Netflix and the $1 Million Programmer
Who needs a programming job when you can be a professional contest winner instead?
Today, Netflix announced it would be offering a $1 million reward for the first person to
improve the accuracy of its online movie recommendation software by 10 percent. In order
to facilitate the contest, the company is releasing a database of 100 million customer ratings
for programmers to work with.
It is a new spin on the “wisdom-of-crowds” concept made popular by James Surowiecki’s
book of the same name. The belief is that for some business problems, it is better to solicit
quantity rather than quality (I’m assuming that Netflix has a couple quality programmers
on staff). Besides, Netflix employees are not allowed to participate. They have already tried and,
obviously, failed.
Recommendation systems, like the one that Amazon uses to regularly freak me out by sending
me an e-mail to buy a record at the precise moment it was on my mind--Oh my God, how did
they know I was humming that song? Is there a camera in here?--have been in use for years.
They’re a subcategory of predictive analytics, and they’ve gotten scarily accurate over
the years. But there’s always room for improvement. About a million bucks worth of improvement,
apparently.
Offering up the problem for the whole world to solve says one of two things about Netflix:
1.) They don’t have a strong application development staff; or 2.) They have a really expensive development staff that isn’t that strong. I imagine there are more than a few programmers over at Netflix headquarters
that are pretty steamed about this announcement. I mean, what a slap in the face. How emasculating.
But it does make you wonder if this is the start of a new hiring model for companies of all sizes. Everybody
knows that finding good talent is really hard to do. This contest concept is globalization in a
way that not even Thomas Friedman could have imagined. When developers from around the
world can compete on a project like this, who needs an application development team? What if you
just throw a dollar amount over the wall every time you have a particular problem to solve and let
the masses battle over it. The French government has already done it, by posting its balance sheet
on the Web and challenging French citizens to balance the budget. And DARPA is always
throwing a great big carrot out there for building a robot or creating the Internet (I think Al Gore
won that one.) JetBlue just built an entire advertising campaign around ideas sent in by customers.
Come to think of it, who needs any kind of actual employee anymore, with their expensive health care
and demands for a congenial working environment? Need help with a marketing campaign? $2 million
to the best creative idea. Trouble structuring a merger? Two tickets to the Super Bowl for the first
accountant to make the numbers work. I may just offer up a portion of my salary to anyone that
can improve upon my blog entries.
Well, let’s not get carried away here. But I will offer you a chance to write my blog for a day, subject to
my edits, of course. So go ahead. Show me what you got.
