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Growth is hard, but still the best company I've worked for

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Pinterest for 1 year
March 31, 2016
San Francisco, California
5.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Big engineering challenges but still small enough that individuals can make a real difference.

Surrounded by very talented engineers, designers, and data analysts that will take the time to answer your questions and from whom you can learn.

Management is incredibly transparent and open. Every Friday, there is a public Q&A with the CEO and senior management answering your anonymous questions. Every meeting with more than three people sends out notes so you can see what's going on with the rest of the company.

It's clear at every step that Ben (CEO) really cares about employees and wants them to share in success longer term and enjoy their day at work.

Like any company, there will be non-optimal groups or projects, but it seems pretty easy to switch groups if there is something else you want to do.

I've worked at 4 different startups/tech companies now, and this is by far the best company to work for out of all of them. The perks, culture, and engineering are great, but the opportunities and care for employees are even better.

Cons

They are growing very quickly, and you have to be ready to grow yourself as well as upgrade existing solutions that aren't scaling. The foundational changes to scale in raw numbers of users and internationalize the product aren't necessarily appreciated by everyone.

I've read a number of reviews complaining about a lack of engineering rigor, and in my experience, most of the problems they are describing are problems of growth, where the solutions that worked last year don't scale to this year's traffic. This growth leads to legitimate problems and challenges, but they are the kind of problems that you want—much better than the problem of not having any growth in users.

Advice to Management
  • Love the focus and the transparency.
  • Personally, I think it would be motivating to engineering trenches to articulate product innovations in addition to the current focus on growth and improving the performance of core features.
  • Thanks for taking the time to get up and talk to us every week. Please keep it up, even when we're chicken and like to ask questions anonymously.
  • I know senior management spends a lot of time recruiting. How much of that is spent on retention and mingling with current employees as we grow? Come sit at a random table at lunch. It sounds like you weren't necessarily the cool kids in high school, but neither were the rest of us, and generally, we really like you guys and want to hang out.

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