Comment by dangus

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.