Pinterest

• Good values
• Good pay
• A few genuine people here and there
• Some unique systems that help drive data-driven decision-making

Not safe for LGBT, especially transgender individuals. There's a lot of virtue signaling, but very little actual policy or management willing to protect LGBT and BIPOC workers.

Middle management will absolutely burn you into the ground; they do not care about you at all.

Very fake people and company, a lot of performative allyship and toxic masculinity.

Being thrown around to a new team or manager every six months. You get put with a good one, then transferred to one that burns you out.

Features you work on can be completely trashed, so much for all that work.

Management goes out of their way to find every little thing you did wrong and mischaracterize situations to their fullest.

Dirty liberal centrists that have no real spine or backbone on anything.

Pinterest promised us all a better working environment, but what they did was lie to us all. They got you in the door with a good manager, but in six months transferred most to others who burned everyone into the ground. It was not uncommon to see good engineers outright quit the company after screaming matches with middle management, or just as soon as they got their stock vests. The company is rife with people who want to act like they’re the do-gooders, but are really just the same preppy, nose-in-the-air liberal elites who commit the same basic problematic and toxic behavior as anywhere else.

All the good managers consistently went back to IC roles because the management chain is rife with capitalists who don’t care if people live or die. When management was confronted with any sort of feedback, they immediately dug in their heels and refused to see themselves and their process as anything other than the magnum opus. It took giant lawsuits to even see the most minor of changes, but it was all just for looks – the same toxic behaviors still existed just as they did before, just now with a rainbow sticker on top of it and an HR that wanted any reason whatsoever to get rid of anyone who spoke up.

We all really wanted to believe in Pinterest, but once it went IPO and the stock was actually worth something, management was keen on getting rid of everyone they owed big money to. They purposefully threw them onto big, impossible-to-complete projects or under managers who showed them zero support while criticizing everything that they didn’t remotely like (read as: not being able to read their minds). Most of the engineers that are left do the absolute bare minimum to get by, and the code quality has slipped to being some of the worst folks have had to deal with.

If you want an example of just how poor some of the code is, you can just look at all the public variables and spaghetti code that is everywhere, along with code where refactoring has been long, long overdue. From databases loaded with millions of columns to shared enumerations that have hit their storage limits, to code that has zero testing and is thrown together, barely hanging by a thread, Pinterest has very little interest in fixing anything as long as the ad money keeps rolling in.

I left a lot of good friends at Pinterest, but the company itself is a farce. What should have been a haven for the mistreated and exploited became a further exploitation center that made sure to take advantage of people, much akin to that of Facebook and Amazon. Everything became about dev velocity and making sure to milk every last drop they could from you, even if it meant destroying your life/work balance.

Any engineer worth their salt should be very careful. While the benefits and pay were exceptional, the kinds of toxic players in positions of power guaranteed that the whole thing was meant to be more for them and less for you. Just take the “infinite time off” policy – a great example of something that sounds nice, but in reality results in fewer people taking the time off they deserve and being further burned out, as well as making it so when you exit employment, they owe you a big fat $0 from any accrued time off. As well, there is always the small text that they never really tell you that significantly limits how much you can access.

My advice to management is to get bent. You ruined a great environment for talented engineers who were so happy they left when they did, completely lying to them in the process of the exploitation you really were after you began with.