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I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too. Our engineers are fucking moron
by walrushunter 2y ago
I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too.
Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 2y agoI can +1 with a similar anecdote. They obviously have some really good engineers, but many low-tier ones as well. No idea how long they stay there, though. I'm watching the fight now and have experienced the buffering issues. Bit embarrassing for a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this. Also, yeah, 900k TC and whatnot but irl you get this. Mediocre.
- spencerchubb 2y agolivestream is quite different from streaming pre-processed video, so I'm not surprised by the scaling issues
- moralestapia 2y agoI know. But given how much they spend on engineering, how much time they had and how important this event is ... mediocre performance.
- jhugo 2y agoAll true, but this part of your GP comment: > a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this … isn’t true. From the couch, watching Suits and watching a live sports match may seem similar but they’re very different technical problems to solve.
- Moru 2y agoOr in other words: In one case the "stream" is stored on a harddrive not far away from you, only competing for bandwidth in the last section to you. In the other case the "stream" is comming over the Internet to you and everyone else at the same time.
- katbyte 2y agoi was mildly interested and managed to find a pirate livestream, it didn't have buffering issues lol
- dh2022 2y agoWell the pirate site was not live-streaming to 100 million users…
- anakaine 2y agoI have to wonder if its a regional thing. I'm watching from the southern pacific in HD, and its been excellent.
- diab0lic 2y agoI’d imagine it is fairly dependent on which cache you’re connected to.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- reagan83 2y agoCurb your enthusiasm had a good segment of episodes that were a parody on Netflix and how they shifted hiring from merit to other criteria.
- indigodaddy 2y agoCurb did? What season/episodes?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoIts all ego when these companies think they hire the best.
- 0xpgm 2y agoAn engineering manager who thinks his engineers are morons and dumb? I have questions..
- wordofx 2y agoNone of the Fortune 500 companies hire top talent. They have a few good people but 98% of the engineers are average at best. Over paid.
- qingcharles 2y agoThis is every dev house I've worked at. For most people (mostly not the ones on HN), coding is a 9-5 job. No ambition. Just lines of code. Go home. I don't know there is anything particularly wrong with that. You just have to accept most staff at any corporation are simply just average. There has to be an average for there to be better and worse.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoI've never seen a team that has somehow managed to hire exclusively morons. Even the shittiest of call center jobs and construction crews have a few people with enough brain cells to tie their shoelaces. Have you considered that maybe you're being overly harsh about your co-workers? Maybe take the fact that one of them was hired by a top paying employer as a sign that you should improve your own ability to judge skill?
- theendisney 2y agoI've seen tons of them! The formula is to create conditions that will make even slightly competent people leave. They hire their morron nephew, he is always 30 min late then they moan when you are 5 min late because the parking lot was blocked by their car. He always leaves 2 hours early while you do overtime that they regularly forget to pay for. Your day is filled with your own work PLUS that of your retarded coworkers who only drink coffee while joking about you doing their work. You are not as fast as the last guy! haha! If something goes wrong the morrons collectively blame you, just like the last time. You get a formal warning. etc etc The other normal person they hire is let go after 2 days because they complaint which means they didnt fit the team. And so on If he still works there the morron who left was less of a.
- TylerE 2y agoAt least half of that is on you. NEVER work unpaid/unlogged OT.
- scott_w 2y agoCan’t speak for every place but that’s not always an option. As a teenager, I worked at Sports Direct where the management would regularly work us after our allotted hours and bar us putting the extra time onto our timesheet. If I recall correctly, the company eventually got pulled for it but the money they’d have saved over years would have outweighed the fine. The timesheets were on paper so good luck putting your real hours on without your manager, who files it, finding out. I’d be amazed if they ever cleaned up their act.
- djbusby 2y agoWhy is your team morons? Kind of disparaging maybe? Fish rots from the head situation?
- that_guy_iain 2y agoHaving worked with a bunch of guys who have gone on to "top teams", I no longer believe they have top teams. My fav was the guy who said the system could scale indefinitely after it literally fell on its ass from too much traffic. He couldn't understand that just because Lambdas my themselves can scale, they are limited by the resources they use, so just ignored it and insisted that it could. The same guy also kept on saying we should change the TPEG standard because he didn't like how it worked. And these companies are seriously pretending they've got the best and brightest. If that's really true, I really need to find another profession.
- YZF 2y agoI've worked for many companies that said they hired the best. And to be honest when I hire I also try to hire good people. I think I could hire better if a) I had an open cheque, b) I was running coolest project in the universe. I did hire for some interesting projects but nothing close to an open cheque. Even under these conditions it's tough to find great people. You can go after people with a proven track record but even that doesn't always guarantee their next project will be as successful. The reality though is that large companies with thousands of people generally end up having average people. Some company may hire more PhD's. But on average those aren't better software engineers than non-PhD's. Some might hire people who are strong competitive coders, but that also on average isn't really that strong of a signal for strong engineers. Once you have a mix of average people, on a curve, which is the norm, the question becomes do you have an environment where the better people can be successful. In many corporate environments this doesn't happen. Better engineers may have obstacles put in front of them or they can forced out of the organization. This is natural because for most organizations can be more of a political question than a technical question. Smaller organizations, that are very successful (so can meet my two criterias) and can be highly selective or are highly desirable, can have better teams. By their nature as smaller organizations those teams can also be effective. As organizations grow the talent will spread out towards average and the politics/processes/debt/legacy will make those teams less effective.
- that_guy_iain 2y agoTo be fair, when you need to hire hundreds or thousands of people, you gotta hire average people. The best is a finite resource and not all of the best want to work for FAANG or any megacorp. I used to want to work at a FAANG-like company when I was just starting out thinking they were going to be full of amazing devs. But over the years, I've seen some of the worst devs go to these companies so that just destroyed that illusion. And the more you hear about the sort of work they do, it just sounds boring compared to startups.
- kkielhofner 2y ago> I'm an engineering manager How are you involved in the hiring process? > Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. Very indicative of a toxic culture you seem to have been pulled in to and likely have contributed to by this point given your language and broad generalizations. Describing a wide group of people you're also responsible for as "fucking morons" says more about you than them.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoReputation usually lags reality by 5+ years. See: Google.
- renewiltord 2y agoAbsolutely right. Netflix was once all about the sports team mentality. Now they’re Man Utd.
- scott_w 2y agoGiven Man Utd under Ferguson used to be THE football team, you could say they were always Man Utd and still are ;-)
- renewiltord 2y agoHaha indeed, but I’m a gooner. You’d never see me admit that.
- Lammy 2y agoI hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.
- geodel 2y agoBtw how do you know your current manager is not doing that.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agodumbness is ranking intelligence, which is a positive trait, dumbness is just a metric for how often intelligence fails. Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons. You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.
- JamesBarney 2y agoAlmost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes. In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"
- whstl 2y ago
- spike021 2y agoHmm. Engineering managers should be setting the team culture and determining best criteria for extending an offer to a candidate. If theres a problem with the hiring process I'd look for the closest source that could or should be fixing it. I don't think I'd want to work for you.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- geodel 2y agoIt mostly makes sense to me. From their bombastic blogs to github projects full of overwrought Enterprise java design patterns. The only thing great about Netflix is it pays a lot more.
- globalnode 2y agothis is why managers get a bad rap. what proportion think like this? hopefully not a large one but i do worry. ultimately if the team sucks its because of the management. theyre the ones with the greatest power to change things for the better.
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago> I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too. Apparently he was smart enough to get away from the Fortune 500 company he worked at, reporting to yourself, and "got a pay raise too." > Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. See above. > If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix. Maybe you don't know the talent within your own organization. Which is entirely understandable given your proclamation: Our engineers are fucking morons. Then again, maybe this person who left your organization is accurately described as such, which really says more about the Fortune 500 company employing him and presumably continues to employ yourself. IOW, either the guy left to get out from under an EM who says he is a "fucking moron" or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level.
- JCharante 2y ago> or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level. sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI was consulting at a place, there was a very bad programmer whose code looked sort of like this cost arrayIneed = []; const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => { if(item.hasProp) { arrayIneed.push(item); } }); return arrayIneed; the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo. he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise. I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
- midtake 2y agoTop troll bro
- 29athrowaway 2y agoWhat are the chances that your entire engineering team is entirely composed of low performers or people with bad attitude or whatever you designate as "fucking morons"? It's more likely that you are bad at managing, growing and motivating your team. Even if it was true, to refer to your team in this way makes you look like you are not ready for management. Your duty is to get the most out of the team, and that mindset won't help you.
- notadoomer236 2y agoDon’t agree. Sometimes you can observe the world around you, and it’s not pretty. Are they not allowed to observe the truth as they see it? What if they are right?
- ohyes 2y agoSometimes if everyone else is the problem you are the problem.
- admksx45v65uqpw 2y ago[dead]
- gamblor956 2y agoOur engineers are fucking morons If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron at this Fortune 500 company because he was reporting to a manager who was calling him and the entire team morons and he didn't feel the need to go above and beyond for that manager. Also, highly likely that it was the manager that was the moron and not everyone around him.
- throwawaythekey 2y ago> If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron It's also possible that there's very little correlation between capability, reputation and salary. Don't we all know someone who is overpaid? There are more than a few well known cases of particular employers who select for overpaid employees...
- krzyk 2y ago> Don't we all know someone who is overpaid? Yes, usually managers.
- normie3000 2y ago> well known cases of particular employers who select for overpaid employees Not well-known enough, apparently. Where should I be applying?
- throwawaythekey 2y agoThere are different forms of overpayment but to give some examples: - The recent story of AWS using serverless for video processing comes to mind [1]. - Google is renowned for rest and vest. - Many government jobs pay more than their private counterparts. - Military contractors - Most of the healthcare industry - Lobbyists [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811741
- 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- reactordev 2y agoSounds like he got a better deal. If this is how you describe your team, I suspect they are all submitting their resumes hoping to get away from you.
- cultofmetatron 2y ago> Our engineers are fucking morons. I interviewed at Netflix a few years ago; with several of their engineers. One thing I cannot say is that they are morons. their interview process is top notch too and while I was ultimately rejected, I used their format as the base template for how I started hiring at my company.
- silisili 2y agoI don't have a dog in this fight, but you typically use your A players for hiring/interviews. It can be both true that Netflix has God tier talent and a bunch of idiots. In fact, that's probably true of most places. I guess the ratio matters more.
- parpfish 2y agooR god tier talent and a bunch of other god tier talent that decided to coast and cash their fat checks
- tayo42 2y agowhat seemed good about it that makes different then any other hiring process that seems detached from the job?
- blinded 2y agoYou ever thought they were doing the bare minimum and studying at night to leave?
- justmarc 2y agoYour job must be truly awful.
- throw10920 2y agoI'm going to avoid leaving a zero-effort response like "actually you're the problem" like half of the replies and contribute: Why do you call your engineers morons? Is it a lack of intelligence, a lack of wisdom, a lack of experience, inability to meet deadlines, reading comprehension, or something else? I wonder if Netflix is just hiring for different criteria (e.g. you want people who will make thoughtful decisions while they want people who have memorized all the leetcode problems).
- _giorgio_ 2y agoI don't understand why nobody here believes you. There's no reason to doubt what you say, probably people identify with the mistreated one. Why?
- horns4lyfe 2y agoBecause the idea that all the engineers that work at his large company are morons is absurd. Anyone in that situation that believes that and even more, states it, is just making their own character flaws apparent.
- sgarland 2y agoIt’s hyperbole, like a teacher complaining to others, “my kids were all crazed animals today.” I’ve worked with engineers where I had to wonder how they found their computer every morning. I can easily see how a few of those would make you bitter and angry.
- _giorgio_ 2y agoLet me think about it... All the engineers in MY company are morons. They're just bureucrats.
- horns4lyfe 2y agoSounds like you’re a good match for their team then
- dang 2y ago(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154036.)