Great CEO, a lot to learn there, but some cultural flaws. Worth working for.
Pros
You are part of a team that is at the leading edge of a cool entertainment paradym. Reed Hastings, the CEO, is probably the CEO that I have most respected in my career, and I feel he pretty consistently makes good decisions and moves the company in the correct direction. Netflix has a very quantitative approach to almost everything, including detailed user testing for their products, so there is a lot to learn about that. The other employees are generally cool people, and fairly smart in general. The user interface aspects of the website are strong, so again, there is a learning opportunity. The company wide meetings are fun, and entail good communication.
Cons
In the website development group, there is two week development cycle. That means that there is a push to the website every two weeks. This has a few consequences. One is that there is a high percentage of overhead (testing and release stuff) compared to actual development time. There is not much time for software design in such a scheme, there is always a rush to hit the next two week time click. Longer term projects are tougher to schedule and short term thinking dominates. The performance policy is that anyone who, if they quit, would not be attempted to talk out if it, should be fired preemptively (a hair trigger threshold for firing, basically). This creates a chilling effect in my opinion. I have seen fairly senior management that disagreed with their boss being (farily apparently) fired. This creates a bit of a yes man environment, something that Netflix would deny (perhaps even to themselves). There is very little empowement of employees in real decisions, and decision making is very top down, with the resulting motivation hit that entails.
