Inside Operation InVersion, the Code Freeze That Saved LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s May 2011 initial public offering was a blowout. Its share price more than doubled in the first day of trading, giving the networking site a nearly $9 billion valuation. Behind the scenes, though, the company’s computing systems were a total mess. In the months that followed, hundreds of engineers struggled to hold the site together with the digital equivalent of chewing gum and duct tape.

By November 2011, Kevin Scott, LinkedIn’s top engineer, had had enough. The system was taxed as LinkedIn attracted more users, and engineers were burnt out. To fix the problems, Scott, who’d arrived from Google that February, launched Operation InVersion. He froze development on new features so engineers could overhaul the computing architecture. That may not sound like a big deal, but in the frenetic world of the social Web, it’s sacrilege. “You go public, have all the world looking at you, and then we tell management we’re not going to deliver anything new while all of engineering works on this project for the next two months,” Scott says. “It was a scary thing.”