[sadikkapadia1]

Netflix is no different to any other company. Your happiness depends on your boss. And even single teams go through bad patches.

Some background. I wrote Netflix's recommendation system. Netflix later went on to take part in fraud against USPTO which now led to Netflix with no ownership of it's "most important technology". Xavier Amatrain https://www.linkedin.com/in/xamatriain/ was my boss. Xavier went on to hire lots of staff to try and replace my system and was unable to do so. In the end he started claiming credit for systems I had written without understanding the technology. He still presents his incorrect knowledge in public conferences. The result is that for 5 years Netflix has been running my alpha system without improving the technology (various techniques that Xavier tried and k-means, LDA and deep-learning). Netflix never did push a version I had written with 40% greater "click-through" rate, 3 times greater speed and order of magnitude less memory.

One example conversation I had with Xavier after he left Netflix (para-phrasing of course): Me: How is my system doing? Xavier: We don't use it anymore. We stopped using your system 1 week after you left. Me: Really what do you use? Xavier: I cannot tell you it is secret. Me: Who wrote it? Xavier: You don't know him. We hired him after you and he wrote and pushed the new algorithm. Me: So that new person, wrote a new recommendation system; pushed it into A/B test; got test results and then pushed it into production in 1 week. Xavier: Yes - he is better than you. All was this is a lie (and not out of character), because I have been in touch with other engineers post-Netflix and in fact I've talked with Justin on a number of occasions on the phone about how to keep my system running. Later Xavier invited me to work for him at Quora. He offered in his own words "an unbelievable salary". I of course refused. I met Xavier sometime later and tried to talk to him about a particular bad presentation of his. He got upset and shouted "Fuck Off, I'm not interested in listening to anything you have to say" multiple times. We were on the Facebook campus at the time. He left at that point.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Always remember https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...