Why am I finding it so painful ….

Leaving friends when I changed school after 7th grade was not this painful, leaving home and parents to start undergrad was not this painful, leaving India to come to the US was not this painful, certainly leaving companies I have worked in so far was not this painful. Don't get me wrong, they were all hard but not painful. I thought leaving LinkedIn would be something similar - hard but manageable. I was totally wrong, last few weeks have been really painful and hard to describe. I have two kids and have seen them cry a lot when mommy goes out and people call it as separation anxiety. I had not totally bought into that concept - I always felt kids are too smart and know how to get the best out of their parents ;-). Leaving LinkedIn has changed my opinion - may be there is something as separation anxiety after all.

Leaving LinkedIn was painful because of various reasons -

People…

People we work with have a huge impact on our life and I was super lucky to be associated with an amazing set of people. They instilled positivity, inspired me to be a better person and gave me the confidence that together we can achieve the impossible. The way I evaluated this is “How do I feel after having conversations with them” and most of the time I felt happy and energized. Apart from people I work with on a day to day basis, I have been fortunate lucky to have Kapil Surlaker and Shirshanka Das as mentors. Once you are surrounded with such good people, you don’t think of work-life balance because work is full of life and you find more joy in daily things. To all the wonderful people I worked with on a daily basis - Thank you and will miss you all dearly.

That feeling of having a job that you love...

To add to the joy of working with such wonderful people, I was lucky enough to work on something that I absolutely love - building distributed systems. I hate quoting quotes but had to make an exception for this "Choose a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life.". I can’t remember a day where I got up and did not feel like not going to work. I am truly grateful to LinkedIn for creating such an environment where people are able to find something that they love doing.

Greenfield projects  and Open source friendly …

LinkedIn is a great place that fosters innovation and does not shy away from taking on new high risk high reward projects. LinkedIn has a strong history of creating successful open source software. Being part of LinkedIn Open Source committee and leading some of these projects, I have first hand experience on how LinkedIn encourages engineers to open source their projects.  I am fortunate enough to have the privilege of building some of the most complex systems at LinkedIn - Espresso, Helix, Pinot and ThirdEye. All projects apart from Espresso have been open sourced and used widely within LinkedIn and outside. As a developer, it’s very satisfying  to see the software you built used at companies like Uber, Microsoft, Yahoo, Instagram, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack and many others. This would not have been possible without LinkedIn's commitment to Open Source.

Perks

LinkedIn really spoils you with all the perks - free food being one at the top. But for me the best perk was all the inPain activities- yes it’s called inPain. I got to be part of some of these crazy adventures -  Half Dome, Mt Shasta, Mt Whitney, Gran Fondo bike ride etc. On top of this I also did Death Ride and world famous Haleakala Cycle to the sun. Special thanks to Nadiya Hayes for the flawless organization and Igor Perisic for sponsoring. I will miss these activities.

So why am I leaving …

Before joining LinkedIn, I was curious about how complex distributed systems are built and I wanted to build one. Not only did I learn how systems are built but I had the opportunity to build various distributed systems from the ground up. Off late, I have been fascinated about how companies are built from scratch and want to experience it. This is something I cannot learn being at LinkedIn or any other big company. The only way is to join a startup and experience it first hand. And that’s exactly what I am doing - joining a very early stage startup. While I am sad to leave LinkedIn, I am equally excited about starting my new adventure.

Thanks again to everyone who made my journey at LinkedIn memorable.