What is it like working for one of the sustem infrastructure teams at LinkedIn ?
Yup.. am asking about the data infra team. A lot of really interesting projects came out of there.. do they still have smart folks or have they all left ?
Countable number of smart folks (on your two hands). A couple are a**es and management is political. Kafka is in code yellow. Nothing really to grow your career. Very easy to get into a “business as usual” role. Till MSFT invests deeply in the company, nothing great happening.
I came from data infra, left for a FANG company. I really don't see another Kafka-level invention coming out of LI data infra team any time soon. Too political, people are comfortable making small incremental improvements and supporting OSS community needs, and honestly, LI does not have a lot of hard problems to solve compared with FANG.
By systems and infrastructure roles you mean data infra? I believe it has pretty smart people and perhaps a higher bar. A good number of projects/tools are open-source
Is it that pretty much everyone who works in the backend? I know they hire application developer, data/infra, and sre.
At LinkedIn app development backend is different than data infra. Data infra work on infra/plumbing systems such as Kafka, Samza, Venice, Brooklin