

He requested a pre-emptive severance package and got it from Netflix. After that, he was left with no other option but to explain to his manager that his goals diverge from his team’s and it was the reason behind the dip in his performance. His motivation was waning very fast and his performance was dipping with every passing day.Įventually, Lin’s manager started noticing the dip in performance and things got heated up in a performance review. The work I was doing didn't help me learn the business skills I needed," Lin said. " My team's goal also started to diverge from my career goals. He felt that he was staying at a job longer than he should have - the same mistake he made at Amazon.Īlso read: From Losing His Arm Just Two Months Before Joining A Masters' At Indiana University, To IIM Calcutta - Meet Ananth Adiga Now, I was just making money, with no career progression," Lin said.įor Lin, it felt like he was making the same career mistakes he had made at Amazon. " When I started at Netflix, I was making money and continuously learning new things. When one works at a job where there is no enjoyment, even a high salary feels like a burden. " I've never seen an engineer successfully transition to product management at the company," he added.Įventually, he was frustrated by the search and was inching towards a decision where stepping out of Netflix would be inevitable. However, his attempts did not work out and he was still stuck in the same job.Īccording to Lin, Netflix did not have any process in place to support the transition from an engineering role to product management.

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For me, deciding how to allocate engineering resources was more relevant to my career goals than the engineering work itself, and I wanted to transition into product management to lead these efforts," he said.Īs a result, Lin tried to network within Netflix and started applying for every product management role he could find. Realizing His Dream Of Product Management He wanted to make a transition, and there was no scope for it at Netflix.

While this situation was a tipping point, Lin had more pressing issues at work that were bothering him. " The office shut down, and all my favorite parts of work - the socializing, the coworkers, the perks - disappeared," he said. For him, the engineering work felt like 'copy and paste' and the only thing he was enjoying was socializing with coworkers.īut that would go on to become short-lived as the Covid 19 pandemic resulted in office closure. The meetings and the projects were becoming more and more the same thing and Lin was not enjoying it. However, as Lin noted, the attraction of the job started to fall apart for him within two years. " They made the memos for every product decision available for all employees to read, and I learned so much every day," he said. " Working at Netflix was like getting paid to work on case studies you learn about in MBA programs," Lin said. What was his motivation? It was simple: escaping boredom and enjoying work. In fact, Lin's parents were the first to object to his decision as it almost meant throwing away their hard work of immigrating to the US.Įven Lin's mentor objected to the idea of quitting as he would not be able to leverage his high salary while negotiating his pay at the next job.Īll these factors made it hard for Lin to take the decision, but eventually, he did it. " When I left almost four years later in May 2021, everyone thought I was crazy," he said in his post.Īlso read: This Engineer From Karnataka Took Up Knitting As A Hobby To Overcome Anxiety Now It's His Side Business!Ĭoming from an immigrant family in the US, life has not been easy for both Lin and his parents. Yet, when he left after 4 years, everyone was questioning his decision to leave Netflix. It was the Big Tech dream," he wrote in a Medium post.Īs a resident of the Bay Area, he also got the opportunity to return home, and what made it even better was the fact that he got a promotion as well.
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" I made USD 450,000 a year, got free food daily, and had unlimited paid time off.
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When Michael Lin joined Netflix from Amazon in 2017 as a Senior Software Engineer, he thought that he would stay at the job forever.
