Netflix’s project management acumen is impressive
Netflix has the most awe-inspiring development schedule in the entire industry!
I made a Netflix profile - basically a separate list of movies attached to my account - for my previous girlfriend to use. We stopped dating over two years ago. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to remove her profile, not least because seeing it in the nav menu is a constant annoyance for her successor. Netflix has this to say on that score, a message that has remained unchanged since the first time I tried:
Note the third sentence of their answer: the ability to remove a profile is scheduled for a future release. This message has been there for at least two years. Unless Netflix is flat-out lying to its customers, that means they plan their feature sets and schedule their software releases years in advance!
At most of the web companies where I’ve worked, you’re lucky if you can put together a schedule that stays intact for two months. Two years is astonishing — and for all I know, it’s three, or five, or ten years, since I don’t know how long I’ll be seeing that message. Hats off to your engineering team, Netflix. I wish I were half as disciplined and forward-thinking as you guys.
September 12th, 2007 at 2:43 am
No kidding about the schedules.
One of my $BIG_CORP clients occasionally show me big schedules printed over many many pages with the “release plans” for the next 9/12/18 months.
In almost two years of helping them I don’t think I’ve seen any of those last more than a month; maybe two, before being completely unrecognizable.
What can be so hard about deleting a profile?
If it’s because they don’t want to lose the ratings the user has made, then “update profile set {hidden,deleted}=1 where id=?” should do it.
- ask