It all started as a joke. The six of us – all interns from the University of Waterloo – were brainstorming ideas for our first hackday at LinkedIn. While we were commenting on our lunch from that day, we thought “Why not build an app to rate our lunches?”. We had the perfect name already picked out: EatIn. Our hack went on to win the “Best Internal Tool” award – a win at our first hackday!
LinkedIn hackdays are a special day every month when our engineers are encouraged to work on something new and innovative. This month, we extended this spirit of innovation beyond the engineering team in our second bi-annual Innovation Challenge.
To help foster this challenge, the LinkedIn Idea Bank was born. The LinkedIn Idea Bank is a new internal website created and managed by employees. It leverages the LinkedIn API and contains features to handle idea creation, such as handling slides and video content, as well as features like search, voting, commenting and tagging to enable engagement and participation by the whole company. With this in place, employees leveraged this opportunity to share their ideas with the entire company: teams were formed; ideas voted on; feedback from peers, managers and executives was given; and ideas were iterated on. In just one week, the LinkedIn Idea Bank had 3,507 votes, 389 comments, 152 projects submitted, and 8 minutes on average spent on the site by employees! LinkedIn employees submitted a wide range of ideas from internal productivity tools to LinkedIn site features to using LinkedIn for charitable opportunities.
Editor’s Note: LinkedIn hosted our second Intern Hackday in August. Karan Parikh, LinkedIn intern extraordinaire, is here to tell us about his experience.
LinkedIn’s Intern Hackday was AWESOME – the hacks were spectacular, the judges incredible and the food delicious.
What happens when you get 100 engineers together? Magic! And what if they are all women engineers in Mountain View and Delhi? MAGIC!
We were lucky enough at LinkedIn to witness magic in the making last month when we held our first ever Women’s Hackday, DevelopHer. A little tongue-in-cheek, and a lot of good old fashioned elbow grease, this hackday was initially sketched as a get together for women in tech in the Bay Area. It shortly became clear to us that we need more doing in this area, and less talking. So DevelopHer was born to give women of all programming abilities a chance to code with us, and compete against each other. And we coded, all night long. 18 teams in Mountain View and 5 teams in Delhi were formed and amongst them there were the Hackbright Academy women who are just learning to code, and industry rock stars like Julia Grace of WeddingLovely.
Attention all interns in the Bay Area! You’re invited to the second annual Intern Hackday to be held at LinkedIn HQ on August 3rd, 2012. This is a chance to compete with the best and brightest in Silicon Valley: form teams with other college students, hack all night, and create something amazing.
