With that said - yes, Netflix does chew up people and spit them out pretty quickly. I know a number of people who are moderately successful other places that didn't do so well in Netflix's rather meritocratic environment.
It's almost cliche now, but it bears repeating, at "Netflix they reward adequate performance with a generous severance."
The pay is actually pretty good over there. Network Engineers (the ones that can manage to hang onto their jobs) make about $30K more than Radford 50th percentile for the Bay Area.
Well - I'm not sure if it means anything to say that I've spoken with network engineers from Netflix who make from $130K - $185K, but there you go. Those numbers, by themselves, don't actually mean anything. $185K is undervalued for a Sr. Network Architect. $130K might be good, bad, great, or average - depending on what your responsibilities are.
A better way of looking at it, is if you have two job opportunities, one at Netflix, and one at a bog-standard Radord 50th percentile silicon valley company, my anecdotes (four) indicate that that you would be looking at about $30K/year more at Netflix.
With that said - Netflix isn't so much interested in 9-5 employees, as it is in entrepreneurs who can navigate the company, show leadership, and get results. It's a challenging environment for an employee that looks for hands-on management.
These are all full time roles. If we wanted to compare with a contractor, we'd have to fold in Netflix Actuals for Bonuses + Equity + PTO and Benefits. But, you make a good point - the less and less security you have as an employee, the more closely that position resembles that of a contractor in which case you should be targeting about a 30-50% hourly increase (Taking into account the Benefits package). Hint: To get the 50% increase, remit your hours through friendly "Contracting Agency" instead of doing so personally - for numerous reasons, a contractor who would make $100/hour contracting individually, can somehow be charged out at $120/hour by their contracting firm.
How about a Sr Developer "informal" team lead ~$160,000?
As a Tech recruiter, I gained him a new job (at lower pay), and his complaint with Netflix were two fold.
Work-balance (family) and, he couldn't move up into a formal Lead role (though was acting as such, this could be a variable of the candidate itself). The new job handled both of these concerns. Otherwise, as a Tech recruiter, it was very hard to "head hunt" Sr/ Mgr / VP anything at Netflix...interesting article and discussion.
See: http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco
I challenge anyone to walk through Adrian's DevOps slides of what they are up to at Netflix and suggest that they aren't getting shit done this year: http://www.slideshare.net/adrianco/netflix-on-cloud-combined...
With that said - yes, Netflix does chew up people and spit them out pretty quickly. I know a number of people who are moderately successful other places that didn't do so well in Netflix's rather meritocratic environment.
It's almost cliche now, but it bears repeating, at "Netflix they reward adequate performance with a generous severance."
The pay is actually pretty good over there. Network Engineers (the ones that can manage to hang onto their jobs) make about $30K more than Radford 50th percentile for the Bay Area.