Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.
Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the freedom to innovate.
I've been there, working on FreeBSD performance since 2015. I wouldn't say "many" of the early folks. From memory, I think it was more like 2. Granted, 2 of the earliest. More of the early folks were ex Level3.
That was in the openconnect team but we had a lot of ex-Yahoo throughout engineering. For example the entire observability team was ex-Yahoo when I got there in 2011.
Many of the Netflix engineers a decade ago, especially the ones that contribute to FreeBSD, are ex-Yahoo.
Yahoo was dying when Netflix was growing, and a couple of the best engineering leaders from Yahoo came over to Netflix and brought all the top talent with them, and they gave them the freedom to innovate.