Humans of Engineering - Sandhya's Story

This article was originally published as part of an internal series called Humans of?Engineering,?a collection of stories shared by?our employees?to encourage, inspire, and connect with each other as around the world, companies transitioned to work from home.?The series was created by our WIT team based on?the popular Humans of New York blog.

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My journey to LinkedIn was nothing but a roller coaster ride. Be it getting married, having kids, my first job after numerous rejections and then finally ending up at LinkedIn.?

I moved to the United States after marrying my college sweetheart. Moving to a foreign land from Chennai, a city in south India, I had no idea where to go next. I thought of immediately getting started with a new job, but being on a dependent visa the process of obtaining a work permit was not straightforward. Hence I decided to pursue my masters degree and then BOOM! I was pregnant with my first child. In Spite of that I decided to pursue further education, but when my first kid was born it was simply tough for me to leave her at home and study. Hence I decided to drop out. I felt insanely guilty to leave my baby at home alone with caregivers. I thought if I really want to study I can do that for the next two years, but I won't really get the infant version of my little one after two years, hence its best to focus at home.

After my kid grew up, I pursued a fellowship program to get exposure to recent technologies. I was in their SRE track and thoroughly enjoyed the process. I felt like that was my mini masters. But even after completing the program it was very tough to find a job. I tried everything, numerous job applications, referrals etc. But nothing worked. Eventually, hard work pays off. I was then hired by a start up. Working at the start up was super cool. It was like an explosion of knowledge for me. I thoroughly loved it, but then yet again, after 17 months as my work permit expired, I had to discontinue working.

Nevertheless the experience at startup was so enriching, it instilled a lot of confidence in me. I soon was pregnant with my second kid. During this time I got my green card and work permit and I was all set to start working. I passively started interviewing and I came across #LinkedInWiseUp Challenge, where there was an online assessment, and if we pass, top 3 winners get a direct onsite opportunity at LinkedIn. I was 4th and was given a watch. I was bummed but I thought “Nevermind…at least I have this watch”. But then a recruiter contacted me and asked if I am interested in giving an onsite interview. I was in my second trimester at that time, so I thought “There is no harm in just giving this interview...lets see”.

I passed the interview. It was as if I was meant to work at LinkedIn. After I started at LinkedIn, in my first 1:1 with my manager I told him that I was in my third trimester of my second child, and he was overjoyed! He was very inclusive that he even mentioned that if anything I need to be happy as I am having a baby. The whole team was supportive when they discovered that I am a pregnant hire. I continued working at my dream company with amazing colleagues after 4 months of maternity leave. I was all set to contribute to my team.

For me, success is about achieving a great work life balance and that's what LinkedIn helps me accomplish. I work with the Trino team,a data analytics tool used across the board at LinkedIn with a massive scale of over 1 million queries per day, thousands of nodes, thousands of users. Currently I am moving mountains in the way we operate Trino by migrating the deployment stack to Kubernetes. There are a lot of new challenges to solve everyday. As engineers we sometimes tend to have crazy deadlines, but the best thing about my team is that the expectations are at par with the pace I can work with. Literally I can do a great nine to five job and then be back and not really worry about my work and focus on my kids and husband.

--Sandhya Nagarajan, Site Reliability Engineer LinkedIn [as told to Chinmayee Vaidya]