Well, the same engineer who didn't figure that out went ahead and profiled things, drew some pretty graphs, actually bothered to write a blog post to put his thoughts for public review. IMO, that is all some good engineering :-)

But you made me think what I said. I would say this sort of gets into the programmer / engineer debate. Netflix has good progammers like most companies. Good engineers (in my books) are very hard to find. These people are good at being at peace with tradeoffs and understand the requirements of a business at a much deeper level than programmers. Programmers just want to have fun with computers (and there is nothing wrong about that).