Preview Our New Show; Tech Titans

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're giving you the first preview of our newest show, Tech Titans. This show features summary episodes of our best leadership advice from Modern CTO. Check the description for a link to subscribe. Raghu from LinkedIn joins us in this episode to share his greatest leadership advice. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) What's the best leadership advice that you've ever gotten?

(Raghu at 00:00:29) This was maybe eight or nine years ago now. I was working on something. I forget what it was. There were a set of people who were unhappy with it, with what was going on, how it was being done, etcetera, etcetera. I didn't hear about it directly, but I heard about it through other people.

(Raghu at 00:00:46) I was all bothered, and I chatted with Mohak about it. He was like, dude, did you hear from me about it? Did you hear from me if I wanted you to change anything? The answer was no.

(Raghu at 00:01:00) He had not. He was like, you know what? When you're trying to make changes, drive things, there will always be people who are unhappy about many, many things. Don't let that bother you, right?

(Raghu at 00:01:15) There will always be a ton of noise. There'll be many, many naysayers. But you need to figure out how to distill the signal from the noise. Driving changes, building big things is not easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) What's the next big thing for you and your team? What's going on at LinkedIn?

(Raghu at 00:01:34) The product is scaling really well. The business is growing a lot. The usage of the product and the value we create is accelerating. But what all of that means is pretty massive demand on infrastructure and platforms. Ensuring that we have the right systems in place to support the growth and scale of the business is something that our teams have done remarkably well through the years.

(Raghu at 00:01:57) And we will definitely continue doing that, build new capabilities to ensure that infrastructure and platforms stay a couple steps ahead of where the business wants to go. But one thing that is sort of a new muscle that we are trying to build is to provide beautiful user experience for our engineers, for the infrastructure and platforms that we build for internal consumption. This is with just ease of discovery of the systems that we have, ease of onboarding, ease of operations. This is not a muscle that comes naturally because we have exactly one customer for these systems that we build, that is LinkedIn. It becomes easy to deprioritize building world-class user experience when you have a single customer.

(Raghu at 00:02:50) But it is really, really important because that to me is the single biggest unlock for productivity. When you have platforms and infrastructure that are easy to use, that are a delight to use, it improves the productivity of the entire organization multifold. So that is something that we're trying to push on. And this needs to be at literally all layers of the stack, be it with compute infrastructure, storage infrastructure, our caching systems, our database systems, all of these things. So that is definitely thematically an area that we are trying to focus on quite a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:28) What are your thoughts on, you know, the Instagrams and the TikToks? They've recently come up, this trend in the past year with stories and these short clips. And when you as LinkedIn look at that, is that something that you think you're going to do? Can you not talk about it? Or what are your thoughts on that?

(Raghu at 00:03:48) Following those trends is, I don't think, our priority because, you know, what we are looking to do as a company is not the same as what TikTok and Instagram are trying to achieve, right? Creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce is what we are trying to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:06) That sounds good.

(Raghu at 00:04:08) Right? So the products and features that we build are directed at making progress towards that. Now in achieving that, if something like stories, which is something we tried on the product, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) Oh, you did?

(Raghu at 00:04:21) Yeah. We did, and we chose not to pursue it. Yeah. We dialed it back down.

(Raghu at 00:04:28) So I'm not the right person to talk about it, but following TikTok and Instagram is not what we're looking to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) Earlier, you said something. I think you said something about calibration discussions. Did is that what you said? I've never heard that before. What is that?

(Raghu at 00:04:44) Well, when I said calibration, I meant performance evaluation discussions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:49) It sounds cooler. Let's just pretend it's like a thing that LinkedIn does. You calibrate the humans together. I mean, it's an appropriate word because especially when you're working on a problem, right? I found over building products, feature creep is a human trait, right? Like, you go off. You're like, okay. Let's solve that. That would be cool. And then and and and, right? And so being able to focus on that problem statement and doing only what's necessary to achieve the solution is super important. So when you said problem statement, I'm like, oh, I wonder if they talk about the problem statement in the calibration discussions.

(Raghu at 00:05:23) Yeah. I think it's really, really important to be crisp about what problem we're trying to solve, right? And be very crisp about what success looks like. The thing that I insist on quite a bit when I get involved a little more deeply in a project is writing down what the design principles are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:43) What's the design principle? Give me an example of that.

(Raghu at 00:05:46) I'm going to repeat something one of my mentors at LinkedIn had told me a while back. Separation of the control plane from the data plane is really, really important. All of that needs to be taken in context, obviously. So for a specific problem that you're working on, talking about what that specific principle means, I think is important. And the reason I think it's important to establish those upfront is because once you get into execution, it is easy for even fairly senior people to lose sight of what it is that you're trying to achieve.

(Raghu at 00:06:17) Because you're just so focused on execution that you start taking shortcuts that you really wouldn't take if you zoom out a little bit, right? So codifying those things and ensuring that everyone working on a project or an initiative is aligned on those things and ensuring that we refer back to those from time to time is important. So as a stakeholder or as a sponsor of an initiative, for me, it is important that we get aligned on what success looks like and what the problem statement is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) What's the interval on that? Is it just depending on the project and the person, or is it, like, every other week? Is it strict and restrained, or is it just kind of flexible based off of the project?

(Raghu at 00:06:54) It depends on the project.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:56) So it can be any—

(Raghu at 00:06:57) It depends on the project. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:58) Okay.

(Raghu at 00:06:59) So I'll give you example of one more thing. When you're writing a class, let's say, a Java class, you should be able to describe the purpose of that class in a single sentence without an "and" in it. It does one thing and one thing well. If you start introducing "ands" in that statement, it means you haven't thought about it quite well. And I extend that to services as well.

(Raghu at 00:07:23) Tell me what that service does. And don't have "ands" in your sentence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) Yes. Yes. I think Martin Fowler calls that the single responsibility principle. That might be somebody else, but that is really good. And it's actually surprisingly pretty rare. I mean, I'm sure when you get into the higher end hiring, like, higher end developers with more experience, it might not be so rare.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:46) But in general, I don't think it's something that they're teaching in code camps yet.

(Raghu at 00:07:51) Yeah. But and, you know, these things are hard to get right. But it's okay. I think these are things that we should aspire to get right as often as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:02) Oh, yeah. What will LinkedIn look like in a hundred years?

(Raghu at 00:08:07) In a hundred years? Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:09) Do you have like a Neuralink app? Can we—

(Raghu at 00:08:13) Creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce is a big, big task, right? If you're able to do that for the global economy, I think that'll be amazing. That'll be amazing. If you're able to have, if you're able to provide insights that help drive decisions on what kind of training people need in different geos to address shortages of labor in a specific industry, or to create upward mobility for people in different parts of the world for industrial trends, if we're able to drive those outcomes with the kinds of products that we build, I think that'll be amazing.

(Raghu at 00:09:03) I don't know if that's really a hundred years out. That may be much, much sooner. But if that's the scale at which we're operating and those are the outcomes we are creating as a company, that'll be amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:15) So achieving your mission at scale.

(Raghu at 00:09:18) Yeah, right? Yeah. That'll be cool. And for me as an engineer and as a platform and infra guy, building tech to power all of it will be amazing.