Netflix

Pay is great.

Free food.

Good 401k match.

Culture deck is a bunch of lies. The reality is this:

a) It is hard to find "stunning collages" because hiring is broken. If you are good at talking and repeating culture jargon in the interview, you can easily get hired. You can look on LinkedIn to see the qualifications, background, and education level of our engineers. Many engineers here are from "bodyshop" Indian IT firms (the likes of Infosys, TCS, etc.), who came onsite and simply switched to Netflix because they can TALK.

b) Informed captains (mostly managers) are technically incompetent and have no clue on making any informed, data-driven decisions. Decisions are heavily driven by politics.

c) The whole push of open and honest feedback is just a sham to make things look good. Providing critical feedback is impossible here, as it mostly backfires and results in getting fired. So people just keep providing rosy feedback.

d) If you were hired into a bad team or don't like the work, it is very, very hard to switch teams. Even if some other manager is willing to take you onto their team, the current manager usually retaliates by triggering a "keeper test" and you get fired. Essentially, your manager tells the new hiring manager that this person was a bad performer, so switching teams to not get fired.

e) There is no career growth for ICs here; everyone has the same title and level. However, in management, there is a clear growth path – double standards.

Provide opportunities for anonymous feedback; otherwise, leadership will keep living in the dark. If feedback is your value, accept all forms of feedback.