So this is the story about how I quit Netflix. About three years into working at Netflix, I was kind of excelling. I took on some projects that a lot of people kind of said no to.

It turns out that we had Groovy on the backend. Yes, Groovy, baby, was on the backend.

It's a terrible JVM language. It absolutely is dog water, but I just happened to take a little bit of time, look up a few things, out, you know, a few ways to do stuff in Groovy, and of course, I just excelled beyond everybody else because everybody else is just like, "I just want to get the stuff done.

I don't want to look at it. I don't want to be a part of it." So I got good enough that I could actually build a bunch of different backends.

So I got selected to kind of do this kind of large improvement that would make it so that we could have extra metadata about every single video in the television catalog.

And of course, from there, they put me onto an open-source project that was related. It was called Falcor. No, not the luck dragon, okay? Though named after the luck dragon, not a luck dragon.

Effectively, what Falcor was, is you can kind of think of it like a GraphQL. You provide an array of kind of strings or numbers, and it would go off onto the backend and grab all that data like a super simplified Squeal-like language.

Hey, I'd also be squealing if you hit that sub button. Thanks, baby. Anywho, so this was like my dream job. I got to go to conferences.

I got to speak both in the UK. I got to speak multiple times in Amsterdam. Got to do a bunch of different places throughout the United States.

It was awesome open source circuit, the dream life, right? It was fantastic actually.

It wasn't that fantastic. Now, I think in today's day and age that that really is the dream life. That is what a lot of people kind of aspire to be, working full-time while getting paid, while working on open source.

But let me tell you, I I would I really had a hard time.

And this is the reason why. We are a small team, about four of us devs, all working on a couple different products for the UI kind of team. We were called a UI platform at the time.

And during this, one of the roles was kind of like a non-coding architect, really deciding how things should work. And of course, this role kind of appears from various companies, and people really have strong feelings about these kind of roles.

Me personally, I greatly dislike non-coding architects.

The reason why is I feel like they get so abstracted from reality that they start building things that, though they look great on a whiteboard, we're talking lab coats, mwah, clipboards, those little goggles to protect your eyes.

Things are looking great, but when you actually implement it, it's nothing but a dumpster fire of logical inconsistencies and all those other things.

I just I just can't stand it. So, of course, this was going on, and for about a year, I just like I was programming like 60 hours a week.

I was putting in so much effort, and it was just starting to feel more and more soul-crushing.

And I can still remember, it must have been December 28th, 29th, 27th, shortly after Christmas, walking into my backyard at like 7:00 at night, having a long conversation I did not want to have, discussing some of the internal details about Falcor, oh, we want to make this pivot.

Oh, this is actually going to be the greatest, most ergonomic, most developer experience change in the universe.

And I remember that was kind of like the moment I snapped, right? Like I could not handle this project anymore. I became pretty dang infuriated with it.

But at the same time, something else happened. I had another co-worker who was working beside me, also feeling a lot of the same weight, and he really kind of reached out and kind of started pouring out his, you know, his heart in, you know, the best way that he could.

And of course, I was much younger and much dumber at that point, and I didn't catch it at all, right?

In a sense that I was just like, yeah, I'm kind of upset too, but that's about it, right? I didn't hear him, and I really look back at that as one of my bigger failures in that moment and really of just of my lifetime in the professional sense.

You know, having someone come to you and tell you these things and not really try to be there for them, try to help lift them up, or even approach your boss, you know, with their permission, of course, and really try to create a better team conversation.

I really wish I would have taken the control of the situation that I would do today.

If it was today, I would have been much more forward, much more open about everything long before I got to the point. But ultimately, what ended up happening was that I became so sick and so kind of toxified from my job that I started looking elsewhere.

And ultimately, I did find a different job at Coursera.

Yeah, Coursera, online education. I had a good friend there, Tom Willow.

where we were, who was the uh, I forget, Chief Product Officer, something like that. Vice President of Products. I can't remember what his role was, but he got me the interview.

I got accepted. I was actually going to make the jump, and I sat down with my boss and said, "Hey, I'm not going to work at Netflix anymore." And ultimately, it was all because of those previous interactions.

And I think there's a lot of things that I did that I failed there.

I really do wish I would have taken more time and understood how I felt and kind of really, you know, judged myself in a more sober tone.

And ultimately, I really wish I would have been there more for my co-worker. I really wish I could have turned around the team and helped, because in the end, a couple people, you know, within this area, actually a few people within the area, got fired, which is sad.

I was about to change jobs until, of course, Papa J. Wagner came over and called me back in, made a nice offer. No monetary, by the way, no monetary change, just made an offer for me to come work with him on his team.

And ultimately, I did, and it was fantastic.

I took down production a few times, and it was a lot of fun. But in the end, I quit Netflix and it's because I didn't have communication and the talks that I should have had.

I wasn't understanding myself as well as I should have. And so, if you find yourself in those situations, you've got to speak up.

You've got to approach your boss. And if your boss and your co-workers aren't good enough to listen, like I wasn't good enough to listen, right?

You know, I I I failed my co-worker, but ultimately my boss should have also been there listening and making the situation better, which didn't happen, and it led to a lot of, uh, you know, probably a lot of heartache.

If you work at a company that doesn't support you in that kind of sense, that doesn't understand that things are kind of going wrong, that it's only causing more and more tension, you probably need to start thinking about A, how can you improve the situation, or B, is it time to leave the situation?

And I just chose B without considering A.

Big mistake. Make sure you consider A because often, you know, bosses are motivated to make you, you know, happy. They're there to make a team successful.

And so there's a lot of change that you can enact by simply speaking up and being confident and pushing forward what you think is best.

So that's the time that I quit Netflix. But hey, I still work at Netflix. I still really enjoy it. That was about five years ago, and look at me now, I work on dumb things and write C++ from time to time.

Hey, subscribe to the channel already. Give this video a like. Maybe make a little comment. Have you ever had a situation in which you affected change, wish you would have looking back, or have you ever been on the other side of it?

The firing side? The side in which you wish some other co-worker would have stepped up like I should have done for mine?

Why I Quit Netflix

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