Giving up the Keys to the Kingdom: A Story About Transformation

I’ve worked at LinkedIn for four years. During that time, I’ve had nine desks and four titles, sat in four different buildings, worked out of three time zones, and flown over 130,000 miles. It’s been a breakneck pace of change, exploration, and transformation, and I couldn’t be happier.

On the day of my four-year anniversary, I moved into a full-time role on LinkedIn’s editorial team. Editors at LinkedIn are responsible for three things: creating content, curating content (finding the best stuff and making sure it’s put in front of the right audience at the right time,) and cultivating writers (getting other people to write on or otherwise use the platform). This is quite a change, and may be somewhat surprising news, especially if you look at my LinkedIn profile. It indicates that I had a relatively traditional operations career path, starting in the network operations center (monitoring systems and escalating issues), then becoming a systems administrator, then a site reliability engineer, then an engineering manager. You may wonder, then, why I’m now an editor and how that happened. Let’s break that down.

Why I’m an Editor

I love this company and what we do. Our product actually changes people’s lives. We’re not changing the world in the Silicon Valley (the TV show) way — getting a new job can literally change people’s lives, and you can see it happen on our platform. However, different groups of people use the site differently, and I learned at a management offsite earlier this year that software engineers are an audience that we want to get even more engaged on our platform.

After seeing this, I chose to pursue an editorial job because LinkedIn needed someone who understood what it was like to be a software engineer and who could figure out what matters to that audience. I wanted a role where I’d have the satisfaction of knowing people are learning, growing, and building stronger networks all because of my effort, and it’s a pretty great feeling.

Additionally, people who understand technology, and who enjoy talking to others, and who don’t mind being quasi-public figures who are responsible for evangelizing platforms, and who enjoy trying to convince other tech folks to communicate and share their knowledge are... rare. While I fit that mold, I also wanted a challenge. Jumping into an entirely new thing is both exhilarating and a little scary, but I’m incredibly excited about where it will lead.

How it Happened

One of LinkedIn’s Editors, John Abell, had been feeding me story pitches for a while, generally in response to one of my principled rants about something. My first post (about Amazon’s company culture and how companies create and manage their culture) did well, especially given the focus, but my real breakthrough post was this one, on the Apple/FBI fight, where I explained what was at stake and took a position on what I thought Apple should do, and the greater impact the debate was having on the world.

It’s an awesome feeling to take a stand on something and see that hundreds of thousands of people have read it, or engaged with it, or helped the idea spread. After I published that piece, I saw a job posting shared on our platform for a technology editor, and started talking about it informally with a few folks. Those informal talks slowly morphed into formal talks, and now here I am, ready to go.

LinkedIn enabled this transformation effortlessly on my part, and for that, I am incredibly grateful. I can’t imagine any other company that would not only not obstruct, but instead actively support having a skilled, technical, senior-level engineering manager to go and do something so wildly different. I have to give so much credit to our leadership team for recognizing what’s in the best interests of LinkedIn and for letting me do it. Once I decided to transition, though, there was one hard moment. I had to give up the keys to the kingdom.

Giving up the Keys to the Kingdom?

Photo: osik1992 / Twenty20 / LinkedIn

I have to admit, this was pretty bittersweet. SREs enjoy basically unlimited access to troubleshooting data in the service logs and performance metrics generated by our systems, because we need it to help troubleshoot and fix issues when things go wrong. It’s an enormous display of trust in us. Editors, on the other hand, don’t really have any access to systems, because we don’t need it. Having to surrender the ability to just jump in and fix the problem (or at least investigate) myself has been one of the toughest parts of the switch for me so far. Going from being able to look into and potentially fix anything to having to fire off bug reports — then wait — is definitely a humbling experience.

On the other hand, SREs also are responsible for being contacted 24/7 because some part of the site has had a hiccup. There have been many nights where I’ve rolled over in bed, heard my phone ringing with the special “The site is on fire” ringtone, snarled, answered, and then spent the next few hours trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. I’ll (probably) never have one of those again… which sounds great, though I might still miss the adrenaline rush from time to time.

What’s Next?

Starting right now, I am focused on news and insights for software engineers. Specifically, I’m focused on making sure that content software engineers need is available on our platform.

If you know someone who you want to see publishing here, or who does publish here but doesn’t get enough love, please reach out to me through inMail (you can send me one for free!) and let me know. I’m also going to attend some conferences and otherwise start building my network, and obviously I’ll continue writing about engineering topics and other things that come to mind.

It’s been awesome to make this transition and I’m looking forward to making LinkedIn the absolute best place on the Internet for technology professionals to consume and create content. I want everyone to feel like LinkedIn is something they have to check every day to be the best they can be. Thank you all for reading and your support.