> Sounds like being on a sports team at a high level.
In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix) even though you are in the top of the world. With the high level sports you get some kind of satisfaction that you got further than anyone (or some other reason beyond money) and not for the money; most people at Netflix probably work there for the money.
>In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix)
Can most people who work at Netflix join another company for comparable pay? From what I've heard: No. Netflix often justifies their culture by pointing out they pay the highest. If you look at a thread below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18316176) you'll see that $400K guaranteed as a senior developer is normal.
They also used to have a generous severance pay - well above industry average. That again was used to justify their policy: Hire the best, and give them a generous token of appreciation when we replace them. The claim was they don't want people to be worried about being fired, because whether they stay or leave, they'll get good money.
(Not sure if the severance package is good these days - my information is quite dated).
The question of course is how much staff works on video tech. Even at a company like Google, most people are not working on Google search. There are teams that do all kinds of work behind the scenes to make this happen. Like Build teams, SRE, QR DevOps etc.
The tech part is hard, but is largely solved. AWS has today made it easy to play the scale game. The unsolved riddle there is affordability not tech. That's the whole point behind Amazon Prime anyway. If Netflix was using their infrastructure to be successful, they might as well have done it themselves and they have.
Another big part about these companies is they oversell the role of technology, and the role of tech people in their success. Content is way important a thing for these companies than tech will ever be. Interesting content to consume is what keeps these people in the game.
There is a reason why some thing like New York Times is still around. And they are not even a tech company.
In the sports that doesn't pay too much (for most people working at Netflix) even though you are in the top of the world. With the high level sports you get some kind of satisfaction that you got further than anyone (or some other reason beyond money) and not for the money; most people at Netflix probably work there for the money.