Namaste

5069.

5069 days.

5069 days between the time I started at LinkedIn and my last day.  As today is my last day at LinkedIn I cannot help but reminisce on that journey.  

I see myself joining a small startup and going through so many adventures that I had no idea were going to be in front of me.  Not all were fully enjoyable, by far.  Many were stressful indeed.  I see myself countlessly failing, picking myself up again and having the will to move forward, grow and learn.

But as I see myself, I also see all of you.  And there are so many of you.  All of you that were part of my journey that helped me, supported me and trusted me.  My journey started really with an anodyne lunch discussion with a friend to consider joining LinkedIn in my future.  Along the way I am simply amazed by what we have built.  By what we have simply been ambitious to try.  I am in awe of the great engineers that I have had the pleasure to work with. I am happy today that I have been able to create that space for them to accomplish what they did.

Oh the things we built and how privileged we really were to be and still are in this industry at this time.  As we went along this journey, we shaped data science, data engineering, data infrastructure, AI, big data engineering, fairness, ethics in AI, privacy, etc.  Not just at LinkedIn but in the industry.  We shaped it not because we endeavored to do so for their own sake but because we wanted to unlock value for our members.  We built Kafka to enable us to better our recommendations within our application.  We built LiX and XLNT to enable us to better understand what our members appreciated.  We took on Ethics and Fairness because we want to create equitable experiences for our members.  In retrospect it seems obvious and smooth sailing. It wasn’t, we had many shortcomings, but we persevered because we had no choice really.  We knew how data could create so much value for our members, we had that vision, we just needed to find a way to enable it.  

But as I see these software artifacts, I also see all of you.  Software was and still is built by people, not automata.  And there are so many of you, that you’ll have to excuse me in my inability to name all of you.  To tell you the truth, I am so afraid that I’ll miss one of you, that I am not going to do it.  I just can’t, I am ashamed that I’ll miss someone that had a profound effect on myself and our success.  I see all of you but as I have shared with you many times, ever since I taught, I am bad at remembering names. I see all of us crying, laughing, being elated at times and despaired at others, walking, running, biking, arguing, discussing, brainstorming, drawing diagrams, shipping code, etc. I see all of us being human.

As I walk away, I have truly been transformed by my journey with all of you.  I have grown to learn and appreciate so many new things thanks to the support from all of you. I am who I have become because of who we all were and are. As I am leaving, many of you have thanked me for being able to create safe spaces for you to grow.  But it is really I that should thank you for having created a safe space for myself to become. 

Thank you for the privilege of your trust in me to lead you during all these years.  As I am moving to my next play, I know that I am not really leaving, as I have made friends in all of you.

Namaste