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Comment by RyanShook | Hacker News Reader

How much better would the world be if the Netflix engineering team tackled real-world problems instead of making sure we can all binge watch Stranger Things? Such a smart group of people.

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How do you know what a real-world problem is or isn’t? Avoid the intellectual trap of trying to socially engineer the world to your tastes. Watching stranger things might be more important than you realize.

Most companies have smart engineers. The difference is how they prioritize tasks. Most companies spend a significant amount of time building new features. Netflix is pretty low in terms of number of features. Their core product is uptime and reliability. So the result is that they _have_ to reinvent scalable solutions because the rest of us are accepting production issues for more time to build out features. What you see is the result of laser focus on uptime. Not even AWS cares about uptime as much as netflix.

The world’s problems are not the result of some software engineers deciding to work on a video streaming platform.

Specifically, what would you suggest applying this skill-set to?

A local start, given Netflix has real estate in LA: using these skills to develop better consumption services for unreliable internet users toward developing better tools for distance learning for LAUSD. Lots of students are falling behind thanks to issues with poor unreliable connectivity due to the expenses associated with having broad band internet. In march, 17% of LAUSD families had no internet at home. Today, more have bought internet plans, but given the job lossess suffered by the working poor, these are probably the cheapest internet packages available. Given how JS heavy these online education sites are, this is a poor experience for students who are already dealing with the stresses associated with being on the bottom of the economic totem pole in a high cost of living city.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-21/online-l...

So you are suggesting Netflix as a company should enter a completely unrelated location-specific government-related industry (which has its very own specific regulations and domain-specific issues), just because they have smart employees whose technical expertise domain sorta overlaps with the kind of engineers who would be useful to solving problems of that other unrelated industry?

Might as well suggest that HFT finance firms enter a business of providing fast and reliable internet service to rural areas, because their employees have an extremely high expertise in providing bleeding-edge insanely responsive internet service from the exchanges to their offices (not kidding at all, they legitimately drilled through mountain ranges[0] and set up microwave towers just to get an edge over competitors[1])

0. https://www.ft.com/content/d81f96ea-d43c-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5... 1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazil...

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