Assumed audience: People interested in the contours of a career in general, and specifically who care about why I left LinkedIn earlier this fall.
Part of a series on what’s next for me:
- Next: Role?: for those curious about where I am heading next… including folks who might want to hire me.
- Now: Sabbatical: for those interested in how I am spending this sabbatical.
- Past: Leaving LinkedIn (this post): for those interested in why I am on this new path.
When I came to LinkedIn at the start of 2019, I told people that I hoped it would be a
This change was, by the time it happened, not a surprise. I did not rage-quit my job during an incredibly high-pressure period back in the spring (though I wanted to, at times!), and I also did not burn out by staying too long. No, I kept a promise I made to myself when I chose to come to LinkedIn five years ago: not to burn out, by keeping a close eye on how well my values stayed aligned with company priorities, and leaving before things went awry.
Reflecting on 2022, I wrote:
I find that when I end up spending a majority of my time on writing documents to articulate strategies, or dealing with team dynamics, or otherwise away from building, I am least satisfied. Those are all good kinds of work and they all need doing, and I don’t mind spending some of my time on them, but they never energize me the way that both building and teaching do.
…I am looking forward to having some space to do more R&D and exploration around how to continue making an impact on developers’ ability to develop quality software quickly.
[The] year felt odd: while we made a little bit of progress on things in that space of “developers’ ability to develop quality software quickly”, basically all of the work we were doing felt like catch-up work — both in terms of getting LinkedIn’s web stack caught up with capabilities its mobile stacks have had for a while with types, and in terms of getting LinkedIn’s web stack at least in the ball park of where other front end stacks have been for a while. Catching up is good… but it is generally hard to advance the field from behind*.
…
I will be very curious to see how I feel come the end of 2023! For now, I will simply close by noting how delightful it is to be a matter of weeks from my 4-year anniversary of starting at LinkedIn: this is already substantially the longest I have stayed at any job. I no longer feel like I am “just getting started” but I do still feel like there is a lot of opportunity ahead, and indeed more opportunity than there was when I started, thanks to the work my colleagues and I have done over the years in between. That is a really nice spot to be.
“How I feel” is a pretty open and shut book here late in the year: Unfortunately, the opportunities I hoped for did not materialize, my own best efforts notwithstanding. Worse, the horizons for what I could work on narrowed substantially. Client development at LinkedIn (web, iOS, and Android alike) is embarking on a course that — to my judgment — offers me no levers for the kind of work I care about.1 (More on “the kind of work I care about” in Next: Role?) There would have been a lot of code in the mix, but not code I believed in. In sum, the work in front of me no longer aligned well with my own values and priorities, so — after much consideration and discussion with my wife and close friends — I resigned.
Life is short, and our work is a massive part of it. Given the considerable blessing of financial stability and margin, and given the question: Spend the next few years of my life working on things I do not really believe in? Or… do something else? The answer was easy. Not everyone has the opportunity to make that call, I recognize. Sometimes, you just have to do annoying or terrible work to put food on the table for your family. That comes with a sense of responsibility. For those of us who do have that opportunity, though, it matters that we take it: It matters that we use financial stability as a lever to make sure our work actually moves the world — however fractionally — in the directions we believe in.
I remain very glad to have gone to LinkedIn. I developed some great relationships there — made friends we have had fly across the country to spend time in our home! — and did really good work. I grew and learned a great deal through working at significant scale both technically and organizationally. But now it’s time for something new.
Bonus: a few months after publishing this, I recorded an interview with Adam Gordon Bell on CoRecursive about my time at LinkedIn, including leaving LinkedIn. If you want a little more detail on what I wrote above, check it out — it has a full transcript as well as the audio recording.
Notes
My most common description of that roadmap has been: building mediocre developer experiences with mediocre technologies to deliver mediocre user experiences in the name of product velocity — and, worse, doing so as a technical bandaid over other, far more fundamental, cultural and organizational issues. The details are not public, and people could reverse course, so I will not belabor the point here. But my judgment stands unless or until they do reverse course. ↩︎