From the Bay Area to Sydney, Without Losing the Job
I've traded the San Francisco Bay Area for Sydney, Australia, and I'm keeping the best job of my career: performance engineering at Netflix. The move, one of the first by engineers on Netflix's Linux cloud teams, was made possible with the support of the company's engineering management and HR teams. Netflix isn't new to Australia — it's had staff there for years working on content, marketing, and FreeBSD OCA — but this marks a significant shift for the technical side of the business.
For me, the move is about more than just a change of scenery. It's a reflection of how the tech industry itself is changing. When I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 2006, it was the undisputed center of kernel and performance engineering work. Now, in 2021, the landscape has flattened. Sydney is home to AWS and Google offices, and even a small Netflix outpost. If you want to do kernel engineering, you no longer need to be in a specific building in California. Linux can be worked on from anywhere.
That decentralized reality is reflected in the numbers. In 2015, BPF (iovisor) meetups in Santa Clara were filled with local contributors. Today, the same community is scattered across the globe. And the capital markets agree: last year, headlines predicted that the Bay Area's share of VC deals would fall below 20% for the first time in 2021.
Remote Work Is the Norm for Linux
There's a common misconception that high-level engineering requires the office environment — an open floor plan where maintainers can shout feedback across the room. That's not how Linux, the world's most successful open source project, actually works. There is no central Linux kernel headquarters. Engineers collaborate remotely and might only meet in person once or twice a year at conferences. This model has proven successful for decades.
I've personally experienced the effectiveness of this approach. I wrote Systems Performance, 2nd Edition, entirely from my home office last year. The entire project, from drafting to delivery to the publisher, was managed through email and cloud-based documents with a team of remote contributors. It was delivered on time.
Making the Time Difference Work
Remote work isn't for everyone, and I don't think it will fully replace the office. There are undeniable social benefits to being in person, from serendipitous conversations to the very specific joy of playing on the Netflix cricket team. I expect future teams to be hybrid models, with remote employees visiting the office on a quarterly cadence for key meetings. That structure is already in use at Netflix.
My daily schedule illustrates how this can work. I typically start around 7 a.m. Sydney time, which gives me 3 to 5 hours of overlap with California depending on daylight savings. I'll have an early-morning call roughly once a month — a 4 a.m. start is manageable. After years of handling SRE oncall duties with unpredictable wakeups, this feels like a health retreat compared to my earlier Bay Area days, which often ended past midnight. As more people shift timezones, meetings themselves may need to adapt, moving to asynchronous formats or being run twice — once at 9 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. California time.
For anyone considering this path, be prepared to put in extra effort. You have to genuinely want it. I use a stopwatch to track my own productivity — I pause it when I'm interrupted and log my hours of uninterrupted work each day to graph trends. I'm essentially performance analyzing myself. The results are rewarding, though. Finishing a full day's work and realizing you have a two-minute walk to the beach rather than a long commute is a powerful motivator.
Many people have asked me the obvious questions about my motivation: Is it this reason or that reason? The answer is yes, all of them. I started discussions with Australian companies in January 2020, and the pandemic added another compelling argument for the move. Both the US and Australia have their merits and drawbacks, and I treasure people and places in both. But I'm a proud Australian, and I prefer my home country for reasons that include visa uncertainty, voting rights, and complex international taxation. I was fortunate that Netflix treated its visa workers well — that was never a problem — but the broader uncertainty was a factor I was glad to leave behind.
