(This article is authored by Alar, a freelance content writer) 

As living proof for the expression, 'a bird in a gilded cage', Michael Lin, a software engineer has quit his job at Netflix despite getting paid a whopping Rs 3.5 crore per year. Based in the United States, Lin has a reason to offer why he quit the job, which has turned heads across the globe. He said that his work was boring and he wasn't enjoying it. 

Lin had joined Netflix in 2017 with the mind of working forever. He felt that his work was exciting and now, he has decided to move on. In a Linkedin post, Lin wrote he had joined Netflix as a Senior Software Engineer in 2017 and back then, he thought he would stay at the job forever. He wrote, "I made $450,000 a year (about Rs 3.5 crore), got free food daily, and had unlimited paid time off. It was the Big Tech dream."

He further said, "My parents were the first to object. For them, my quitting was throwing away their hard work of immigrating to the US. My mentor was the second to object. He said I shouldn't quit without another job lined up because I'd miss out on leveraging my high salary when negotiating my pay at the next job." Following such advice, Lin introspected whether he is making the right decision of quitting the company. 

After three days, he went to his manager and informed him that he has decided to quit. He said, "Working at Netflix was like getting paid to work on case studies you learn about in MBA programs. They made the memos for every product decision available for all employees to read, and I learned so much every day. The only thing left was the work itself, and I didn't enjoy the work anymore." 

"I wanted to have a bigger effect. For me, deciding how to allocate engineering resources was more relevant to my career goals than the engineering work itself, and I wanted to transition into product management to lead these efforts", he added. Lin has first attempted to get a product manager's role within Netflix, but after failing to do so, he slowly lost all motivation to work.

He also lost his interest in his work after witnessing the after-effects of the Covid pandemic because of not socialise with his coworkers and other things. Before joining Netflix, Lin was working at Amazon and after he got stressed in work style at Netflix, he had even applied for a job position change. But the organization has denied his application and said that it would not come under their policy terms. Lin has relinquished his job when Netflix has already announced that it would be cutting off 150 employees across the board, which is 2% of the total employees of the global streaming platform.