> It's really difficult for me to believe that they really got 10% top performers.

Of course there is no hard data on it, but I can say anecdotally the people I know who went on elsewhere were consistently rated at the top of whatever organization they landed at. And also, there wasn't a single person there that I would not want to work with again and would jump at that chance.

> For one, knowing the cut-throat nature of employment there, I would expect only a minority of developers would be willing to try working there, despite the awesome rewards.

On the flip side, a lot of people wanted to work there because of that culture. But you're right, some really great people wouldn't even apply, won't deny that.

> Finally, just as a cheap shot at Netflix, sorry I can't resist as a customer: they absolutely suck at the most basic stuff in their business, which is to produce good content in the first place, and very importantly, NOT FREAKING CANCEL the best content!

Actually, objectively, it's not the best content, which is why it gets cut. The way that decision is made is every piece of content is charted on a cost vs minutes watched. Then that chart is looked at by actual humans.

Some content, like reruns from the 1950s, is super efficient. It's not watched a lot but it also costs very little, so it stays. Some content, like the latest Marvel movie (before Disney had their own streaming service) was very inefficient, but it was kept because it was a big marketing draw. But some content didn't quite make it over the line because it was expensive but niche. It was popular amongst a small set of die hard fans.

I think your complaint it more about the industry in general though -- it's not just Netflix that doesn't give a show room to grow. Even the old school TV networks cut shows much quicker now than they did before.

> I won't even mention how horrible their latest big live stream was... oh well, I just did :D.

Netflix knows it didn't go well. Streaming in general used to break just as much. But the nice thing was that they gave us the resources to hire the right people and the autonomy to fix it. And so we did things like create Chaos Engineering and OpenConnect. I suspect the same will happen with live streaming.