Netflix & LinkedIn
After 4+ years at Netflix, I am about to embark on a new challenge. On Monday, I start at LinkedIn as a senior member of the Service Infrastructure team. It has been my privilege and honor to work at Netflix these many years. To date, Netflix is the best company that I have worked at.
Netflix
Central to the company’s success is its unique culture of “Freedom and Responsibility”. This culture places decision making, risk taking, innovation, and operational judgement in the hands of each engineer. Management serves to prioritize the big tasks and sets the context for each engineer, leaving each engineer to prioritize his or her own work. There is an allergic aversion to process and micromanagement.
Progress is made by sheer drive and motivation. Accountability is achieved by having each engineer accountable for his or her own work. Gaps are filled not by instituting process but by leveraging automation (e.g. our Simian Army).
This unique culture attracts and rewards folks who are “do-ers not say-ers” and fully-formed adults who play nice with others. In other words, “brilliant jerks” tend to have a short shelf life at Netflix, whereas someone with a good blend of leadership, technical savvy, and social intelligence will go far.
Frankly, it is this culture and my relationships with cherished colleagues that have kept me from considering positions at other companies for so long.
Fast forward to my acceptance of a position at LinkedIn. If Netflix were to have a peer in terms of technical vision, engineering drive, and a bright future, it would be LinkedIn. We all know LinkedIn as the place to find jobs or employees, manage professional contacts, and follow technology trends, but I believe that feature set to be the tip of the iceberg. Speaking to the technical attractiveness of the company, LinkedIn has long been a leader in big data and analytics, open sourcing technology with some regularity. With renewed post-IPO vigor and an infusion of new talent, they’ve bolstered their commitment to open source and technology evangelism.
As a new entry to their Service Infrastructure team, I hope to share my experience regarding the following:
- the development and evangelism of centralized libraries and services
- the transition to high availability databases
- best practices around high availability and high scalability
A large part of my role at Netflix involved the migration to a public cloud, but it is not clear whether this is something that LinkedIn finds useful.
I look forward to working with Kevin Scott, Mohak Shroff, and their talented teams.
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