Pinterest

• They have an interesting tech stack.

• Understaffed
• Tight deadlines
• Lots of pressure
• Complex team dynamic
• Underpaid

At Pinterest, as a Software Engineer, it's expected that you do more than just what your title says. You create your own work, run meetings, act as the scrum master, own projects, and are pretty much in charge of everything you do.

This can be good and bad. For me, it was bad, and here is why.

At the beginning, I was told I'd be joining as a full stack developer. I thought the dynamic would be similar to other places. But here, they follow this "enhanced" version of Agile in which you create the tickets, add the description, and document everything (oh boy, do they like their Google Docs in this company) before doing the actual work. You then submit your document for validation, get some feedback, may or may not be approved to move forward, run your project, and finally go back to see what could have been improved.

Again, all this could be good for you. But for me, it felt like I was becoming a jack of all trades, and they were saving money by not hiring more people to handle this process more efficiently.

Lastly, I didn't code as much as in other places here. My time went into doing other stuff that I felt should have been done by someone else.

Hire more people to handle the workload. Let developers do the development.