What I'm actually working on

Most MBA internships (as far as I understand) are project based. You come in and they hand you a project you can do in 12 weeks. It's expected that at the end you'll make a presentation to the groups you did the project for.

My project is working on career development. I'm helping to build out career ladders for various roles at LinkedIn. A career ladder defines what's next.

LinkedIn has been growing at such a fast clip, that it's been easy to focus on the growth of the company and new employees. Now they are getting to a point where they have to better define options across departments for promotion and growth. 

The ladder for software engineers has been defined over the past few months, but now we need something more robust. I'm working first with IT to define some ladders for the job families they manage, and then I'll help hone the engineering ladder as well as help the operations department to build theirs out. 

The career ladder is set up for individual contributors (IC). When people get hired into a position, it's easy to assume that as they get better and more experienced, they will move into management. The skills needed to be a great software developer are completely different than the skills needed to manage and coach employees. Likewise with strategic decision making needed in execs. This doesn't mean that if you're hired as an engineer you'll be a bad manager - it just means that different people need different opportunities to grow their career.

It's fun to get to talk to all of the managers about what they do and help them define some sort of structure for their employees. I'm also excited for the training aspect of the project - we have to make sure managers don't just get handed a tool they'll never use, but that they understand how to use it and have additional resources for when they need help.

Hopefully I can help set up an environment where managers have the tools and training to not only get great talent at LinkedIn, but keep great talent.

Mountain View

I come to work each day to a place called Shoreline Drive. Most of the business park is Google, but LinkedIn is nestled in a corner. They now have 6 buildings here, along with offices world wide.

If you zoom out, you can see where LinkedIn is in relation to the freeways and bay. Mountain View is between Palo Alto and San Jose.

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I've been coming to work pretty early to get stuff done before the hustle and bustle of the normal day, so the freeways haven't been too bad.

The LinkedIn Culture

The values of a company are always interesting to me - how are they communicated and does the company actually follow them?

Here's what I learned on day 1:

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG). Reid Hoffman (one of the founding partners) said that at LinkedIn our goal is to "can change the GDP of nations."

A smaller scale of that is that LinkedIn's vision is to increase economic opportunity to all of it's users (the working professionals of the world). That's a vision I can get behind. One of the things I wanted in the company I interned with was a chance to work on for a company whose product I really believed in.


David Henke spoke to us on the first day and had some thoughts about how LinkedIn ran. He is the svp of operations (I am supporting operations and engineering with my role in hr).

"Look at Yahoo around 5:00 and you'll see an empty parking lot. Look at LinkedIn at 8:00 and you'll see tons of people still here. I've never asked any of my department to work harder or later, but they do. Why?

We hire passionate people.

We want to empower our employees to solve problems. We want our employees to create value, so we try to get out of the way."

He also talked about the ideology on users coming first. I didn't write them down, but he talked about a number of instances where LinkedIn made changes to their products they sell that would mean less money for them, but would please their users. He pointed out that the short term sacrifices in revenue always come back in the long term user engagement and growth.

He also mentioned hierarchy.

"Yahoo has 13 levels from the bottom to the top. Are you (expletive) kidding me? If the Catholic church can do it in 6, then we can do it in less than that." I have been impressed with how few levels there are. I have 2 people between me and the CEO. That's it.

I'll post more later about how the culture actually works. It's been great so far!

Food

I'm sure I'll talk about this here and there, but the food is amazing. They have a catered lunch each day. Yesterday I had lime chicken, steak, a berry salad, and a red velvet cupcake that was pretty amazing

In addition to the cafeteria, they have kitchens on each floor of each building (they have 6 buildings, I think). In their kitchen they have shelves of goodies, candies, snacks ...

They also have fridges with tons of drinks, snacks, and prepared meals you can heat up for breakfast or dinner (tonight I had rotisserie chicken, brown rice, and veggies).

There are drinks I never knew existed (I had coconut water today) and fresh fruit to slice up (I had a mango for a snack). It's still crazy to me how much food there is, but it's wonderful to not worry about when my next meal is coming (Katrina, stop smiling).

Really, when you're paying top talent to be there, food is a small thing in the grand scheme of things to provide so that people stay on site, stay focused, and love working for you. I'm impressed to say the least. It's still pretty surreal to me.

Day 2 - Ambiguity

Today I felt some of the pressure I've heard many MBA interns talk about - ambiguity.

For my project I'm supposed to help different groups within engineering and operations design career ladders for individual contributors. This will help answer the question "Where can I go next?" for software and IT guys.

At the beginning of the day I felt like I had nothing. I was reading up on book passages and articles I thought were related. Midday I got to hear from the general manager for LinkedIn India, Hari, who was pretty interesting. Apparently LinkedIn India is growing like gangbusters and he's been at the center of that growth. He was the first LinkedIn employee hired in Asia (less than 3 years ago) and he won the India's Hottest Young Executives award.

At LinkedIn if you've been around for more than 2 years, you are a veteran.


I finally got to the scheduled meeting with some of my colleagues who shared more about the project, who I'll need to talk to, what's been done so far ...

It's a little frustrating to not know who needs what and how they feel about it. I haven't met a single person I'll be doing the project for yet. It's hard to know if I should just seek them out myself or wait for an introduction (I elected to wait, I'll get introduced to the first team I'm designing the ladder for tomorrow). But, this is part of the process - figuring out how to maneuver. Who do you talk to, who do you get buy-in from ...

I still feel like I don't know anyone, but I guess I can't be too hard on myself on day 2. I'm slowly meeting more and more people.

Tomorrow I have my first all hands meeting (where the CEO speaks) as well as lunch with some other people in HR. Should be fun!

Day 1

All I can say about day 1 as a LinkedIn intern is WOW. I knew going in that they had an open culture; I knew going in that they had lots of perks; I knew going in that they were on a mission to change the world. Yet I was still blown away. Wow.

My day started at 7:00. I got ready and ate breakfast at the hotel. I met Ryan Daly, another hr intern, who is from Wharton. We drove over around 8:30 for orientation. 

Orientation lasted from 9:00-3:00. This year there are 176 interns at LinkedIn - the largest class they've ever had. Most of them are coders. We had an icebreaker activity (my group played "I want it that way" with kazoos), got our laptops and some info from IT, then went to lunch. Lime chicken, steak, veggies, pasta, and red velvet cupcakes definitely hit the spot (and I didn't even try the Indian or vegetarian lines). I ate lunch with a couple of people I'll be working with over the summer, and got introduced to many others. 

One thing that showed me how LinkedIn is different is that I met the SVP of ops and the VP of HR before I was done with lunch. I knew I'd get to meet high level executives, but they were so open it caught me off guard. Most companies have days planned where the interns get to meet with certain executives, but here I was meeting them and having them say they were looking forward to working with me (as opposed to "have a great time here, but there are 4 levels between the guy you're working for and me, so maybe I'll see you in the hall sometime") - guys who report to the CEO. Awesome to feel the benefits of a smaller company. 

After lunch we heard from a number of departments - operations, product development, hr, benefits, health and wellness, security. The operations guy (David Henke) had such great stuff that I started taking notes (left them at the office, so I'll post tomorrow).

After orientation, I got situated at my desk, set up my computer settings how I like them (most everything was already set up when I got there - laptop, extra monitor at my desk with a dock already hooked up ... sad, but I've never come into a job that was close to that prepared for me), and found out about one project I'll start working on.

The thing that blew me away most wasn't the food (basically free food everywhere you look, all day everyday ... drinks, snacks, fruit, yogurt, candy ...), but the tone of the company. One of the executives said that their goal wasn't just to connect people - their goal was to increase the GDP of nations by bringing economic opportunity to professionals. They have such a clear view of the impact their work does and the importance of helping everyone at the company enjoy working towards that impact ... it was amazing.

Day 1 = Mind Blown. Awesome perks, interesting work, and people around me who actually like their jobs. I have a feeling I'm going to love this summer. 

Day 0

Tomorrow is my first day at LinkedIn! (which I guess makes this day 0) I decided to five ether than fly. LinkedIn covers the cost for me either way, but having a car will make it so much easier to get around while I'm here. I started today by saying by to the family. They were all up early. My ittle almost 4 year old girl was sad to see me go, but excited to 'talk on the computer' (Skype). I've been going a little crazy at home since the semester ended with watching kids so much(new baby and all). I never thought I'd be so sad to go, but I was.

Driving wasn't too bad. I've driven down to Anaheim plenty of times, which is about the same distance. It took me 11 hours. I checked in at the hotel LinkedIn is providing for my 2 week temporary housing. Pretty nice place. Tomorrow I'm showing up with a ton of paperwork already filled out that I'm going to turn in. That's really about all I know at thing point. I'm excited to meet a ton of people and learn new stuff, but I've also been so anxious without really knowing much for months since finding out I'd be at LinkedIn. Here's to tomorrow.