Pinterest

General Company Culture:

• Decently competitive salary and benefits. Although I expect a long downhill slide in this area as Pinterest continues to adapt to being a public company.
• Generous amount of company-wide vacation days.
• Great internal IT group.

Engineering Specific:

• If you want to build something your own way, deploy it your own way, optionally open source it, operate it completely on your own, and sink or swim based on how well you can promote and manage the thing, with almost no help, Pinterest engineering might be a great place for you. Nobody will stop you. Even if Pinterest already has five systems that do the same thing and two other groups are working on something similar. (Is this really a pro? Hmm..)
• The Eng Security group is the most well-managed in Infra; they ship code and have good, realistic standards. Management has failed spectacularly to recognize this or implement their good practices elsewhere.

Engineering Specific:

• If you actually succeed in launching and managing your project/service, expect to find out about all sorts of internal "standards" that you never heard of before and be pointed to some obscure wiki page. The team who thinks they're responsible for managing that type of thing might try to take it away from you or have it shut down.

• Don't expect to ever have your project or service become an engineering-wide standard, because those don't exist there. Don't expect to be able to keep documentation up to date, as there are multiple internal systems and docs are horrendously out of date and scattered between several different systems. Sometimes your critical docs are just deleted without warning due to wiki restructuring and "cleanups".

• Engineers build and deploy new systems and services without any real review or requirements. They hardly have a handle on what is currently deployed. Zero interest or investment in elimination of repetitive operational tasks. If you operate an important service, be ready to be on every weekend maintenance call to stop and start your service manually, or fix/redeploy broken instances.

• Promotions are entirely political. They are treated as poker chips to be traded amongst managers for favors. (Same for yearly salary increases / RSU refresh)

• Project management and planning is still being done mainly via spreadsheets.

• Zero build-vs-buy cost/benefit analysis. Org is heavily biased toward the "roll your own" mentality.

• IC achievements are forgotten almost instantly. They give out awards to ICs every quarter in all hands, but they literally don't even keep track anywhere of who got an award and for what.

• If you go against the grain, expect to be harassed and retaliated against by middle management. Like other reviews have stated, Pinterest doesn't care.

General Company Culture:

• Internal communications are aggressively tone policed. Example: I was once involved in an interview panel where an obscenely qualified, senior candidate was not hired solely because he stated in an interview that he felt good code "was like a beautiful woman".

• Many extremely entitled employees. When remote work started due to covid, someone actually asked in a company-wide meeting if the company was going to increase salaries or give people delivery credits to make up for no longer providing cafeteria meals to the employees.

• Vacation policies are set by individual managers and "unlimited vacation" is subject to management approval. So you might get stuck in a group where you can only take two weeks a year, while you watch people in other groups go on 2-month mega trips during prime vacation weeks.

• Work/life balance is also extremely direct manager dependent. Upper mgmt is anti-swag, so don't expect a jacket or bag with a logo unless your manager uses your team's own budget for it.

• Slack is basically the entire company communications platform. If you like Slack, well, there's no accounting for taste, but either way, be prepared to use it heavily.

Pinterest started out as the best and ended as the worst job I ever had. The "Vile organization in its death spiral" post is really not that far off the mark.

When I joined Pinterest, Infra and SRE were filled with brilliant people. I had an amazing time building new things, learning tons, and being allowed to decide what I wanted to work on.

The SRE group, unfortunately, was run into the ground by incompetent, do-nothing middle management and passive-aggressive, pencil-pushing tech leads, and is now not much more than a staffing augmentation group for the rest of Infra, while also retaining their SRE team responsibilities. It's an untenable situation, and the group (as well as Infra overall) has been hemorrhaging talent over the past few years.

My overall impression of upper management is that they have essentially been in a multi-year holding pattern, waiting for the company to be bought, while vastly overestimating the company's value. The core product has not changed in years, and they've failed to bring a real shopping experience to the platform, which was always somehow six months away.

As other reviews have stated, Pinterest fails to walk the talk regarding almost all of their official positions on inclusion. See the various lawsuits brought by former employees. Diversity is treated as a box to be checked, rather than being a good-faith attempt to include underrepresented groups, or even at least leveraged to inform actual business strategy.

After I left, I heard from friends that they were considering requiring all employees to use Pinterest for a certain amount of time a day, and that if people didn't like using Pinterest, they shouldn't work there. If true, this is one of the most tone-deaf statements I've ever heard. Why in the world would you want only people who like your product to work on it? If the product is perfect, then why ever change it anyway? Negative feedback is some of the most valuable feedback available to a product. Instead of getting mad, you should be seeking out the people who hate your product and figuring out why.