Comment by ericmcer

My experience has been that the talent density is the main difference. Netflix tackles huge problems with a small number of engineers. I think one angle of complexity you may be missing is efficiency - both in engineering cost and infrastructure cost.

Also YouTube has _excellent_ engineering (e.g. Vitess in the data space), and they are building atop an excellent infrastructure (e.g. Borg and the godly Google network). It's worth noting though that the whole Netflix infrastructure team is probably smaller than a small to medium satellite org at Google.

As soon as a streaming service starts having availability issues, it will garner a reputation very quickly and lose customers just as quickly. Being able to serve N amount of content reliably and consistently (even if less than M amount) is still a strong demonstration of good engineering practice in my opinion.

On that point, I can't honestly recall a time I had Netflix streaming issues that weren't because of a problem on my side. Maybe I've just been lucky though, so ymmv.

Hype for the engineering culture? Helps attract the right talent. It is a relatively small team that is...ah, heavily motivated to come up with good solutions around the clock. And they maintain an excellent tech blog.

Don't get me wrong; serving the level of traffic they handle isn't easy to scale or do cost-effectively around the globe. They are also considered by some to be pioneers in chaos engineering, and made headlines years ago making a competition to find the "best" suggestion algorithm.

You're probably right, but Netflix does a good job building their engineering brand by writing up and sharing their technical work publicly.

Netflix still has to serve 20k videos to 300million people. That's about a 750million hours of streamed content. Serving that content is challenging.

Then they have their ad network on top of it. Then they have their analytics apparatus. Then they probably have a whole suite of tools for content producers. Then they probably have a bunch of janky tools for things that didn't exist as products 15 years ago.

Seems reasonable to me if you put in a little more thought about the problem and scale.

On top of that, their competition didn’t need any of that technical adeptness to catch up in the span of a decade or so.

There is now zero value to the technology advantage of Netflix. Perhaps its impressive that they managed to become a new major studio because of that early success, but we could argue that the incumbent studios’ inability to snuff them out is more of a failure of their leadership than anything impressive about Netflix itself. Heck, the incumbents gave Netflix their place in the market by licensing content to them in the first place.

So why did Netflix need to build this “pro sports team-like” team of highly paid technologists where they actively fire/lay off low performers again? Netflix was bragging all over the internet about how their culture is so different and better.

I think ideas like this are something engineers should keep in mind in their careers. You can have the technical advantage but the money and the business environment wins in the end. If you’re in an oligopoly market like Netflix it doesn’t matter that you had a 5-10 year lead and the best technology, Disney and Time Warner and everyone else already had content production, Apple and Amazon have unlimited money.