> I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.

So much this. OP's description of the work environment is stressing me out and I don't even work there.

At best a strategy like the one described above will get you the top 10% of people who are willing to put up with that kind of work environment, which means you might get the top 10% of single, childless 20–35-year-olds—people who are motivated first and foremost by ego and pay and don't value stability and work-life balance. But in the process you're more or less explicitly saying that you're not interested in people who are further along in their lives and value stability and reliability more than ego and raw paycheck size.

This means that you're missing out on the top 10% of 35–65-year-old engineers who are now parents with responsibilities outside of their career, even though the top 10% of that bracket would typically be "better" by most metrics than the top 10% of the younger bracket you're pre-filtering down to.

In a startup environment this might be a perfectly rational tradeoff—you want to filter for people who don't have much else to do and can give you a huge amount of unpaid overtime in exchange for you stroking their ego—but past a certain size and market share you need the stability offered by mature, experienced professionals.

If Netflix failed to get over that hump, it's not so surprising after all that they fell so hard in the last 10 years.

Most of the people I worked with were 30-50 years old with families and kids. The work life balance was great. I was the rare outlier who was married without kids.

We had senior engineers who would work hard and get things done and then go and be parents and partners.