Why I Quit a $450k Engineering job at Netflix

Powerful post! This sent me spinning “Here lies Michael. He spent his life doing work he never wanted to do. Then he got COVID and died. Rest in peace.”

Great post. Agreed, we only get one life to live, and it's not all about how much money you make if you can't be motivated to get out of bed every morning.

I first must admit that I am very grateful to even have the ability to contemplate leaving a big fancy titled job and salary. This is a very good problem to have as there are many more problems people face than being unhappy with their job. I am grateful for my opportunities, and for the life I've lived so far.

That aside, I found myself miserable every day, and cranky, hating the work I was doing. I had zero motivation to get out of bed each morning and go into the office (back when we were doing such things). But I managed to force myself up each day, and go into work. One day, I was acting in a manner that I find unacceptable: cranky, short tempered, and not treating others the way I wanted to be treating others. It made me stop to think, why am I acting this way? What is wrong with how I'm feeling that I am not behaving in a manner consistent with my core values?

I stopped to think about where I've been, and what I was currently doing. I went from helping to build a small company, helping to lead it through the challenges of startup life, survival mode, long working hours, and doing everything from product development, to customer support, to business development, and even HR, to being thrust into a large, multinational corporation after an acquisition. I now had no control of my destiny and I was always trying to determine which levers I can pull to make something (anything!) happen.

I went from productive and empowered, to basically someone who updates excel spreadsheets all day, communicates status and talks in meetings all day (doing no work), understands politics and internal matrix organizational dynamics...I felt like a robot on autopilot and I felt like I was accomplishing nothing. I couldn't believe this is what "executive" level work was. I was no longer building anything. I was no longer working with customers to solve problems. I was no longer building an awesome team to do awesome things. I was a cog in the corporate machine. This could have just been the corporate culture in the organization I was acquired into, but as I looked around at other big companies, I felt that we weren't all that dissimilar.

After much deliberation, and getting over the fear of stepping away from a nice comfortable salary, with benefits, into the unknown, along with the mental adjustment of "this is what I was supposed to be doing" and the rest of the world would think I'm crazy for leaving; I left. It took about 6 months to finally pull the trigger. After all, I had really bonded with the people I had worked with at the small company and who was still my team through the acquisition.

I took a quick break as I was burnt out, but then quickly started working with some friends around me who were running their own small businesses and I saw areas where I knew I could help. Sure it was a completely different world than the one I was in (I was in Nuclear Energy and shifted to data analytics focused on small businesses), but I was having fun again solving problems and working with people to build something.

I will say that financially, I set myself up for such a move. I have never subscribed to competing with the neighbors and buying the biggest fanciest house or car, or always having to have the hottest gadgets. Living beneath my means, which was quite comfortable, enabled me to save and invest in a manner such that I could afford to take up to 3 years of no salary as I bootstrap'd my company. I'm still in that process, and there is a bit of stress in the background in that I need to be making money soon, but that stress does not out weigh how happy I've been over the last two years.

When I think about what I may be thinking towards the end of my existence, I know I will not regret leaving that fancy job, nor will I regret not buying whatever that fancy salary could have afforded me. But I would regret not taking the chance. If it doesn't workout I know I will be fine, I can find a job or shift to something else.

I hope my perspective was helpful.

Good luck to anyone thinking about doing the same.

Everything in life is about tradeoffs and I admire the self-awareness to recognize you no longer wanted to work on things at NetFlix.

Have you thought about the tradeoffs associated with not having a steady predictable salary, especially at that level? I'm curious what you believe you'll need to sacrifice and how you came to the decision those thing were worth it in exchange for working on something you care about.

This is great. looking forward to write a similar post one day.

I enjoyed reading your article. The pandemic has definitely caused a lot of people to re-evaluate their lives and figure out what they really want. You are so right about trading your time and youth for a salary. It’s a trade off that most people just accept. Security is just an illusion though.

Great post. I'm in a similar situation to where the author was. However, I'm a bit older and have been working a while, so I have a bigger safety net to fall back on.

I'm quitting my job as well, though not quite as high as $450k, still a reasonable amount to walk away from. My last day at my corporate job is this Friday.

I've been in the corporate world for about 20 years now, in various companies, and it got the point where I just could not motivate myself to work on something that did not interest me. Like the author, all the work being assigned me or planned ahead was more of the same. I decided this is a good time for me to walk away and try to start my own thing.

It's absolutely frightening walking away from a safe, steady paycheck and I've been having moments of real fear recently that what I'm doing is crazy, but I've seen others do it before, so I know I just have to believe in myself.

Edit: I will say also that the pandemic has had a strong effect on how I look at work now. The fun times at the office socializing with coworkers is gone, so I definitely started to notice that it was just the work now.

Good for you man!