I compiled bug lists for Netflix for many years, hoping to eventually get a chance to work there and:

• Fix the darn bugs.
• Help them innovate their way out of the ultimate commodification of the extremely crowded streaming video market.

Early in my career, I spent four formative years at a company with a culture similar to that described in Netflix's culture document. This high-individual-responsibility culture is how I came to approach all my positions at every company I then worked for. I was eagerly anticipating a kind of 'returning home' glow and familiarity during the interview and, hopefully, day-to-day work at Netflix.

However, it was a very strange interview: very confrontational. Was he just trying to provoke me and see how I would argue my case? I did argue my case each time, but he refused to, or pretended to, not hear me and never acknowledged having heard or understood my points.

He insisted my intention to help grow Netflix's market cap by 10X meant that I liked the size of corps that had room to grow 10X, as opposed to my desire, expressed several times, for my ideas and efforts impacting 10X growth to the bottom line. I believe any one of us is capable of this, given the opportunity and the will to do so, especially for such a rich, technology-powered market like streaming video.

He insisted EngProd was exclusive of toolkits, frameworks (and debuggers and IDEs) and that I had no business saying I was passionate about it, even though I had worked on all four of those things in the past.

He stated that any addition to the UI framework would have to be run by all 70-100 people who use the framework in order to get their buy-in first. I did not mention that I personally thought this to be an onerous anti-pattern, but I did say that I would probably find this to be the most challenging part of the position. I am very familiar with UI tech, and nothing about what they were currently doing would have been a challenge—just fun as heck. Thereafter, he insisted over and over that, apparently because I said it was a challenge, I was incapable of doing it. This was instead of me just acknowledging that, as I said, this would be one of my primary focuses until the challenge was overcome. Even after I described how I recently worked on a product that had approximately 20 stakeholders from 3 different organizations and that I had successfully navigated this situation, he expressed his opinion that I would not be up to this task.

I also mentioned that I had been a consultant for much of my career. He then insisted that I would leave the company earlier than average and, because I was a consultant, I had been able to write crap software and just leave to go to the next assignment, never having to maintain my own code. Despite my average time at a gig being longer than his average term of employment, and longer than most devs in the Bay Area, and that I had left several positions with code less than 1 bug per 10K lines of code, he, true to form, remained unconvinced.

Like a troll, he insisted that he was right about everything and would not acknowledge any point I would make.

Finally, I asked why they were still hacking React, trying to make it performant. Why didn't they just write their own little toolkit to run on top of all the low-performance platforms they support? His answer was that "the UI is not a core competency," and they couldn't afford the engineering resources to support such an effort.

Well, that certainly explains a few things.

Didn't talk in all caps, but... this would be my manager?

After processing all this, I now understand why Netflix's UI is the way it is (see any comment thread) and has so many bugs. A current annoyance is that it pauses for half a second about one minute before the end of every video segment as it loads the following segment. Oh, and now the left arrow of their horizontal-scrolling videos snaps away, and the right arrow appears in the middle of the screen.

Clue to Netflix: the UI is how you compete with the other dozen or so players in this increasingly crowded market. What happens when relying only on content—increasingly boring content—for differentiation has many historical precedents. As I click back and forth between Prime, Paramount+, HBOMax, Hulu, Disney+, and the rest, I have to wonder about the future of this FAANG.

Tell me about your background.