Pinterest Reviews

Cons

Have to prospect. Haven't grasped how to use a lead gen network.

Cons

The politics on the ads product team is discouraging. Even though one of the focus is to grow the ads business, there is so much time and effort wasted on politicking instead of fixing the glaring issues with the ad product. Every team is trying to protect their “territory”.

The rate of shipping new changes is one of the slowest compared to the other big and small tech companies I have worked at.

The ads product is barely industry standard, the people actually building it have little to no advertising experience and yet they don’t want people meddling in their backlog.

Everything important to building a real ads business is 6-18 months out. It really has to change, else the business will run into serious issues.

There has been some reshuffling on the team recently but the general attitude doesn’t seem to have changed.

In general, overall, many of the managers need to be better trained to focus on career path conversations and ensuring the well-being of their teams.

Cons

Honestly, I don't have a lot to put here.

Cons

For context, via consulting / FTE roles I have worked at over 15 companies in a 10 year career.

Pinterest was, by far, the most political, disorganized and lost organization I've ever encountered. My comments are more for the Ads team, than the core experience group--but each week/month/quarter brought an endless stream of reorganizations, reprioritizations and re-buzzwords. It's a product that has a very clear fit and need within the marketing landscape--but is forever mired in internal resource fights, personality clashes and confusion. One day you're chasing what Facebook just did, the next what Google just did, the next what we talked about 6 months ago but no one can seem to remember.

Every week starts out with identifying organizational misalignments. And rather than spend your week building toward something. Thinking about where to go next. You'd spend your week fire-fighting the crisis of the day. If you're looking to expel a lot of energy managing political cycles that never seem to go anywhere, this is the place for you.

I learned more in two years at Pinterest than I did anywhere else--It was one of the most diverse and challenging roles in my life. But I'll probably look at it as the worse epoch in my career. When I worked there, every time I interacted with another alum--they'd always start with, "Is it still crazy?"

My answer was always Yes.

Cons

Accepting your fate as a tech worker forever due to the golden handcuffs

Cons

Not sure about the future of company. Not good 401k policy.

Cons

data tooling can be a pain...
a good amount of product basics to be fixed

Cons

- I left because it wasn't a product I enjoyed using personally. It appeals to specific kinds of people
- apparently there were a lot of politics going on but I wasn't aware or affected by it
- not sure where this company will go
- co-founding team are still relatively inexperienced

Cons

- 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 which 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 that 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, which 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 that expect to still be working at the company 12 months from now keeps going down. Yet nothing seems to change.

Cons

- Many employees, particularly engineers, don't use the product at all and aren't passionate about it
- Horrible on call; 100+ pages in a week, little interest from team and management in trying to improve the process
- Interteam efforts end up being a game of hot potato, with no one taking initiative on ownership and essential work just not getting done