Pinterest

• Flexible PTO policy.
• Good medical/dental/other benefits.
• The product has incredible untapped potential.
• There are a lot of smart, friendly people here.
• The executive team is starting to resemble a group of mature professionals.
• No micromanagement.
• Work/life balance is whatever you want it to be.

Obviously, YMMV depending on what team you're on and what you do, but my day-to-day work experience is generally positive. I don't work with a bunch of a**holes, I get to work on things that I enjoy, and I don't have anyone breathing down my neck to kill myself in the name of artificial deadlines.

For junior engineers, Pinterest seems to be a pretty good place to be. There are a lot of problems to solve and a lot of smart people to learn from.

However, more senior people who come in are struck by some of the stupid engineering decisions that were made in the early days of the company and the complete inertia that seems to surround the notion of changing these things. It also seems that people who have only been here a year or less are still drinking the kool-aid, but the longer you stay, the more you start to wonder about the emperor's wardrobe.

Whether or not Pinterest is a good choice for YOU depends very much on what is important to you in a job. If you just want a place to come hang out for a few years, do some work and collect your paycheck, and maybe learn a few things along the way, you can do that here. If you've still got that idealist fire in your eyes and you want to go work on something special, or if you want to go somewhere that you can make a big impact, think twice before you come here. It might work out for you, but you might also end up very disappointed.

• Very average base pay, no bonuses.
• No 401k match.
• Codebase is drowning in technical debt.
• CEO is an amateur who has outlived his usefulness.
• Some engineering teams are perpetually understaffed, and others get all the love.
• Overall product/company direction sometimes feels like a boat without a rudder.
• Too much focus on doing things that look good on the surface but lack real impact.

Most of the executive team has been replaced with industry veterans over the past couple of years, but we still have a CEO who is learning on the job and who is eventually going to become the albatross around Pinterest's neck. The other reviews that talk about how he can't handle criticism are all spot-on. He does a fine job of coming across as a genuine, caring individual, but all of that goes out the window if you disagree with him. If Pinterest is to have any chance to become all of the things that he says that it can be, Ben needs to step aside and let a more professional captain run the ship.

I'd like to be more positive about Pinterest, but the fact is that so many people here just seem to be going through the motions for one reason or another. Any lingering effects there might have been from drinking that cup of Kool-Aid when I started working here have long since worn off. Outside of a few small teams, there's not much technical innovation going on. Engineering direction is always changing, and it really has gone from something to be excited about to just another job. This means there's no longer anything special about Pinterest that separates it from any of the hundreds of other companies in the Bay Area that an engineer could work for. It's a job. It pays the rent.

It should serve as a wake-up call to management that every quarter, the percentage of engineers who expect to still be working at the company 12 months from now keeps going down. Yet nothing seems to change.

It doesn't matter, nobody is listening.

Besides, there has been so much upheaval in 2017 that further changes in the short term are probably just going to make things worse. A lot of people were hired in 2015, and the 3-year mark seems to be when people start getting restless and looking elsewhere, so if you're not careful, 2018 may end up being a very rough year.