Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How LinkedIn's Project Inversion Saved the Company

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-it-fixed dept.

pacopico writes "Shortly after its 2011 IPO, LinkedIn's infrastructure almost collapsed. The company had been running on decade's old technology and needed a major overhaul to keep up with other social sites. As Businessweek reports, LinkedIn initiated Project Inversion to fix its issues and has since evolved into one of the poster children for continuous development and creating open source infrastructure tools. But the story also notes that LinkedIn's technology revival has come with some costs, including constant changes that have bothered some users."

49 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Dubious story, dubious subject... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I smell a Slashvertisment... Seriously, LinkedIn? Biggest spammer in my Inbox. Of dubious professional value. Facebook, *please* buy them?

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Several points:

      1. LinkedIn is actually a sort-of competitor of slashdot's owner. That's a bit of a weird slashvertisement choice(not impossible, but weird).
      2. The FTC would come down on facebook like a ton of bricks if they tried to buy out one of the largest other social networks.
      3. Remember to report spam on those emails so that someday we might collectively not get them.

    2. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Articles like this don't appear by magic. Businessweek wasn't crazy impressed with LinkedIn's infrastructure work. Don't be surprised to see a few more articles in the press/media and keep an eye out for who's gaining from them.

    3. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Seumas · · Score: 1

      I doubt the FTC would come down on them for buying LinkedIN. The two sites are completely different beasts. One is about your ego and broadcasting to an audience of other people who are all busy worrying about their ego and broadcasting to their audience -- all acting like a bunch of little twits. The other is about putting up your resume and keeping in touch with colleagues and maybe occasionally dropping in (every few weeks or months, I guess?) to update your contacts and resume.

      Granted, it would be pretty gross if Facebook owned them, but I don't see how there is any conflict. Then again, LinkedIN is doing a pretty good job of making it gross all on their own. The constant spam (even when you have turned it off three or four times on their site), the stupid wall updates full of paid-for-articles and updates from other people in your network about random stuff. They really are pushing hard to try and turn "professional contacts and networking" into "social time".

    4. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by alostpacket · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, there are a few "interesting" gems there. Though it's mostly business fluff. From TFA:

      Such companies as Facebook (FB) and Google also have special teams that review the lines of code written by developers. It’s these people who get to decide when a new feature is ready to make its way to their websites. Not LinkedIn. It has one, huge stash of code that everyone works on, and algorithms do the code reviewing. “Humans have largely been removed from the process,” Scott says. “Humans slow you down.”

      Uh, Okay. Automated code review? Um, where to begin? I think there an obvious misunderstanding on the part of the author of the article. Surely Google, FB, et. al., do CI and all sorts of automated testing. They just *also* use humans.

      Incidentally, Google clearly has more products, thus more specialties and codebases. FB also, to a lesser extent. I dont think the Google Search team is the same as the Google Maps team or the Android team.

      LinkedIn is a website, they have an API, messaging, maybe some mobile apps? It's not trivial, but it's probably not very close to the technical complexity of FB, and no where near the technical complexity of Google.

      LinkedIn initiated Project Inversion to fix its issues and has since evolved into one of the poster children for continuous development

      ...by stopping all continuous dev so they could rebuild from scratch...

      I think TFA misses the point in a very "PHB way" sadly. They took the time to make the devs happy and give ownership of features to devs. The result was the devs created an environment that was productive and could be continuously updated with less fuss.

      To me, this is the poster child for creating a dev focused culture, and taking the time to do things the right way. Which, sadly, is the exact opposite of the conclusion of TFA and the LinkedIn PHB.

      --
      PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
    5. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "1. LinkedIn is actually a sort-of competitor of slashdot's owner. That's a bit of a weird slashvertisement choice(not impossible, but weird)."

      Wow, I've seen ignorance of marketing, but not on this scale.

      This is TYPICAL.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    6. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 1

      1. LinkedIn is actually a sort-of competitor of slashdot's owner. That's a bit of a weird slashvertisement choice(not impossible, but weird).
      2. The FTC would come down on facebook like a ton of bricks if they tried to buy out one of the largest other social networks.

      Ah, yeah. LinkedIn may be - to some extent - a "networking" site, but I would challenge you to name a significant number of your "peeps" that use it as a "social network". As well, fewer and fewer people see any need at all to "network" through LinkedIn, its value being more and more seen as over rated.

      --
      If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    7. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by wiredlogic · · Score: 2

      You forgot the all important email contacts scraper and spam generator.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    8. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by elloGov · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I drank from the fire-hose and voted this story up.

      I work for a dot com older than LinkedIn which is crippled by a similar (worse) monolith legacy webapp. Innovation, efficiency, development cycles, new features and site/product-wide roll-outs are a pain or in some cases impossible. This story gives one perspective/solution to the problem.

      Software is a fast moving space, you snooze you lose. As the web matures, I see many more once-prolific trendsetting companies slip into bureaucratic process-driven monoliths milking every bit of value the antiquated software still holds. The wise companies invest in technology and reap the benefits of the initially intangible results of a flexible, maintainable, truly agile technological stack, however, most companies eventually fall into the cycle of:
      1. Start-up and innovate
      2. Grow and profit
      3. Implement n-layers of bureaucratic oversight and process to protect the value
      4. stop their ongoing evaluation
      5. Loose market-share to newcomers and mavericks in your segment
      6. paralyzed with more market-share loss, copy the competition wherever you can and desperately hold onto your scraps
      7. keep losing market-share
      8. disappear into the abyss
    9. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by tattood · · Score: 3, Insightful

      One is about your ego and broadcasting to an audience of other people who are all busy worrying about their ego and broadcasting to their audience

      I'd say that both sites fit that description. LinkedIn has turned into the "Facebook for professionals". It seems like most people's goal on LinkedIn is to connect with as many people as they can to get their "network" as large as they can. I have gotten LinkedIn requests from people that I met at a conference several years ago, and talked to for 5 minutes.

      LinkedIn used to be about creating a network of trusted colleagues, that you want to keep in touch with, so that you could get trusted introductions to people you didn't know. If I trust person A, and person A trusts person B, B trusts C; therefore if person C is looking for a job opportunity, then they have a good chance of being a reasonably good candidate. That whole concept seems to have gotten lost in the last few years, and now it is all about having as many connections as you can.

      --
      WTB [sig], PST!!!
    10. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by ygtai · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have even gotten (plenty of) LinkedIn requests from people that I have never met and never talked to. Another thing that bothers me (a lot) is from people who know absolutely nothing about my professional capability endorsing my professional capability...

    11. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by froth-bite · · Score: 1

      think how interesting things would be if others could mod your accomplishments (funny, etc)?

      --
      In NSA America social networks join you!
    12. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by jcr · · Score: 1

      I interviewed with them a couple of years ago, decided that they were idiots who couldn't be trusted with my information, and tried to delete my account. They gave me a runaround for a solid week. Spammers, definitely.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    13. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      LinkedIn has some very good settings for what emails they send you (i.e. if you want the emails you can have them condensed into weekly digests). Log in, turn off the emails you don't want, and then you can quit complaining.

      Log in? When i don't have an account? Shall i create an account to tell them to stop spamming me? Epic marketing there...

      They're effin' spammers. Deal with it, fanboy.

    14. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by pne · · Score: 2

      Another thing that bothers me (a lot) is from people who know absolutely nothing about my professional capability endorsing my professional capability...

      I think that's because LinkedIn pushes suggested endorsements into your face when you visit the site, so lots of people probably just click on them "yes, yes, whatever" simply to make them go away.

      --
      Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
    15. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by ducomputergeek · · Score: 1

      Linkedin landed me a consulting gig with a company. I spend 6 - 10 hours a month getting paid $250 an hour talking with hedge funds due to a company I built and sold a couple years ago. The reason they found me was my linked in profile.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    16. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Let me guess. First of all, you don't know the legal definition of spam. Because if you were getting spam from LinkedIn, they'd be in deep shit. Secondly, all this non-spam spam you claim to get: ever heard of opting out? Adjusting your marketing preferences? It's all right there, ONE CLICK AWAY.

      So? They shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

      I suppose you're happy with the tons of garbage you get from facebook if you're ever stupid enough to sign up for it?

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    17. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by tehcyder · · Score: 1
      LInkedin is like facebook but without the funny pix and games, which is to say it is even more pointless.

      Anyone who spends time "networking" is in any case a loathsome human being, almost certainly a paedophile, and beyond a peradventure a crashing bore.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    18. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by Northern+Pike · · Score: 1

      Whenever I receive an endorsement from somebody I know that somebody is looking for a job.

    19. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      Linkedin is dead. I updated my Linkedin brilliantly last week and got nothing. Updated my dice.com profile and have been freakin deluged by a flood of calls and emails from recruiters. Not saying there is any value in all of these calls, but it does deliver a lot of job descriptions from which you can identify what you want to do next and tune your resume.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    20. Re:Dubious story, dubious subject... by datavirtue · · Score: 1

      FTC? You sir are an idiot.

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
  2. What bothers me by killmenow · · Score: 1

    What bothers me about LinkedIn is the constant goddamn spam...uh, I mean emails telling me my "limited time offer" for premium membership so I can unlock all the nifty features is almost up.

    1. Re:What bothers me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Why, pray tell, do they need to send 1 email a week? That's more than I get from absolutely any other website.

    2. Re:What bothers me by game+kid · · Score: 1

      It's free and always will be.~

      --
      You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
  3. decade's, eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First of all, it's decades without an apostrophe you doof. Secondly how can a company that's only a decade old run on "decades" old hardware? They bought ten year old computers in 2003?

    1. Re:decade's, eh? by sribe · · Score: 5, Funny

      First of all, it's decades without an apostrophe you doof.

      Apparently you are unaware that in modern usage an apostrophe no longer indicates possession or a contraction. It now indicates OMG WATCH OUT THERE IS AN "S" COMING UP NEXT!!!"

    2. Re:decade's, eh? by immaterial · · Score: 2

      Quite simple: in 2011 the company was running on the 2000-2009 decade's old hardware! Now don't you feel silly for questioning our infallible editors?

    3. Re:decade's, eh? by halivar · · Score: 1

      Don't be a punctuation nazi if you can't properly use a comma. Secondly, properly use hyphens so I know you mean ten-year-old computers and not ten year-old computers.

    4. Re:decade's, eh? by jrumney · · Score: 1

      You are clearly wrong on both count's. It is plainly obvious that the apostrophe is there to indicate usage of the "singular plural" form.

    5. Re:decade's, eh? by DamonHD · · Score: 1

      'So true, 'sadly!

      Rgds

      Damon

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
  4. Cool, no details by stewsters · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, an article with no technical details? Cool. What are they doing thats so new?

    A while ago I noticed their name on the bottom of this : http://www.playframework.com/

  5. UNImprovements since then? by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That would be about the time that LinkedIn started making the search features LESS effective. For example, in the past, I could review lists of new LinkedIn members that worked for the same companies as I did, at the times that I was there, When I had determined that I did not know them, it would not show me those names again.

    The classmates search is completely useless to me. I can no loger add search terms to the search to narrow down the results (I used to be able to do this). All I can do is get the same list of classmates that I have seen before. Since I left university decades ago, I don't have many existing connections to classmates, so a graph search for related classmates is little use to me. I want to search by looking for common courses or interests at the time I was there. Probably, for people only a few years out of college (the Facebook generation), this isn't a problem, since the connections were established while at college.

    So, perhaps the infrastructure is better, but from this user's perspective, the site has got worse.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    1. Re:UNImprovements since then? by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 1

      ... from this user's perspective, the site has got worse.

      And now they're asking every single time you log in to troll your other social media sites and email for contacts. I made the mistake of letting it look at my gmail contact list. After that, every single time I logged in it showed me a checkmarked list of every single contact in my gmail contacts not already connected to me in Linked In and asked me if I wanted to add them (there didn't seem an obvious way to stop it doing this once I gave them permission)... At least it did this until the one day I accidentally hit return instead of the clicking the link labeled "Skip this step" (or just hitting the home link). So now I've spammed random people (who I might know peripherally as someone I auditioned for a band position, or had a talk about an item on eBay, or a real-estate agent, etc., etc., etc.) to be my contact, my contact list is cluttered with people I don't care about, and what for? So Linked In can try to boast a thicker contact web than facebook (which I'm sure they're tracking as a metric for advertisers/recruiters/etc.).

      So fuck you, Linked In. Your "helpful suggestions", which you can't get rid of, has made yourself less useful to me. Sadly, you're still more useful than any other similar service out there, but keep trying - I'm sure that you'll make your self so useless as to be irrelevant sometime within the next two years.

      At least now, it only asks me to connect with random people I've contacted in the past few months.

      --
      That is all.
  6. It's not constant change, but the barrage of email by scorp1us · · Score: 2

    That bothers me. In the beginning sure, I knew those people. Now, the emails have been for the last several years that I might know people that I have absolutely no idea of how I would even know. It looks desperate, LinkedIn.

    --
    Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
  7. I am going to guess SPAM? by h4rr4r · · Score: 1

    Does this company do anything other than generate SPAM?

    I wish these spammers and all their ilk would go die in a gutter.

  8. Linkedin is the Myspace for grownups by Animats · · Score: 1

    LinkedIn used to be a job board for consultants. I'm not sure what it is now. I haven't logged in for months.

    Is changing the features of a web site three times a day actually useful?

    1. Re:Linkedin is the Myspace for grownups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Doesn't matter if it's useful if it effectively snows the BoD and stockholders.

  9. Infrastructure ain't the problematic change. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Unless you look at it as not being able spam out emails fast enough. It's all the Facebook-like "features" LinkedIn has been adding that I hear people complain about.

  10. That was light on any details. by 1_brown_mouse · · Score: 1

    I know how to cook a ribeye to clog my arteries but I don't know exactly what they did in any detail other that "concentrate on infrastructure."

    Not sure what I was expecting from BusinessWeek though.

  11. Details Please by Ghjnut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Where is all the tech stuff? I want to know what systems were swapped out, what was used in place or what was swapped, what the steps were (did they set up unit tests first followed by architecture changes and scalability testing), what new coding practices they employed etcetera. I'll sum up this horn-tootin session: "LinkedIn had to change to grow, and they did".

    --
    MouseClass extends ScrollClass, which extends TabClass, which extends SidebarClass, which extends PowerClass, w
  12. Everyday I get a half dozen "endorsements" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's hard to believe that former colleagues I haven't seen in over 2-3 years care this much about me. :|

    It also makes me feel bad that I don't go through and fill out endorsements for them. :(

    Who the hell wants to be social on an online resume? Sharing photos and crap, that's just a termination or lawsuit waiting to happen.

  13. Re:LinkedIn lets you network with people you hate. by nickittynickname · · Score: 1

    Loose your job and you'll see what it does for you. It's a great place to find people you use to work with to network a new position. Also, its a great job lead source, there are recruiters looking for people on the site all the time.

  14. I'm no longer a member by iplayfast · · Score: 2

    After they spammed my gmail address book with invites. The request page to do this, looks just like the log in page, so thinking that they need your password to log in you end up spamming mailing lists and people you haven't talked to in years.

    I'm not the only one, http://community.linkedin.com/questions/19949/why-did-you-send-invitation-emails-to-my-entire-gm.html#comment-31842

  15. Surprised by /. responses by sinij · · Score: 2

    I am no affiliated in any way with LinkedIn.

    I am surprised by all LinkedIn hate. As an active user I configured it to never email me under any circumstances and only had this rule broken twice (not sure how/why) in all this time I have been using it.
     
    Yes, spam is annoying but there is a clear opt-out.

    1. Re:Surprised by /. responses by admdrew · · Score: 2

      It's less the automatic LinkedIn spam as it is the users who abuse it, while LinkedIn turns a blind eye. Their TOS specifically mentions that users cannot contact other users unsolicited, and yet I'm constantly barraged by recruiters who (using the built-in requests) indicate we've "worked together" (despite never having met, or having had any mutual contacts), attempting to just add me to their huge list of LinkedIn contacts.

      Unfortunately, those are the sort of users that LinkedIn wants, and that behavior is neither curbed nor stopped.

      --
      LegendMUD
  16. Re:They're creepy .... by PlastikMissle · · Score: 1

    LinkedIn creeps your address book if you let it.

  17. Crappy article by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    Technical content is nearly zero. Puff piece for techno bystanders.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  18. Re:LinkedIn lets you network with people you hate. by sinij · · Score: 1

    Exactly. People that you hate, and people that probably hate you back and only would tolerate you in professional settings are the best kind of people to know when you are looking for a job (as opposed to looking for cat or baby pictures).

  19. LikedIn? Those Liars? by Toad-san · · Score: 2

    Screw LinkedIn and the horse they rode in on. If I get one more unsolicited LinkedIn message from some total stranger, I swear to the godz I'm calling in that airstrike the Air Force still owes me.