Netflix

It's a decent JOB (emphasis on purpose) if you are looking for a heads-down, monotonous coding job.

If you can manage a decent amount of work and the perspective, you will have a stable pay check.

I was sold on all the culture stuff and drank the Kool-Aid at first. After spending a lot of time at Netflix, my perspective has changed for the worse. What good is the sales pitch if you can't deliver?

Some organizations are terrible (I am not talking about IT/back-office type groups) when it comes to recognizing people, allowing (forget about encouraging) their growth. No career, no recognition. In a way, it's a career dead-end. It's a JOB.

Recent break-neck hiring has brought in a TON of managers (e.g., instead of bringing in 1 project manager, they've hired >1 managers). Believe it or not, it takes 4 times the amount of meetings (compared to 2 years ago at Netflix) to get half of what we used to get done in the same period of time.

Today, all of the talk about culture (except firing people for no good reason), freedom, etc., are just BS.

No family insurance (medical, dental, etc.). The company only pays for the employee, but in reality, they don't care.

Apparently, top management (who've been at Netflix forever) thinks engineers who've been at Netflix for more than a couple of years are ineligible to move into a management role because they won't be able to hire people. Seriously. Again, this seems to be applied differently in different organizations.

I would love to hear from the management about what data they have to back this up.

Another career killer: Hire people who 'know' their job. i.e., an engineer converting to a manager means that person has to 'learn' how to be a manager. Given all the recent (Q4 2011) news about Netflix, decide for yourself about the management 'knowing'.