Meet the employees transforming LinkedIn's Top Companies

Christina was on the cover of Runner’s World after completing a cross-country trek, alone. Ryan was the first at a company of more than 250,000 employees to secure surrogacy benefits for all parents. Anne championed a change in video processing to make Netflix more enjoyable to millions of people around the world. And Amandla asked if she could lead a project in Africa, before that was even a real possibility at her firm.

These are the stories of just a few of the millions of employees at the most desirable companies in the U.S., according to LinkedIn data. To find out what it’s really like to work at a LinkedIn Top Company, we spoke to the people defining these companies from the inside out. What are their days like and how has their employer evolved along with them throughout the years?

We profiled employees who are transforming several of this year’s Top Companies in the U.S., including Pinterest (No. 29), McKinsey & Company (No. 47), PwC (No. 30), WorkDay (No. 50) and Netflix (No. 11). We also asked them to share a work diary with us, giving us a sense of how they get the most out of their time, both in and out of the office.

Read their stories below, then share stories of the employees who are transforming your companies using #TopCompaniesTransformer.

When Christina Lee first drew national attention, it was by accident. The second time, she knew it was coming.

After graduating from New York University in 2014, 22-year-old Lee decided to run across the country alone with only enough personal items to fit in a baby stroller that she pushed more than 3,000 miles. Somewhere in Iowa, the stroller broke, which forced her to carry some 60 pounds of stuff roughly 20 miles. The incident caught the attention of Runner’s World and Lee graced the cover in December of 2014.

“It made me realize that I’ve never really had a bad thing happen to me, just something I didn't give it enough time to shine,” she said. “If you start looking at things that way, it makes you become better.”

The now 27-year-old software engineer took that attitude to Pinterest, where she currently sits on a team of roughly 15 coders and employees in other technical jobs. In 2016, Lee proposed that Pinterest adopt Kotlin as an official programming language. Lee describes Kotlin as the programming equivalent of a “better spell checker,” and that it allows engineers to write safer code faster. Her advocacy for the new language spread beyond Pinterest’s office in San Francisco and into the wider tech community, leading her to the main stage of Google’s developer conference in 2017. "There, in front of more than 700 people and thousands streaming around the world, her work was mentioned AS Google announced it was adopting the language as well."

“I feel like the thing that works for me is that I have enthusiasm for everything that I do. Maybe too much enthusiasm,” she said. “I love my job so much that it brings me energy even when it’s hard. People laugh at my overabundance, but I think people can deal with more overabundance in their life.”

Here is what a workday looks like for Lee, as told to LinkedIn:

7:30 a.m. My alarm goes off. I’ve been injured so can’t do my normal morning runs. The upside is an extra hour to sleep in every day. The downside is my soul cries.

8:15 a.m. The bus stop is one block from my house and I can see a bus getting ready to leave so I run to catch it. I stand at the door waving but the driver leaves anyway. The driver of a bus behind mine saw what happened and rolls up, opens the door, and beckons me in. “We’ll catch them” he says, and we do! Bus drivers are great. 

8:20 a.m. On bus rides in to work, I listen to podcasts while I embroider. Today, I am working on a portrait of Montana, my family’s golden retriever, while listening to Frontline Dispatch. 

9:27 a.m. I spend the first part of my day checking Slack and clearing out all the messages that accrued since yesterday. Given I have Slacks for every facet of my life, email takes a back seat. I take a quick glance to see if there are any P1s — this is VERY high priority and you should stop working on other things to work on this — but leave the rest unread. From 9-12, my calendar is marked as no-meeting time. I write myself a sticky note of top priorities for the day and hang it on my monitor, then begin on item 1.

10:30 a.m. I spend time assessing opportunities to enhance the accessibility of our app. We want to devote more time to making Pinterest relevant to everyone. To make those investments, we need to know where to focus our energy. We’ll be moving this project forward in the next few days, so it’s one of the five tasks to get done today.

12:40 p.m. I walk into the lobby of our office and someone calls my name. Another Android engineer from the community has recognized me during their coffee break at The Point (the public coffee shop at Pinterest HQ). This happens quite a bit, as The Point has become a go to hang out and one-on-one spot for tech workers in [downtown San Francisco.] We agree to plan the next San Francisco Bay Area Android Meetup, which is something I do every few months.

2:00 p.m. Time to run Android Guild, where we share updates across all Android teams in the company. The meeting is followed by our own team meeting where our data scientist comes in and we brainstorm ways he can help us. I have the best team, and they ask hard questions. During open question times, someone brings up the Rooney Rule while someone else points out the importance of hiring people of all ages and experience levels. I am once again grateful to work on the team I work on. Also, we’re going curling for our next offsite and have a team rematch of Heads Up planned for lunch on Monday!

5:42 p.m. Someone has posted a link to the “Dogs in bags” Instagram in the #allaboutdogs channel and it makes me laugh out loud. I get strange looks.

6:15 p.m. My manager stops by to ask a question. I use the opportunity to meet with him to discuss some topics that have been top of mind. On a normal day I would have gone home by now, but after getting advice on running the Android team, my manager uses the opportunity to ask for feedback on how he handled a difficult situation earlier in the day. I feel like this is a conversation worth having so I don’t mind staying to discuss.

8:00 p.m. Grab a protein shake and head to the gym. I have the gym to myself and have done an exuberant jig between weight racks more than a few times. I look at the CCTV eye and think “please don’t use this against me when I run for public office.” I finish my arm workout and begin to practice my handstands and headstands, which is a New Year’s resolution of mine. I am weak-willed and have hopped on the treadmill even though I know it’s bad for my injured foot. I limit myself to 1.5 miles, but even that fills me with joy.

9:10 p.m. A notification on my home screen says I’m 23 minutes away from home by car, but I opt for the one-hour bus ride. The slow, meandering ride is how I transition out of “go” mode at the end of a day. On bus rides home, I read. Today I am finishing “Becoming” by Michelle Obama.

10:40 p.m. I am a streak-driven person, and I have just finished doing my daily tasks which include practicing Spanish (947-day streak), learning to play the guitar (Creedence Clearwater Revival, here we come!), practicing for the sommelier test (100% accuracy in tonight’s blind wine scent identifications), and writing in my journal (five years of daily entries). I finish my day the same way I have every night for the past three years, by writing down three things I’m grateful for that day. Today’s include the awesome bus driver, finding the metrics bug, and the fact that it’s raining.

11 p.m. Today was longer than most days, and I’ve stayed up past my desired 10 p.m. bedtime. I know I can sleep late tomorrow though, as it’s my favorite day of the week: no-meetings Wednesday. I’ll work from home and have eight straight hours to code. I’ll use my lunch break to go to my favorite yoga class next door. Life is good!

In 2016, Ryan Layman and his husband started to think about having a child through surrogacy. But when he looked into PwC’s employee benefits, there weren’t any that fit his needs. He spoke out on the issue at the company’s bi-annual LGBTQ summit in New Orleans, but didn’t think much more about it afterward.

At the end of 2017, a few months after Layman and his partner’s surrogate got pregnant, Layman received an email from PwC’s Chief Diversity Officer, Mike Dillon. He told Layman that his story mattered and, as of July 2018, employees pursuing surrogacy would be eligible for up to a $25,000 reimbursement per child.

“It caught me off guard,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t anything that anyone owed me.” His words had helped change a policy that now affects more than 250,000 employees at PwC. Layman, 33, has spent over a decade at PwC and says that it’s the opportunity to have that kind of impact that has kept him at the accounting giant. “It gives me the strength to believe that it is not just hot hair or corporate speak, but this is a place where you can grow and learn personally and professionally when you put in hard work,” he said.

A typical day at work for Layman starts at around 3 a.m., when he gets up to feed his six-month-old son, Rory. He then uses his commute to call his direct reports before getting into the office to troubleshoot some auditing challenges that a big client is facing. He told LinkedIn that he tries to spend as little time as he can in his inbox to maximize the face-to-face moments he has with his team and clients.

“I am a big believer that time is everyone’s tightest resource, and sometimes we spend too much time writing things down that could be a short conversation,” he said. “Emails have a place, but they should be short and sweet and anytime there is a dialogue, let’s actually talk.”

After a day of meetings and calls, Layman’s days end quite similarly to how they start: Feeding Rory and spending time with his husband Alex.

When Amandla Ooko-Ombaka was a little girl growing up in Kenya, she told her parents she wanted to be president. Her mother was a doctor and her father a lawyer, but she wanted to be president because he “got things done,” she said.

Getting things done has been a hallmark of Ooko-Ombaka’s career. She didn’t have the grades as a Yale undergraduate to make it into McKinsey’s first-year associate program, but she applied anyway. She got in. A few years later, after working on projects across the U.S. for the consulting firm, Ooko-Ombaka wanted to work out of the relatively new Nigerian office. There wasn’t a transfer program in place, so she emailed a partner at the office and asked if she could come work there. He said yes.

“If you don’t apply, you can’t get in,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even get at the table. But, once you make the decision to be at the table, you do your best to put your best foot forward.”

After three years at McKinsey, Ooko-Ombaka left for Harvard Business School in 2013. The opportunity to lead meaningful projects drew her back to the firm after graduation. As much as 30 percent of the world’s agriculture comes from Africa and Ooko-Ombaka works with companies in the continent to keep business growing. At age 30, the senior consultant admits that a lot of her life is consumed by work, but she takes a long view on the role her career will play in her life overall.

“I used to beat myself up when I didn’t go to the gym every day and call my grandma or my boyfriend or cook for myself,” she said. “What I have done is take a period of three to four weeks at a time and I want to have balance over that period of time.”

Here’s how she spends a typical day at work:

6:00 a.m. Alarm goes off. I hit snooze at least twice. I am not a morning person I peek at my gym clothes that I’d laid out last night as motivation and roll over to my other side.

6:20 a.m. I grudgingly get out of bed. The trainer will be here in 10 minutes. I love working out, but it is often the first thing to drop off the priority list on busy days. I try to make it an activity for my whole team, so no one is working at the time we are all working out. I lead a full-time day-to-day crew of six, and we are all in Accra this week. But we come from several different offices across McKinsey – Barcelona, Casablanca, Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi. And some of the partners are based in New York. It’s a riot!

7:45 a.m. Shower time. I fix a quick breakfast in my serviced apartment. Some coffee I brought from Kenya, cereal and an orange. When I’m on long projects like this one, I prefer to stay in a serviced apartment rather than a hotel. It is more cost-effective for our clients, and I can make it feel more like home with photo frames, and I can carry all of the shoes I want.

8:30 a.m. Team check-in. Our current project – with a consumer packaged foods company – is pretty intense and has lots of moving parts. It is important we all stay aligned. I run a quick 15-minute check-in where we review deliverables completed this week, and priorities for the next two days. We highlight any help the team needs from each other, or from the rest of the partners on our engagement that I speak to regularly.

10:00 a.m. Video-conference check-in with the CEO of my current project. We have a board meeting next week and need to frame some of the organic and merger-and-acquisition growth options to help the client reach their aspiration of having a $1 billion Pan-African business. Fun-fact: There are more than 400 billion-dollar businesses in Africa, and the majority of them are home-grown.

1:00 p.m. I love food, and try to eat lunch at the same time every day, but with varying levels of success. Today, it was an avocado salad and a mango smoothie in the cafeteria with the team. If I have a jam-packed morning, sometimes I prefer to retreat for 30 minutes and get some alone time to refocus with a walk or meditation in lieu of a sit-down lunch.

2:00 p.m. Phone check-in with my former client, a senior government official. We both have exciting news to share. The agricultural strategy project I led last year finally has approval from the Office of the President. I have a couple of things to tweak on the documents, but otherwise all good to go. I also just published a new article “Winning in Africa’s Agricultural Market” on Mckinsey.com that I’d like to share with this client and the Presidential Delivery Unit when I’m next in that country.

3:30 p.m. Back to problem-solving on my current client project. For two hours, we share the challenges we face as we try to “crack” the problem and help the client find a path to their $1 billion aspiration. After problem-solving, I spend a bit more time one-on-one with the associates on my team who have more work to do coming out of problem solving. I want to make sure they have clear direction on next steps. Today, one of the associates needs help with the Excel model.

6:30 p.m. Check-out for team. The whole team comes back together for an end-of-day status check on what we accomplished, what still needs to get done, and what we push to next week. We are all headed home for the weekend and will spend Friday in our home offices. I want to make sure we have enough time to connect with our McKinsey colleagues, catch up on training, make it to happy hour, etc…so we need to be efficient but reasonable with the Friday work load.

7:40 p.m. Head to the airport for my 8:40 flight back home for the weekend. Airport is right across the road from the client. In general, I am a run-from-the-taxi-to-the-plane kind of gal. Africa is a massive continent, and I love exploring it – being able to travel for work is a big plus. I am, however, not a fan of downtime in the airport – the alternative, an extra snooze in the morning, more time for a conversation or dinner with a client or friend, more time with my team – is always better than sitting in an airport by myself.

10:30 p.m. I have a quick in-flight dinner as I indulge in my book of the moment, the New York Times bestseller “The Girl Who Smiled Glass Beads.”

11:15 p.m. Time for some shut-eye. I land in Nairobi in a couple of hours and have some early morning meetings. I plan to leave the office early on Friday as I want to have dinner with my granny who goes to bed by 8 p.m., then a glorious night of sleep in my bed before a full weekend in Nairobi.

Erin Yang joined Workday in 2011 as one of the company’s first 1,000 employees and she thought she’d stay for a couple years and then move to a tech company to work on something a little more exciting than employee management software.

Nearly eight years and 10,500 employees later, the VP of product and strategy says she just never got a chance to look for another opportunity. Since starting at the Pleasanton, Calif-based company as a technology products manager, Yang has swiftly risen in the ranks and now runs a team of 35 at the age of 34.

“Every time I felt like I was just about getting the hang of what I was doing, some other opportunity came to me that I thought would push me and I didn’t think I would get anywhere else,” she said. “I like to say that I grew up with the company.”

With a four-month-old at home, Yang’s morning begins with a pumping session to get his morning bottle ready. After that, she heads down to the Peloton in her home for a quick workout before heading into the office. When she spoke with LinkedIn, Yang was busy planning a summit Workday puts on every year for industry analysts. She was also eager to get customer feedback on a new pricing and packaging proposal the company put together for Workday’s Cloud Platform.

The mother of two told me that she never aspired to be an executive. Instead, she wanted to do a “good job” at the tasks she was given and solve problems. She says support at home and at Workday has allowed her to accomplish much more.

“My husband being an equal parenting partner is something I don’t take for granted,” she said. “Even if I drop the ball one day on work or home life, I feel like someone would come cover for me. I’ve learned not to underestimate myself.” 

Growing up in the Philippines, Anne Aaron knew pretty early on that she wanted to work in tech. “I was just not good at selling soap or marketing soap,” she said, referring to the job opportunities in her country at big conglomerates like Procter & Gamble.

After graduating from college, Aaron got her hands on a list of engineering schools in the U.S. and applied to the top 20. She got denied by all but one: Stanford University. Initially thrilled by the opportunity, she quickly realized she couldn’t afford the tuition. On a whim, she decided to email the head of the electrical engineering department and explain her situation. Within a few months, she was offered a full scholarship.

Taking matters into her own hands has been a hallmark of Aaron’s career, and it’s what’s kept her moving up the ladder for more than seven years at Netflix. Known for its culture of “freedom and responsibility” for every employee, Netflix prides itself on letting the best ideas move forward within the company, no matter where they come from.

Aaron experienced this ethos first hand shortly after she joined in 2011. As a senior software engineer, she noticed how Netflix could improve its video quality while reducing bandwidth. The entertainment company was expanding rapidly into emerging economies, and the fix ended up being a huge benefit to its growth plans.

“You own a project and you own everything about it,” she said. “People who are proactive, proactive to do what is right and not just accept what is there and be motivated what is good for the business.”

Now director of video algorithms for Netflix, 41-year-old Aaron leads a team of about 20 software engineers. Here’s how she spends a typical day at work: 

6:20 a.m. My five-year old climbs into bed before the alarm goes off. I tell him mama wants to sleep more but he ignores me and tries to keep me awake with random questions. Our seven-year old son comes in 10 minutes later and they decide to wake up grandma instead (my in-laws are visiting this month!). Side note: Since my in-laws are in town and they are awesome with the kids, my husband and I can enjoy a bit more breathing room this week. 

7:00 a.m. I join the family (husband, two sons, grandma and grandpa) in the kitchen. They started breakfast. My husband hands me my cappuccino and I eat a slice of toast with butter and jam.

7:45 a.m. I drive to our office in Los Gatos. I listen to a podcast from Kara Swisher while driving.

8:15 a.m. The Los Gatos Creek trail is at the back of our office and it’s the most convenient and efficient way to exercise. I run 5 km and after the run, I take a shower and grab some oatmeal with fruit from the kitchen. 

9:30 a.m. My first meeting for the day is a one-on-one with a team member who’s on his way to Berlin the following week for the Video Quality Experts Group meeting. We discuss goals for that meeting (research partnerships, ideas to propose) and potential recruits from that event

10:00 a.m. The scheduled cross-team meeting was cancelled. At Netflix, we believe in “Context not Control,” so I try to allocate time to make sure I have good context, on different levels. I use this time to catch up on very high-level context: the Oscars which aired last weekend. I read articles on outside perception about Netflix’s performance at the Oscars and watch clips of acceptance speeches for “Roma.” 

10:30 a.m. I have a one-on-one with a new member of the India Communications team. She was in Los Gatos this week for orientation for new employees. She wanted to learn more about our team’s work, particularly on how we reduce the bandwidth requirements of our video streams while maintaining picture quality. This is very relevant for markets like India.

 11:00 a.m. Our weekly team meeting. We start by going around the table and each person gets a minute or two to share what they watched this week and if they recommend it and what is top of mind for their work week. The second part of the meeting is a focus topic. This week’s topic is two production bugs that our team had caused recently. We do a post-mortem and discuss how we can prevent similar bugs in the future.

12:00 p.m. We have a weekly meeting between the leaders of Encoding Technologies and our partner team, Media Cloud Engineering. These two teams work closely to develop the Netflix encoding pipeline. For this meeting, we work through some of the misalignment we had related to an encoding feature for our Studio efforts.

 12:30 p.m. I grab food from our kitchen and have lunch with colleagues. We usually don’t discuss work during lunch. 

1:00 p.m. Desk time. I focus on hiring and I go through [recruiting software] Lever to review candidate notifications, check their profiles on LinkedIn and write some messages.

1:30 p.m. We have a meeting with the Financial Planning and Analysis team to update our forecasts on storage requirements for our video streams.

2:00 p.m. My team has a “Codec Research” subteam and we have a weekly sync-up meeting. We review progress and challenges with the AV1 project. I attend the first 30 minutes and leave the more detailed technical discussions to the team because I have to rush to the next meeting.

2:30 p.m. FASTER (Filipino Americans in Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math) and the Netflix Filipinos employee resource group is co-hosting a networking event for the Filipino-American tech community. This is our kickoff meeting involving FASTER representatives and volunteers within Netflix. Since this is the first of its kind held at Netflix, I’m very excited!

 5:45 p.m. I arrive home and my kids are playing with the grandparents. I hang out with them for a while and ask about their school days. I start preparing dinner (A Good Eggs meal kit “Roasted Salmon with Asparagus & Potatoes,” which only takes 30 minutes!) while the kids are running around.

7:00 p.m. Some struggle to get the kids to finish their homework and get ready for bed. My husband and I take turns reading bedtime books to the kids.

8:00 p.m. Kids’ bedtime. I stay in the kids’ bedroom on a beanbag until they fall asleep. I mindlessly go on my cell phone, looking at Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin while waiting for the kids to sleep.

10:00 p.m. Time to watch Netflix! I watch an episode of “One Day at a Time” season 3. I start watching the first episode of “Umbrella Academy,” but I’m too tired to finish it.

These employees helped transform their companies into what they are today. Who at your company has done the same? Mention them in the comments below and share their story.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Christina Lee did not present on stage at Google I/O. Her name appeared on it during another presentation.