War stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)
Jan 4, 2024
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Reid Hoffman and David Henke discuss the early days of engineering at LinkedIn, including stabilizing the chaos, re-architecting the release process, and the challenges faced at Yahoo. They also talk about Henke's transition from programmer to manager, the importance of individual contributors, and building a disaster recovery site at LinkedIn.
Understanding the natural tension between quality, schedule, and features is crucial for successful outcomes in engineering and product development.
David Henke's multiple retirements led to new challenges and opportunities throughout his career.
Developing a site-up culture at LinkedIn, prioritizing site availability, and implementing project inversion revolutionized code deployment and testing processes.
Deep dives
The Importance of Quality, Schedule, and Features
In the podcast episode, the speaker emphasizes the natural tension between quality, schedule, and features in engineering and product development. While engineers typically prioritize quality and schedule, product people lean towards schedule and features. Understanding this tension is crucial for achieving successful outcomes in projects.
The Story Behind the 'This is My Freaking Site' Poster
The podcast episode explores the story behind a poster that featured a photo of David Henke pointing at a screen with some metrics and graphs while seemingly screaming at the camera. The poster was meant to bring attention to the importance of sponsored search on the Yahoo site, which was experiencing issues. Henke wanted to convey the message that the site was crucial to the company's business and everyone should take ownership of it.
Retiring Multiple Times and Finding New Opportunities
David Henke retired multiple times throughout his career, only to be lured back into new opportunities. After leaving Silicon Graphics, he retired but then joined Elon Musk's first company, Zip2, as the head of operations. After selling Zip2 to Compaq, he retired again, but was later asked by Yahoo to help with their sponsored search and production operations. Finally, he retired once more, but was enticed by LinkedIn's business model and joined as part of their executive team. Each retirement led to new challenges and opportunities for Henke.
Building a Site-Up Culture at LinkedIn
David Henke played a crucial role in developing and fostering a site-up culture at LinkedIn. This involved prioritizing site availability, making it a top concern for the company. Henke advocated for strengthening the site's infrastructure, implementing testing processes, and creating a culture where everyone understood the importance of keeping the site up and running. This focus on site availability led to the successful development of strategies like project inversion, which revolutionized LinkedIn's code deployment and testing processes.
The Challenges and Triumphs of Project Inversion
Project Inversion, a significant undertaking at LinkedIn, aimed to overhaul code deployment and testing processes. David Henke and his team faced challenges, including resistance from product teams who were eager to release new features. However, by emphasizing the importance of reliable site performance, Henke gained support from leadership, enabling the successful implementation of inversion. The project brought about architectural changes, such as trunk development, 24/7 testing, and canary deployment, allowing engineers to release and scale features more efficiently while maintaining site reliability.
At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabilize the chaos, cultivating a much-needed culture of “Site Up and Secure.” Before this, David served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at Yahoo!, overseeing their Search Marketing organization and the Production Operations infrastructure for the entire company. Throughout his career, David has held multiple leadership positions and is recognized as one of the top operations executives. David’s intensity, passion, courage and commitment to work have always been deeply admired by his colleagues and his wisdom, well captured in one line axioms, better known as Henkeisms, are still echoed at LinkedIn.
This episode was first published almost 3 years ago and we are sharing it again because it’s been one of our favorites :) Hope you like it too!
Segments:
[00:01:37] “This is my freaking site” poster
[00:04:10] David’s first 2 retirements and starting at LinkedIn
[00:09:41] IC to Management
[00:17:20] Site-Up Culture
[00:21:58] Re-architecting LinkedIn’s release process
[00:27:23] War stories from Yahoo: The 10G Massacre
[00:32:06] “Go to work every day willing to be fired”: Project Panama at Yahoo
