Netflix made $3.4 billion last quarter. It's cutting 1,000 jobs anyway.

Netflix told employees on Wednesday it's laying off about 1,000 people, roughly 6% of the company. AP says Netflix had about 16,000 full-time employees at the end of 2025.

Netflix runs one of the biggest streaming platforms on earth, and the cuts land mostly on product and tech teams. The people affected look a lot like the people reading this.

Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters sent the memo. Per TechCrunch, the bulk of the cuts hit product, tech, legal, and HR. Netflix hasn't said which roles, so I can't tell you how many are engineers. That detail will probably leak out over the next few weeks.

The money side is the odd part. Second-quarter profit was $3.4 billion on $12.56 billion in revenue, up 13% from a year ago. Netflix says it's still on track for its full-year forecast.

Its third-quarter guidance did come in below what Wall Street wanted, according to Techloy's writeup. And Netflix reports earnings next week.

The memo's line was "Decisions like these are never easy, and we don't take them lightly." The rest was about being disciplined with people and resources while investing in growth areas.

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Two weeks ago I covered Oracle cutting 546 cloud engineers while its cloud revenue grew 121%. Last Friday it was tech payrolls shrinking while IT job postings hit a 3-year high. Now a company posting a $3.4 billion quarter trims 6% of its staff.

Different companies, same pattern. A strong quarter doesn't tell you much about whether your team is safe. I think that's the thing to take seriously, though three data points is a small pile and I'm reading a trend into it.

Ask your manager what the team's top 2 priorities are for the next 6 months, and where your work fits. Netflix says it's investing in "high-impact areas." Companies that talk like that have a list in someone's head. Find out if your project is on it.

Make your work easy to tie to money. Cost cuts, uptime, faster deploys, fewer support tickets. If you've trimmed a cloud bill or cut an incident count, write down the number now. It takes 10 minutes and it's the first thing you'll want in a reorg or an interview.

And expect a bigger pool of applicants. A few hundred product and tech people with Netflix on their resumes will probably hit the market over the next few months. For mid-level roles, that likely means more competition and slower replies. If you've been thinking about a move, a certification or a finished portfolio project can help you stand out from a crowded stack of resumes.

Watch next week's earnings call too. A guidance miss tends to bring more cost talk, and I'd guess Netflix isn't the only company with a quarter like this one coming.

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