YOW2018 CTO Summit: Working at netflix
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This document summarizes Brendan Gregg's experiences working at Netflix for over 4.5 years. Some key points include: - The company culture at Netflix is openly documented and encourages independent decision making, open communication, and sharing information broadly. - Gregg's first meeting involved an expected "intense debate" but was actually professional and respectful. - Netflix values judgment, communication, curiosity, courage, and other traits that allow the culture and architecture to complement each other. - The cloud architecture is designed to be resilient through practices like chaos engineering and rapid deployments without approvals, in line with the culture of freedom and responsibility.
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YOW2018 CTO Summit: Working at netflix
- 1. Working at Netflix Brendan Gregg YOW! CTO Summit, 2018
- 2. Experience: My First Meeting ● March 13th, 2014 ● CentOS -> Ubuntu migration details ● Was told to expect “intense debate”
- 3. Experience: My First Meeting (Reality) ● No raised voices, no personal attacks ● Professional, respectful, and committed to what’s right for Netflix Netflix LA office?
- 4. Working at Netflix: My Experiences This is: ● My experiences from >4.5 years ● A culture worth sharing This is not: ● Written by HR or PR ● An official guide (This is: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture)
- 5. Experience: Job Interview ● It sounded too good to be true ● I asked many questions, trying to find the catch (there wasn’t one) ● It changed how I thought about employment
- 6. Worst thing for me at Netflix: When we run out of coke zero in the F2 fridge ● I can either walk down to the F1 fridge, or up the F3 fridge...
- 7. Worst thing for me at Netflix? Too many awesome things to work on, not enough time ● eBPF tools ● PMC analysis ● Kernel performance ● JVM internals tracing ● Distributed systems ● Flame graph differentials ● eBPF latency heat maps ● Perf training courses ● ...
- 8. Netflix, F2, 5:30pm on a Wednesday … that doesn’t mean we work long hours
- 9. Company Culture Other companies: ● Learned by word of mouth ● … or trial and error Netflix: ● Publicly documented: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture (and yes, it’s true)
- 10. ● share information openly, broadly, and deliberately ● encourage independent decision-making by employees ● are extraordinarily candid with each other ● keep only our highly effective people ● avoid rules From: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture At Netflix, we:
- 11. Experience: Leap second bug ● Independent decision making
- 12. Netflix Philosophy ● Freedom and Responsibility ● Context not Control ● Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled ● Dream Team ● Disagree Openly From: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
- 13. Experience: Java Framepointer ● Freedom and Responsibility
- 14. Netflix Values ● Judgement ● Communication ● Curiosity ● Courage ● Passion From: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture ● Selflessness ● Innovation ● Inclusion ● Integrity ● Impact
- 15. Experience: Crashing Production ● Curiosity ● Courage ● Communication ● Integrity
- 16. Netflix Cloud Architecture ● Resilient to error ○ Chaos engineering ● Rapid deployments ○ No approval process ● Open source libraries The cloud architecture and the culture are complimentary by design
- 17. The Netflix Cloud A resilient architecture
- 18. ● Particularly selfish jerks, who may: ○ Bully, humiliate, manipulate, mislead, and exploit others ○ Only support self-promoting tech ○ Become a negative role model ● Damage includes: ○ Silenced opinions ○ Demoralized staff & turnover ○ Company inefficiency ● Netflix staff are respectful & supportive Personal Favorite: No Brilliant Jerks. http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html
- 19. Not a fit for everyone ● Culture deck ● Cloud Engineering in Los Gatos
- 20. Take Aways: Can you implement these? ● No brilliant jerks ● Freedom and responsibility ● Openly disagree (respectfully) ● Cloud microservices & redundancy ● Encourage independent decision-making ● Share information openly, broadly, and deliberately ...