Measuring Engineering Efficiency at LinkedIn

Learnings and insights from a principal engineer at LinkedIn and veteran of developer tools and productivity, Max Kanat-Alexander.

A few months ago, I tweeted an observation that so many developer productivity tools which vendors build, seem to be designed for CEOs and CFOs to buy them, not to make engineering teams more productive. This is a big difference! Max Kanat-Alexander, principal engineer at LinkedIn, replied, saying:

“The more I read in this space, the more I want to publish what we are doing at LinkedIn.”

Max is an expert when it comes to developer productivity; he’s been in this segment for close to twenty years, spending the majority of it working on tools for software engineers. Over the past decade, he’s spent more and more time working in the developer productivity problem space.

I jumped at the opportunity to learn more from Max about his experiences in this field, and to get a glimpse of what teams at LinkedIn are doing – and why.

In today’s issue, we cover:

1. Max’s career path

2. Developer experience learnings from Google

3. Developer productivity goals at LinkedIn

4. Developer productivity approaches at LinkedIn

5. Developer productivity dashboards

6. The road ahead

7. Why is developer productivity so hard to measure?

We’ll also take a look at developer productivity dashboards that LinkedIn has built, like this one:

Screenshot of LinkedIn’s Developer Insights Hub. All data is mocked-up.

With that, it’s over to Max.

1. Max’s career path: Bugzilla, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn