Career Advice About LinkedIn

The name of the performance evaluation document at LinkedIn is called CPT (Career Progression Tracker). Software engineers are evaluated on the following 3 axes: execution, leadership, and craftsmanship.

In the past few years, LinkedIn is moving toward a metrics-oriented performance culture, similar to Meta, but without the generosity of large equity refresh grants 😭 So it's important to maintain a document throughout the half of various accomplishments and metrics that came from your work.

This reflects your core ability to deliver work on time and land impact.

For L2 and L3 engineers, mastering this axis for promotion largely revolves around the tactics in this guide: [Masterclass] How To Write Better Code Faster As A Software Engineer

This is your ability to bring stakeholders and other teams together. The more people underneath your scope here, the better your rating in this axis.

If you're looking to ramp up your leadership skills, check out this in-depth explainer: "How to develop soft skills like leadership, stakeholder management, etc.?"

This axis covers the quality and elegance of your solutions. Here are some things that reflect well for craftsmanship:

• Writing atomic, well-documented pull requests
• Creating scalable and easily reusable components

The most basic aspect of this axis is code quality. Watch this video to understand what it takes to write clean code at a FAANG-level company: One Diff, One Thesis - What Every Code Review Should Be Like.

Performance feedback is collected entirely in Workday.

Self Review

The self-review has prompts, but you don't have to use them. Most engineers will do a free-form response following the LEC format (leadership - execution - craftsmanship).

The length of your self-review is important. The specifics depend on the org, but managers are often required to condense self-reviews to 1500 characters. So it’s very important to be concise to make your manager's life easier, or provide them with a draft of what they could write.

Peer Feedback

3 - 5 pieces of peer feedback is a good range for most people. However, this can vary:

• If you're a new L2 or L3, just 1 piece of peer feedback could be enough
• If you're L5+ (Staff), you may need more than 5 to justify your scope

Watch this video to determine the optimal "bench" of peers for your packet: Assembling The Feedback "Avengers" For Your Promotion Case

Visibility

You only see the feedback the manager writes. You don’t see feedback from your peers - The manager compresses it for you and gives you a high-level recap.

Every year, your compensation is increased across the following 3 axes:

• Base salary: You get a raise.
• Bonus: You get a cash payment once a year. This is pro-rated if you didn't work across the entire cycle.
• More RSUs (not guaranteed): You get a refresher grant that gives you more equity. Not all engineers get a refresher each cycle - It's more reserved for high performers.

For each level, LinkedIn has a TAC (Total Annual Compensation), which is a pay band that universally cuts across level and geography. LinkedIn uses this TAC to calculate compensation adjustments.

As long as you're getting "Achieves" (3) on all 3 axes, you should be safe from a PIP or performance-based firing. Don't fall below "Improvement Goals" (2) on any axis, and you should be okay.

The key to avoiding PIP is to stay in sync with your manager - Learn how to do that with this video.

LinkedIn was known to be more relaxed before the layoff-era:

• Getting a 2 was okay as long as you had 3s to smooth it out (i.e it wasn't a huge PIP risk)
• It didn't really do any form of stack ranking