Netflix

There are some teams doing progressive, technically interesting work: content encoding, some machine learning teams.

Most teams aren't working on anything very innovative. The tech is your standard microservices architecture, and everything gets open-sourced, with a blog post and a nice conference talk. Eventually these projects wither because no one maintains them, and sometimes they don't even solve very effectively the problems they tout, but it's good PR for the engineers and 'leaders'.

Culture of fear is real. My manager was toxic; he loved to talk about diversity even though he was the biggest mansplainer in the room. My interview was interesting; it was a monologue of his rather unique theories of engineering management, most of which was a bunch of gibberish culled from the culture deck. When I got there, I found him to be a pretty ineffective manager. He didn't have any engineering vision, no idea of strategy, and wasn't technical.

If you get into an interview room and the manager spends 45 minutes talking about himself, that's probably a sign to run!

Pick and choose what team you join. You can have either a pretty cool time with some smart folks, or have to deal with narcissists who believe their own PR.

Every time I run into a Netflixer, they've either:

• Just been fired
• Or tell me stories about people in common we know who've been fired.

Management doesn't care about my advice, and they won't care about yours, too. lol.