Man quits Rs 3.5 crore salary job at Netflix because he was bored of it

Michael Lin was afraid that the move would affect his career and social life but, the opposite happened. (Image credit: LinkedIn)

A man who used to work as an engineer for Netflix in the US quit his job after he got bored of it. He used to earn Rs 3.5 crore a year.

Michael Lin joined Netflix as a senior software engineer in 2017 after leaving his job at Amazon. "At the time, I thought I would stay with Netflix forever," he wrote on LinkedIn.

"I made $450,000 a year (about Rs 3.5 crore), got free food daily, and had unlimited paid time off. It was the Big Tech dream."

That's why, when Lin quit in May 2021, everyone thought he was crazy.

"My parents were the first to object. For them, my quitting was throwing away their hard work of immigrating to the US," Lin said. "My mentor was the second to object. He said I shouldn't quit without another job lined up because I'd miss out on leveraging my high salary when negotiating my pay at the next job."

This made Lin wonder if he was making the right decision. He waited for three days before speaking to his manager about quitting.

Speaking about what made him decide to leave the well-paying job, Lin said that during his initial years he learned a lot on the job. "Working at Netflix was like getting paid to work on case studies you learn about in MBA programs. They made the memos for every product decision available for all employees to read, and I learned so much every day," he said.

But the shine began to wear off in a few years and after Covid struck, almost everything that Lin liked about the job -- the socializing, the coworkers, the perks -- came to an end.

"The only thing left was the work itself, and I didn't enjoy the work anymore," he said.

"I wanted to have a bigger effect. 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."

Read more: These bosses are paying their employees to resign

So, Lin spent two years networking within Netflix and applying for every product-manager role he could find but nothing worked out for him because he said Netflix didn't have any process in place to support horizontal role changes. "I've never seen an engineer successfully transition to product management at the company," Lin added."

"Now that transitioning into the product-manager role was out of the question, my high salary felt like an increasingly bad deal. When I started at Netflix, I was making money and continuously learning new things. Now, I was just making money, with no career progression."

In the months that followed, Lin lost the motivation to work and it affected his performance. During his last performance review in April 2021, he was asked to pull himself together if he wanted to keep the job.

He quit two weeks later.

Lin was afraid that the move would affect his career and social life but, the opposite happened. "I've met more people through starting my own business — other entrepreneurs, writers, and creators," he said.

He added that he felt a deep calmness inside him and believed that everything would eventually work out.

"It's been eight months since I quit my job at Netflix, and I've decided to commit fully to working for myself," Lin said. "Although I'm just starting and don't have any dependable streams of income yet, I'm going to trust the process that if I do work that energizes me, good things will happen."