me is possibility to have multiple subtitles visible, all easily configurable with a few keybinds (track, offset, position, size etc). No streaming service provides this, and they actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.
+1. This is a fantastic feature. I haven't even bothered learning the keybindings (perhaps I should), I just start with --sid1= and --sid2= and it works well enough.
Neither me nor my significant other are native English speakers, but we have different native languages. I'm comfortable enough with English, but like having English subtitles since I have a hard time with some dialects and occasionally just miss a word or two due to noisy audio. My SO likes having subtitles in their native language.
Being able to have multiple subtitles makes it possible for both of us to get the experience we like, at the cost of a little screen real estate. Well worth it.
They are not default keybinds, but like any configuration can be cycled or set at runtime. Actually I don't use the keybindings much directly since my default config usually is fine, but have a remote GUI to configure it when needed.
Depending on the aspect ratio of the video and playback viewport, you could move the subtitles into the potential black bar underneath.
If there is no black bar, you could get one of those long narrow LCDs off AliExpress, set up the driver, add it as an X display with the right positioning... and then drag the mpv window across that and the TV. Should work. Those little LCDs are just silly expensive though...
Mpv is great with subtitles. Not just being able to switch through subtitle tracks and configure positioning, but also being able to automatically find and play external subtitle files when playing a video. I wrote an article about this: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mpv-subtitles-automatic. Only issue I found is the documentation for what subtitle formats are supported is lacking. You have to look through ffmpeg code to actually find what formats are actuallly supported.
Especially for things like language learning they are amazing, but services like Amazon show like two (English and the local language) out of the 30 something they have available. And I won't even go into the difference of subtitles and dubbing...
For language learning there are some scripts that allow you to hover words and show translations for them. I haven't used them myself with mpv, but I found that kind of tools to be invaluable on a browser when learning a language with a foreign script.
They probably don't want to license them globally, because the expected usage is low. But surely this could be taken into account in the contract / negotiation. Anyway I guess I'm just not in the target audience. But that's what MPV is great for, it allows you to tweak it for that 0.1% use-case.
I think it's also partially an issue with video + audio being paired by region.
AFAIK, the video you are being served is always based by the geolocation and what video was licensed for that. E.g. in a French version of a movie, text in the movie may have been localized into french inside the video. Additionaly there might be additional/missing scenes in the localized version to get the desired age ratings in that market.
The audio is then synced to that version of the video. That means that e.g. the French audio produced for the US video is not 1:1 the same audio as the French audio for the German video.
So that takes it beyond a licensing issue, and would mean additional effort to produce compatible audio tracks for content that they may only have streaming rights for temporarily. For content native to the streaming service they usually put that effort in.
> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.
Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)
Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.
The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.
There has been dozens of times I heard about some classic and wanted to watch it. When I look it up on <streaming service> it is not available. If it's an old movie it can be hard to find a good torrent for it. Having an extensive local library of movies of general interest sounds nice, especially going forward when content will disappear and become more fractured between paid services.
It's technically easy to not charge/cancel the user if they haven't used the services. But it's impossible to convince the product and business leads this is the correct thing to do. You will quickly get the "industry standard" response.
It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature since it's filled with dark patterns.
> It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature.
Agree. I loathe subscriptions and avoid them like Covid. But the code I write for the publishing industry is out there day and night, across continents, pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.
It's not like a pacifist writing missile guidance software, but it's sad that this is where the money is.
I'd suggest the GP is indeed working in advertising
pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.
The one service I have that works this way is AT&T mobile International Calling and Data. I pay $10 USD for any day that I use the service outside the US and Canada. It is always “on” so I don’t have to worry about enabling it before trips or canceling it when trips end.
I agree it would be great if more services were like this.
This is a tangent, but I would bet that your AT&T service also covers Mexico without the $10/day fee. My wife's does, as does my Verizon. Note: AT&T didn't have a partner in Morocco on the $10/day plan when I was there in 2019, but VZW did. Do check which countries are covered.
Ah yes it does. Which I guess is another benefit of this setup. I don’t need to know which countries are included with the base plan as they only charge extra for the countries that aren’t
That’s an interesting idea. I wonder if, for some services, the outcome for the supplier would be better.
I think I’d be likely to subscribe to more TV services if they only charged me on months I used them. I’d feel I could just let them sit dormant in months they had no shows I wanted to watch, but I think I’d use them without much hesitation when some new show I was interested in became available.
From a provider standpoint, I’m guessing they would lose more revenue from existing subscribers not using it vs. what they’d gain from new (often dormant) subscribers.
It's a great model for any younger, relatively unknown provider for this reason. Although, the $9/mo Netflix subscription (I can't remember the actual price point, but it worked out if you watched more than 2 movies in a month) totally beat the pants off the Blockerbuster late fees / missing title fees on a $1/film/day pay-as-you-go model, from a consumer standpoint.
This is an interesting idea but would need deeper adjustements on what the user is paying for.
For instance Netflix charges you for the next month you'll be using it. So at the time of charge, it has no idea if you'll use the service within the month or not, thus only the "cancel" part could happen. Moving to a post-usage payment can be done, but it becomes weird when the payment doesn't go through and quickly transforms into an open door for fraudulent activity.
Auto-canceling could be the best option, yet it would be an issue if the user actually expected to use the service the next month. They can still resubscribe again before using it again, but that's an extra step and also means the billing date gets reset, which might not desired by the user depending on how they manage their budget.
Basically, it's looks like a simple enough idea but the devil's in the details and it requires a decent amount of work to come out with something both the service and the user can easily understand and manage efficiently.
Yes, it becomes an in service credit system, which is pretty clear to the user and most of us experencied that at some point.
It becomes messy when you have more credits than you could ever consume, as the service will be reluctant to emit refunds (making them harder to get also pushes the user to consume them instead...yes, dark patterns...), but I think it's a good system.
I personnaly think it works better when it's not auto renewed (so not a subscription), as it engages the user in the ownership of the credit and naturally reduces the refund part. Getting new credits can still be as simple as pressing a button, so friction can be reduced.
>For instance Netflix charges you for the next month you'll be using it.
Yes, and if you didn't use it for the next month you could "freeze" the subscription for the user. Basically as if the user cancelled it on the last day. It should be easy for the user to continue it since the payment method is already setup and authorized. Send an email like "Hey, we noticed you haven't been using our service lately. We went ahead and cancelled your subscription. Welcome back anytime."
For what it's worth my perspective is for a service that is free to use, but subscribers get extra "free" stuff. Basically the purpose of subscription is to get loyal customers who do not use competitors.
Wouldn't that work the same with an email a week before renewal day, saying "Hey, you haven't used the service most of this month, would you like to pause it before renewal kicks in ? We will let you reactivate it with a month free next time when you ask to resume."
That keeps the user in control of the situation, as a service you've been transparent, and you can still issue full refunds to users who come to you after a while explaining they actually wanted to cancel but forgot.
My basic POV in all of this is, the user enters the agreement on their terms, and it's weird to have the service acting cute and unilaterally suspend itself.
As a real world example, it would feel like leasing a car and have the dealer take it back during the night and stop the lease because you didn't drive last month. Sure you could just phone and they bring back the car, but why in the first place ?
I mean we could give them a "free" month as on off ramp, pay exactly the same as we do today but if you don't use it for a full month it gets paused, and that would still be dramatically better for consumers than the status quo.
You seem to be describing something like a credit system ?
It would be weird to get billed for December on a service because you used it a few times in November; that can be explained, but with enough time between the use and the billing it would easily look like a fraudulent charge to the user, and if they decide to cancel it at that time, they'll still be stuck for a full month.
That could make more sense if you're burning through "coins" and need to purchase new ones once you don't have any.
Come to think of it, mobile data billing system would also be close to that, except mobile ISPs can afford to require KYC documents up to a legal ID which drastically reduces the potential for fraud.
Do you feel like you don't understand my intended mechanism? Because that language was solely intended to communicate what I was thinking. Which part was unclear?
Yes, you're pushing an idea that has deeper ramification on how the billing works and how you explain it to the user.
It goes from a simple "the user pays every month" to "the user sometimes pays, sometimes doesn't, they have to guess by themselves when and why they
'll pay, it all depends on what happened in the past month". How you deal with the extra complexity from the user and from the contracting side is completely unclear. It might be surprising, but many users care a lot about understanding what and how they pay for.
Perhaps it's not important to your point and it's just an idea that doesn't need to ever see the light of day. But I feel we've been using subscriptions for long enough that improvement ideas could come with a clearer picture on how we deal with the change.
Slack does exactly this, but then it makes business sense for both parties because they can tell a company "buy licenses for all your employees, but don't worry we won't charge you if they send less than N messages a month". When dealing with individual consumers the service doesn't really have any incentive not to charge you.
That’s because subscriptions aren’t about providing a product, it’s about creating stable cash flow. Literally every subscription product could be charged on a per item basis, but they don’t because they want to create stable cash flow.
Subscriptions are just the gym membership model, where they hope people forget about it. Or when it comes to SaaS, the ransomware model. (“Those are some fine files you got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to them.”)
There’s a sneaky reason to suspend their service if they’re not using it: to capture some revenue by avoiding chargebacks or refunds for the entire idle period. If they fees stop getting charged, past periods are likely not going to be audited and are at less risk of claw back. Obviously, this itself is a dark pattern masquerading as beneficial to customers.
I think his argument is that in general their results would be worse because of the timezone and culture difference, thus earning less on average. I think there might be an element of truth there, but probably not enough to explain the entire difference, only a small part of it.
It's not that Indian culture somehow isn't as good. It's that there's sufficient supply there to fill all the positions at lower pay. If the exact same people manage to get a visa and transfer to SF, they will instantly start getting paid $100,000s more. Likewise, If Google moves an entire org, doing all the exact same work, from NYC to Raleigh, NC, it will cut everyone's pay by 25%.
I personally am moving from completely remote to completely remote but from somewhere else, specifically because my company pays more than the difference in CoL so it's "free" for me. From the company's point of view, I just became more expensive for no reason and at no gain to them, but that's their policy so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sorry I just realized I confused your website with glassdoor. I just checked out levels and it seems awesome in comparison. What I like in particular is that I do not need to login, which is why I cannot use glassdoor.
