It’s astonishingly how inept organisations become as they scale up at executing on their core mission.<p>There has been an endless parade of self-congratulatory articles here on HN by Netflix espousing their incredible engineering feats: petabytes of logs ingested per second! Millions of microservices redeployed hourly! Hardware accelerated encryption so nobody knows that you’re not watching the same ten shows as everyone else!<p>Subtitles?<p>Oh that… crickets for a decade.<p>This piece is proudly showing off how finally, <i>finally</i> they added “English” as a language!<p>Think for a moment how inane that actually is.<p>Not for every show! Just one. <i>One.</i><p>This warranted a press release.<p>Now look at the screenshot: it has only four (4) languages. Six options if you count Off and the duplication of English.<p>What happened to the other hundred or so? Too many? How about just the dozen or so with more than a hundred million speakers?<p>Netflix can serve petabytes of content, but a few hundred kilobytes of text files is a technical challenge that’s just a step too far.<p>Ah well, maybe my partner can watch a show with me and get subtitles in her preferred language next year. Or the year after. Any decade now, any decade…