War stories from early days of engineering at LinkedIn | David Henke (LinkedIn, Yahoo)

At the personal request of Reid Hoffman to emerge from early retirement, David joined LinkedIn in 2009 during a period of rapid growth to help stabilize the chaos, cultivating a much-needed culture of “Site Up and Secure.” Before this, David served as SVP of Engineering and Operations at Yahoo!, overseeing their Search Marketing organization and the Production Operations infrastructure for the entire company. Throughout his career, David has held multiple leadership positions and is recognized as one of the top operations executives. David’s intensity, passion, courage and commitment to work have always been deeply admired by his colleagues and his wisdom, well captured in one line axioms, better known as Henkeisms, are still echoed at LinkedIn.

This episode was first published almost 3 years ago and we are sharing it again because it’s been one of our favorites :) Hope you like it too!

Segments:

[00:01:37] “This is my freaking site” poster

[00:04:10] David’s first 2 retirements and starting at LinkedIn

[00:09:41] IC to Management

[00:17:20] Site-Up Culture

[00:21:58] Re-architecting LinkedIn’s release process

[00:27:23] War stories from Yahoo: The 10G Massacre

[00:32:06] “Go to work every day willing to be fired”: Project Panama at Yahoo

[00:43:33] The power of Individual Contributors

Show Notes:

• David Henke on LinkedIn

• Learning to Lead - David Henke’s talk on leadership which he delivered at his alma mater - UCSB

• Project Inversion at LinkedIn

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