LinkedIn reviews

For a small company, it's highly political. It contradicts itself on several levels: 1. By claiming to hire the best, but it hires incompetent leaders (especially middle management) and keeps legacy poor performers who are in the wrong roles (a.k.a., the Peter Principle). 2. There is further hypocracy by not abiding by its values. It has become too layered with management that is inaccessible and won't share information. 3. It claims to be a global company, yet it mandates that in order to have any career path, you must be at the HQ in Mountain View. Exceptions are made to certain telecommuters on a hush-hush basis--but not to others--therefore creating unfair practices. As an internet company in this century, I would expect more flexibility in order to retain and attract employees. 4. Benefits are marginal at best for an internet company trying to compete against the big boys. You may as well work at a bank. 5. Wants to be a big player and has the attitude of its neighbor, but it is not implementing practices to compete. 6. It's impossible to have a career path at LinkedIn when they have poor management, poor communication, and oversight of great talent.

Blind technology leadership, not invented here attitude towards standard open source technologies. For example the 'open sourced' Zoie project implements a cheap hack for realtime search using Lucene, that was presented to and rejected by Twitter. Voldemort is yet another copy of Amazon's Dynamo, however it falls far short of Cassandra. LinkedIn has numerous open source and internal projects that show technology comes last, egos, first.