Good E5/L5/64/senior SWE: consider Netflix?
Netflix SWE here, previously at other FAANG companies. Last time I was switching jobs, I spent a long time on research. Netflix came up with some advantages (pay, freedom & responsibility culture), but with some possible drawbacks as well (high pressure, quick to fire, bad work life balance). I wanted to offer my data point of what's it like at Netflix, for other folks who might be in a similar situation (thinking about it, but having second thoughts due to reputation). The advantages are real. Especially for someone who's an independent, well performing senior SWE in another tech company: there's much more freedom and much less process at Netflix than in other companies. You can spend much more time being productive without the 2 week code reviews, 20 page design docs or 15 people's approvals. Pay is really good (search on blind). Managers have way fewer reports than what I was used to. You actually are important; as an individual you have more influence on the company bottom line than elsewhere (due to the company size, but also because you spend time working on things that matter, rather than fighting red tape). People are great, I've made more friends at Netflix than at my previous companies. I have never really felt the disadvantages that I was scared of before coming to Netflix. It's is a large tech company and has to compete for good SWEs, they couldn't afford to exploit their employees. Unlimited vacation is a thing: I don't keep track, but 6 weeks a year is nothing special. People are let go, but it's never a surprise for anyone - in fact, I like it as a technique of dealing with low performers. It's very quickly obvious that if you're good, you don't need to worry about ever being fired. Production outages happen and there is a blameless postmortem culture. WLB is a thing. Managers and colleagues care about your well being. Expectations are reasonable, delays, bugs and bad quarters can all happen. Questions? Ask me. Also, the team I work for is hiring (in short: backend, but works on customer-facing features, Java microservices, very visible within the company). It's apparently hard to hire good people, so if you are good, hit me up. I'll be happy to chat. #swe #netflix #culture
TC or GTFO!!
Meh. I'll GTFO. Search blind for overall salary info, you'll get many more data points than just mine.
You don't fit into the Blind culture. Good riddance.
Just wish they paid equity instead of all cash. 4 year grant upside is one of the most exciting parts of the industry. But you feel the amount of cash outweighs it?
Look up the stock option program. There's no stock, but there are options. Pretty interesting.
What stops someone from buying the stock on robinhood or something?
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How do you review design? How are the internal tools? How is the oncall load? Have you seen or heard of someone bring fired due to politics or some reason other than performance?
My man asking the real questions!
Internal tools are quite good, and getting better. We license some stuff (eg. storage) and have our own company-wide productivity engineering team as well (eg. monitoring, delivery). Code review, code search, deployment and configuration management, build management it's all there. We have a few people working on internal tools just for our org too. Oncall load - I'm oncall 2 weeks out of ~15 (1 as primary, 1 as secondary / build cop). Urgent production issues happen maybe once a month. Very serious fires maybe once a year. Most of the oncall time is spent looking into less urgent alerts and answering questions from other teams. Typical oncall workload from everything combined is maybe... 20% of the time you are oncall. This will vary by team and by person. Among the teams I know, oncall is not a big problem, nor a big burden. Design review is interesting. "Freedom and responsibility" means that it's on me to figure out when to do a design review and "how much". Your peers will course-correct: if you make a big change with no appropriate review first, be prepared for questions. Is this process perfect? Oh no. Does it work well in practice? I think so. Does the benefits outweigh the downsides? Absolutely. In general, design reviews still happen when they should most of the time. But *you* are responsible by design-reviewing your changes, instead of an almighty rule deciding for you. To my knowledge, people get fired only due to low performance. All the firings I saw were good decisions, and all were given a long time to improve. There is very little politics overall.
Do they have megabackdoor 401k? When are they going back to the office? How common is it to see people with less than 3 YOE working at the company as a SWE? How does career development work when there are no levels (does your time there translate to a difficult time jumping back to FAANG at 1 level higher)?
Yes there is megabackdoor Roth 401k/IRA. Offices are already open, but at reduced capacity. I haven't met anyone here with less than 5 YOE. I'm relatively new, so I can't speak to career development.
Do you know C++ oriented teams at Netflix?
I don't, sorry
So what's the main programing language? Java?
Iβm a new grad (~6 months experience) and would love to eventually make it to Netflix after a few years. What advice do you have for making the most of my early career to optimize for getting to Netflix eventually?
Become a senior level engineer: senior technical skills (clean coding, testing, design, know about storage and distributed computing). But also senior soft skills: good communication, make projects happen, navigate ambiguity. Look up senior level job descriptions at FAANG companies and develop these skills. Find a mentor you look up to and work to become like them. Good luck
Thank you for this! Looking up existing senior positions to help guide my roadmap is bloody brilliant
how important is the "culture fit" during interview? any suggestions on how to prepare that round?
I'd say it's important. Recruiters will suggest that you read the culture memo, and interviewers will likely discuss aspects of that memo with you.
What exactly does Netflix do to avoid the lengthy code reviews?
I think code review process is very team dependent. But in a microservice architecture, every team is on call for their own services. So naturally a balance between speed and quality will be found. Some teams do better than others. And bad teams face high pressures to improve service reliability, and their manager can be quickly let go if they can't fix their own shit.
There's no approvals needed for making code changes. So no code review gatekeeper jerk can stop you from just shipping your changes. Netflix is all senior people though, with aversion for political games in the workplace and with focus on what matters. So no one is interested in lengthy code reviews
Can I DM you?
Go for it!
Can I DM too ?