LinkedIn Hackdays are an awesome opportunity for innovation — learn more about them here. But first check out this unusual entry by Hackday master Dhananjay Ragade, whose previous hacks include the LinkedIn Year in Review:
http://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/jw_player_v54/player.swf
Don’t worry, it’s safe for work. Well, unless you work for Linden Lab. 🙂
Given that I work for the world’s largest professional network, I take work very personally. I’m also deeply involved in LinkedIn’s hiring process, which gives me opportunities to see how people make career decisions. I thought I’d share my own perspective here.
For me there are three things that matter to me about my work:
Not everyone may share my above values, and in any case not every job can address all of these values. But I am fortunate to have found one that does, and I’m loving it. To borrow a phrase, it just works.
If you haven’t seen this video by Dan Pink on what motivates people, I urge you to watch it. It’s a great reminder that there is more to motivation than economic incentives.
Finally, I hope that you are doing work that fulfills you. As I work to grow my great team at LinkedIn, my mission is not only to to bring great people to LinkedIn, but bring great work and fulfillment to great people. Whatever you do, be amazing.
Last weekend I had the extraordinary privilege to attend Foo Camp, an annual gathering of about 250 Friends Of O’Reilly (aka Foo). Tim O’Reilly, Sara Winge, and their colleagues have amazing friends, as you can see if you scan this unofficial list of attendees working on big data, open government, computer security, and more generally on the cutting edge of technology and culture (especially where the two overlap).
Foo Camp is an unconference, which merits some elaboration. No fees, no conference hotel (many attendees literally set up camp in the space O’Reilly provided), and no advance program aside from some preselected 5-minute Ignite presentations. Attendees proposed and organized sessions, merging and re-arranging them to optimize for participation. It was a bit chaotic (especially the mad rush after dinner to secure session slots), but very effective.
The minimalist format brought out the best in participants.
For example, I am passionate about (i.e., against) software patents, so I organized a session about them. I did a double-take when I realized that one of the participants was Pamela Samuelson, perhaps the world’s top expers on intellectual property law. I braced myself to be schooled — as I was. But she did it gently and constructively. Specifically, she pointed me to work that her colleagues Jason Schultz and Jennifer Urban were doing on a defensive patent strategy for open-source software (including a proposed license), as well as reminding me of the Berkeley Patent Survey supporting the argument that software entrepreneurs only file for patents because of real or perceived pressure from their investors. I also heard war stories from lawyers who have done pro bono work against patent trolls, reinforcing my own resolve and also reassuring me that the examples I’ve seen at close range are not isolated.
Another session asked whether we are too data driven in our work. What was notable is that this session included participants from some of the largest internet companies debating some of the must fundamental ways in which we work, e.g., do we actually learn from data or do we engage in assault by data to defend preconceived positions (cf. argumentative theory). Like all of the conference, the discussion was under “frieNDA”. so I’m being intentionally vague on the specifics. But it was refreshing to see candid admission that all of us know and have experienced the dangers of manipulating an audience with data, and that there are no algorithms to enforce common sense and good faith.
I won’t even try to enumerate the sessions and side conversations that excited me — topics included privacy, the future of publishing, a critical analysis of geek culture, and irrational user behavior. I missed the session on data-driven parenting, though others have pointed out to me that you can only learn so much if you don’t have twins and perform A/B tests. The best summary is intellectual diversity and overstimulation. If you’d like to get a general sense of the discussion, check out the #foocamp tweet stream. I also recommend Scott Berkun’s post on “What I learned at FOO Camp“.
As someone who organizes the occasional event, I’m intrigued by the unconference approach — especially now that I’ve experienced it first-hand. Moreover, I feel strongly that the academic conference model needs an upgrade. But I also know that open-ended, free-form discussion sessions are not a viable alternative — indeed, a big part of Foo Camp’s success was how it inspired participants to organize sessions — and to vote with their feet to attend the worthwhile ones. And of course part of that success came from inviting active, engaged participants rather than passive spectators.
Many of you also organize events, and I’m sure that all of you attend them. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how to make them better, and happy to share more of what I learned at Foo Camp. After all, Foo is for (inspiring) thought.
As promised, here is a video of CMU professor Christos Faloutsos‘s recent tech talk at LinkedIn on “Mining Billion-Node Graphs“. Enjoy!
And check out our next week’s open tech talk by Sreenivas Gollapudi of Microsoft Research on “A Framework for Result Diversification in Search“.
ps. If you like these topics, then please talk to me about opportunities at LinkedIn! My group is hiring, as are many others.
The war for talent. It’s the latest metaphor for the challenge that tech companies face as excitement is building in Silicon Valley again. Well, not really — McKinsey coined the phrase in 1997 and used it as the title of a book published four years later.
But anyone who has been trying to hire great software engineers in recent months knows how hard it is to do so. Particularly for folks like me who are trying to hire data scientists — apparently there’s a national shortage. This is nothing new — as Joel Spolsky noted in a 2006 post, “the great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.”
I’m not an expert (or ninja) on the subject of recruiting or employer branding in general, but I’ve seen enough of how companies go about hiring software engineers to know that we can do better. I’d like to share some of my thoughts and experiences, and I hope that you will reciprocate and share your thoughts in the comments. I’m especially interesting in hearing from folks who are at universities (aka hunting grounds) or who are involved in organizing academic conferences.
First, let’s talk about how we measure success. As Lord Kelvin famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” I’m not going to talk about how to handle active candidates — that’s a filtering problem which, in my opinion, is much more tractable. For example, see what Joel has to say about interviewing developers. Rather, I’m concerned with the challenge of discovering qualified passive candidates and converting them into active ones. Hence, I propose we make our metric the number of qualified applicants.
The baseline strategy is sourcing, i.e. have sourcers or hiring managers scour the world for qualified candidates (there’s an app for that), entice them with your best recruiting pitch, and then go hog wild on the folks who respond. The success of this strategy depends mainly on the rate at which you, your sourcers, or your hiring managers find qualified candidates — which in turn may split into the two subtasks of finding candidates and filtering them — and the conversion rate for the qualified candidates you find. Since the best candidates are often happy in their current positions, sourcing passive candidates requires a lot of work and a thick skin for rejection.
What are other ways to attract qualified passive candidates? Here are a few, with examples from my experience at LinkedIn:
Finally, don’t forget measure the results of these efforts! Some activities generate leads directly, in which case you can make an apples-to-apples comparison of their results and costs with the baseline strategy of sourcing. It’s harder to measure the longer-term effect of efforts to raise visibility, but you can at least ask candidates if they are aware of those efforts — after all, efforts to raise visibility should be visible to candidates! You can also ask candidates if those efforts were a factor in their decision to apply. These measures aren’t perfect, but they are a lot better than nothing, especially when you’re trying to decide how best to invest limited resources.
Of course, even an optimal strategy can’t substitute for offering a combination of interesting work, competitive compensation, and a work hard / play hard culture. As with all marketing efforts, you need to start with a great product. But great products don’t sell themselves: you need to invest in a combination of outbound and inbound marketing to have a fighting chance in the war for talent. Good luck! And, in case you didn’t notice, we’re hiring!
The Noisy Channel 