Presentation: Am I a Brilliant Jerk?

I manage a team called playback API. When the customer sits down in front of their Netflix device and presses the play button, what they see and hear on the screen is our responsibility.

When I joined Netflix seven years ago, I read the culture deck, the point about brilliant jerks really stood out to me. At the time, I had an intuition of what I thought the phrase meant, I had worked with people you might describe as challenging. But, I didn't fully appreciate the wisdom behind the statement.

Throughout my time at Netflix, first as an engineer then as a manager, I’ve built up an appreciation for why “no brilliant jerks” is so important to our culture. The motivation for my talk is to share my experience with others, so they can fully appreciate the wisdom.

Anyone who works on a software team and wants to improve their culture. Or if you think you have a brilliant jerk on your team or have a secret notion that you may be a brilliant jerk yourself.

I’m not just presenting an argument for why you don't want a brilliant jerk on the team, but I’m also going to talk through what to do if you have one or if you are one. People can change, we can rehab brilliant jerks.

On the playback API one of the things that we've been considering is moving from a stateless to a stateful architecture. The motivation for us to move in that direction is to achieve sublinear scale. But, moving in that direction is not an easy trade off. Stateless systems tend to be simple versus stateful systems which tend to be more complex. Managing state is a hard problem. Moreover, we've built up best practices and lessons learned for stateless, we're going to be throwing away a lot of these if we transition to stateful.