This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better.
It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity.
Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up control.
The same thing happened with Netflix where they wanted to push too hard to be a tech company and have their tech blogs filled with interesting things.
On the back end they went too deep on the microservices complexity. And on the front end for a long time they suffered with their whole RxJS problem.
So it's not an objective matter of what's better. It's more cultural problem at Netflix. Plus the fact that they want to be associated with "Faang" and yet their product is not really technology based.
"Microservices" have nothing to do with it.
Netflix regularly puts out blog articles proudly proclaiming that they process exabytes of logs per microsecond or whatever it is that their microservices Rube Goldberg machine spits out these days, patting themselves on the back for a heroic job well done.
Meanwhile, I've been able to go on the same rant year after year that they're still unable to publish more than five subtitle languages per region. These are 40 KB files! They had an employee argue with me about this in another forum, saying that the distribution of these files is "harder than I thought".
It's not hard!
They're solving the wrong problems. The problems they're solving are fun for engineers, but pointless for the business or their customers.
From a customer perspective Netflix is either treading water or noticeably getting worse. Their catalog is smaller than it was. They've lost licensing deals for movies and series that I want to watch. The series they're producing themselves are not things I want to watch any more. They removed content ratings, so I can't even pick something that is good without using my phone to look up each title manually!
Microservices solve none of these issues (or make it worse), yet this is all we hear about when Netflix comes up in technology discussions. I've only ever read one article that is actually relevant to their core business of streaming video, which was a blog about using kTLS in BSD to stream directly from the SSD to the NIC and bypassing the CPU. Even that is questionable! They do this to enable HTTPS... which they don't need! They could have just used a cryptographic signature on their static content, which the clients can verify with the same level of assurance as HTTPS. Many other large content distribution networks do this.
It's 100% certain that someone could pretend to be Elon, fire 200-500 staff from the various Netflix microservices teams and then hire just one junior tech to figure out how to distribute subtitles... and that would materially improve customer retention while cutting costs with no downside whatsoever.
Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free.
I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an EM what he would do if given a magic wand to fix one problem at the company. His response: "I would instantly hire 10,000 more engineers."
Elon famously did the opposite and now revenue is down 80%.
From my experience, this answer usually belies someone who doesn’t fully understand the system and problems of the business. The easy answer when overwhelmed is “we need more people.” To use a manufacturing analogy, you can cover up a lot of quality issues with increased throughout, but it makes for an awfully inefficient system.
Borrowing costs went to nearly zero. That's not the same thing. You have to repay the money, you just don't have to repay it with interest.
I would have assumed people generally know this, but everybody (and I do mean everybody) talks like they don't know this. I would like to assume that "money is free" is just a shorthand, buuuut... again... these arguments! People like that EM talk like it was literally free money raining from the sky that could be spent (gone!) without it ever having to be repaid.
If you watched any of the long-form interviews Musk gave immediately after the acquisition, he made the point that if he hadn't bailed out Twitter, it had maybe 3 months of runway left before imploding.
Doubling headcount without a clear vision of how that would double revenues is madness. It is doubly so in orgs like Twitter or Netflix where their IT was already over-complicated.
It's too difficult for me to clearly and succinctly explain all the myriad ways in which a sudden inrush of noobs -- outnumbering the old guard -- can royally screw up something that is already at the edge of human capability due to complexity. There is just no way in which it would help matters. I could list the fundamental problems with that notion for hours.
Subtitles are also complicated because you have to deal with different media player frameworks on the +40 different players you deal with. Getting those players, which you may not own, to recognise multiple sub tracks can be a PITA.
Things look simple to a junior developer, but those experience in building streaming platforms at scale know there are dragons when you get into the implementation. Sometimes developers and architects do over complicate things, but smart leaders avoid writing code, so its an assumption to say things are being made over complicated.
I read and understood their entire technical whitepaper. I get the what, I'm just saying that the why might not make as much sense as you might assume.
> +40 different players you deal with
They own the clients. They wrote the apps themselves. This is Netflix code reading data from Netflix servers. Even if there are third-party clients (wat!?), that doesn't explain why none of Netflix's home-grown clients support more than 5 subtitle languages.
> Getting those players, which you may not own, to recognise multiple sub tracks can be a PITA.
This is a core part of the service, which everyone else has figured out. Apple TV for example has dozens of subtitle languages.[1]
With all due respect: Read what you just wrote. You're saying that an organisation that has the engineering prowess to stream at 200 Gbps per edge box and also handles terabytes of diagnostic log ingestion per hour can't somehow engineer the distribution of 40 KB text files!?
I can't even begin to outline the myriad ways in which these excuses are patent nonsense.
These are children playing with the fun toys, totally ignoring like... 1/3rd of the viewing experience. As far as the users are concerned, there's nothing else of consequence other than the video, audio, and text that they see on the screen.
"Nah, don't worry about the last one, that only affects non-English speakers or the deaf, we only care about DEI for internal hires, not customers."
[1] Just to clarify: I'm asking for there to be an option to select one language at a time from all available languages, not showing multiple languages at once, which is a tiny bit harder. But... apparently not that hard, because I have two different free, open-source video players on my PC that can do this so I can have my spouse get "full" subtitles in a foreign language while I see the "auto" English subtitles pop up in a different colour when appropriate. With Netflix I have to keep toggling between her language and my language every time some foreign non-English thing is said. Netflix is worth $362B, apparently, but hasn't figured out something put together by poor Eastern European hobbyists in their spare time.
You lost me. Netflix built a massive CDN, a recommendation engine, did dynamic transcoding of video, and a bunch of other things, at scale, quite some years before everyone else. They may have enshittified in the last five years, but I dont see any reason why they dont have a genuinely legitimate claim to being a founder member of the FAANG club.
I have a much harder time believing that companies with AI in their name or domain are doing any kind of AI, by contrast.
You can argue whether or not that edge translates into more revenue, but the edge is objectively there.
I have always wondered how do they deliver their content and what goes on behind the scenes and nobody on tech twitter or even youtubers talk about pornhub's infra for some reason. A lot of the innovation in tech has roots in people wanting to see high quality tiddies on the internet.
