LinkedIn To Allow Most Employees To Work Remotely, Reversing Course (reuters.com) 16
LinkedIn will allow most employees to opt for full-time remote work as offices gradually reopen, Chief People Officer Teuila Hanson told Reuters. From the report: This new policy from Microsoft's professional social networking site is a reversal of the company's initial indication last October that employees would be expected to work from an office 50% of the time, when COVID-19 pandemic restrictions lift. The updated policy, offering employees the flexibility to work remotely full-time or work at an office part-time, will apply to LinkedIn's global workforce of more than 16,000 employees. "We anticipate that we'll definitely see more remote employees than what we saw prior to the pandemic," Hanson said in a Wednesday interview ahead of the announcement, adding that some jobs would require in-office work.
16,000 employees to run LinkedIn? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean I can understand Facebook needing a lot of people to moderate its fluid, high-bullshit-content website. But LinkedIn? It's just a collection of overhyped resumes and social contacts ferchrissake. What the hell are 16K employees needed for?
Re:16,000 employees to run LinkedIn? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
I work here (been at LinkedIn over 5 years) and I honestly don't know.
The engineering teams are large because we never use any off the shelf or existing opensource products - we like to reinvent the wheel in house every time. (At LinkedIn we do Promotion Driven Development.)
We don't use docker or kubernetes because we tried to build our own. Like most things we try to build internally, it fails. A few things (like Kafka) succeeded but most internal projects are a maintenance nightmare and require teams of engineers to develop, test and run.
Sometimes the excuse for needing to build things in house is because existing software doesn't "work at our scale". And sometimes that might be true. But it would seem to be easier to improve existing open source software so it DOES work at scale than build something internal from scratch.
FWIW we're finally moving to Azure and starting to use docker and kubernetes after abandoning some of our internal projects but it was years wasted..
As for non-engineering teams, no idea why we have so many people. Not a clue.
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I also work here, and I think the non-engineering types do sales and account management. Given how expensive those recruiter seats are, there are a lot of training and consulting that we do for big customers, like what customer success does. I honestly think we could eliminate 80% of our engineering team and move the entire website to run from someone's laptop, but we keep doing this stupid Java shit.
Never leaving the home office (Score:2)
Good. That's one more argument that /. user Opportunist could use to persuade their boss to let them never leave their home-office!
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Already forwarded it, but thanks for your concern.
Re:Never leaving the home office (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had a couple employers in my lifetime. This one is something special.
First, it's a company where I can be absolutely certain that it WILL continue to exist. Not going into details, but if this company fails, the country fails. Second, for the first time in years I have a department head that knows what I need from him: Cutting the red tape. That's all I need in a manager. And that's what he's great at. We work well together. I like that. I am an internal consultant, meaning that the people I work together with and consult rarely change. I like that too. The pay is average, nothing to write home about, but it is as much as I need. I don't care too much for money. It's more than I spend, so it is sufficient. The projects are interesting and keep me motivated. That's a plus too,, nothing is more boring than testing one webapp after the next. The training packages are great, it's basically a limitless training budget, or at least I didn't manage to find its limits yet.
There isn't really a lot of incentive for me to switch employers. I do know that it could be way, way worse.
I wonder how many employees they lost... (Score:2)
I Don't like working from home (Score:1)
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None of it matters, employers tried the working from home thin in 2010 and brought people back in. If they are letting people work from home it is only so they can be replaced in a manageable way. If you watch, the companies wont be hiring for new remote workers, they'll be hiring for in person workers and gradually letting the remote workers go, who will eventually take in person work because thats what companies are hiring.
Also, if my company let too many people work from home and I was the only one at t
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Some employers; and of course only those made the news, e.g., Yahoo. (BTW, how'd that work out for them?)
[citation needed]
I have been watching any there are many high-profile companies offering "work from anywhere" including Ford (somewhat surprisingly), Sa
My employer is... (Score:1)
Get Back In The Castle (Score:2)
While some tasks are probably more efficient in an office setting, the vast majority of jobs, particularly for a company like LinkedIn, can be done remotely.
When I see CXOs complaining that they want people back in the offices, I just assume that not having a building filled with underlings makes them feel less powerful.
After all, what's the point of being king if you can't make your subjects tremble in your presence?