[highwaylights]

I can't speak to whether your assertion is true or not (I've no experience of Netflix or it's hiring), but it kind of makes sense that this would happen if you think of the Netflix journey to date.

They transitioned from a mail order DVD system to online streaming, building that as they went, then moved the lot to the cloud while keeping everything up during it's exponential growth period.

There are a lot of really hard engineering challenges just in that sentence that would need some really good people, but now that they've built out a planetscale video delivery system their needs are a lot different (they just need to keep the lights on and the engine running).

I'm sure some really clever engineering still happens at Netflix but mostly the hard problems appear to be solved at this point, so you don't need incredible resources. Also, it would follow that most of those people would want to seek out new challenges rather than stick around for maintenance over the long term, but I've no idea if this actually happened there.

[jcims]

I'm curious why Zoom doesn't get more shine.

In my opinion they were tested like few other companies in history at the start of the pandemic and seem to have pulled it off. My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed. I won't say there were zero issues but the number definitely rounds to zero.

Obviously there are the privacy questions, but that's orthogonal to the engineering challenge of delivering realtime voice/video to millions of people.

[ecshafer]

I think Zoom doesn't get more shine for the same reason Alibaba, Baidu, or ByteDance don't. They are large companies doing complex engineering, but they are Chinese and not western.

[sargun]

I'd say that in systems engineering, alibaba gets a lot of love. Alicloud folks have actually done a lot of impressive stuff with k8s

[throwaway744678]

Not sure I am getting your point... Zoom is a US company.

[hardware2win]

> My former employer had 60,000 people with technical roles and we all went to zoom in the summer of 2020 after our existing conferencing solution completely shit the bed

Do i understand it correctly?

60k ppl left ur job and went to zoom?

[jcims]

I could have stated that more clearly. 60k people started working from home full time and we switched completely away from our existing solution to Zoom as the primary service provider for teleconferencing.

[TheJoeMan]

What’s interesting is in my opinion Netflix engineers made the best UI and best reliability with distributed edge-node storage and all those hard problems.

Disney+ still lags ridiculously, but guess which one has the blockbusters?

[jpgvm]

Yeah I completely get why it happened it's just sad that it did.

Because of how markets work in the US their management come under immense pressure to find other sources of "growth" now that the main streaming business has capped out.

TLDR engineering hiring got a lot less selective in pursuit of accelerating "new growth areas". Once that happens your A class engineers leave and you can't ever rehire at that same level again without majorly taking out the trash.