Culture

Getting to Know Shivam Sharma

Shivam is an engineering intern with our Sales Solutions team, which focuses on delivering innovative products for sales people who want to leverage their networks to enable social selling. Specifically, his team is working on the redesign and re-architecture of the Sales Navigator product on the new Pemberly technical stack. Shivam is currently pursuing his bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, San Diego.

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What are some of the coolest projects that you and your team have been working on?
One of the coolest projects I have had the pleasure of working on is leveraging the Ember Data persistence library and building services on top of it to introduce a centralized caching layer in Sales Navigator. This enables us to significantly reduce the amount of API calls to our backend needed to propagate changes to our UI and reliably anticipate data changes in our cache based on a finite set of user interactions. For the end user, this means a UI that updates instantaneously in a highly performant manner and a decrease in loading times while using the Sales Navigator application over an extended session. This has been a really great project because I have been able to work so closely with many of the senior engineers and the architect on our team to come up with solutions that will be utilized throughout the Sales Navigator application and produce clean, concise patterns for other developers to follow. I've also been given opportunities to present my findings to our entire team for feedback.

How would you describe the engineering culture at LinkedIn?
I would describe the engineering culture at LinkedIn in three words: accessible, open, and supportive. Accessible, because everyone on your team is incredibly easy to meet up with and willing to sit down with you to discuss any and all technical issues that you may have. Even being an intern on the team, I have been able to work on really large architectural projects with our team leads and architect, with their support and guidance all along the way. The culture here at LinkedIn is also very open to change; having previously come from a heavy Angular and React background at my previous internships, I had a lot of thoughts about how web applications should behave and how they should be structured. As a result, I was able to come up with several patterns to integrate concepts I was familiar with into the Ember ecosystem, get approval from several other engineers, write up documentation wikis about how others could utilize my changes, and even present in front of the entire team about my findings. Finally, the culture here is very supportive. Everyone on your team wants you to succeed, whether that be by helping you to get rid of any potential blockers, finding larger tasks for you to take on, or giving detailed code reviews, all to ensure that you develop your own skills at the highest possible level in the best possible environment.

What are your favorite things to do when you’re not at the office?
Outside of the office, I love to exercise. I started lifting in my freshman year of college with the help of some of my friends and, thanks to LinkedIn, I get to routinely make use of the gyms here on campus and earn points along the way to get free company swag. I also love photography and travelling, and plan to travel across Europe and India for three months later this year, taking pictures on my DSLR all along the way.