This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with David Ronca, a retired video systems engineer. He spent 12 years at Netflix and six years at Meta. This story has been edited for length and clarity. My time at a startup in the early years of my engineering career was like a really bad relationship. I joined a company that specialized in video playback around 2000. I loved working on video. I consider those seven years like going to school, and I came out with a Ph.D. in practical video