Stay Away From Pinterest

TLDR - Pinterest does not treat employees well and you will have a chance to work with real stupid people in your day-to-day life. More likely your manager stabs you in the back and none of their promises will be true. People who actually do things are burning out and not rewarded. If you consider yourself a top talent, expect to be recognized or look for growth in your career - Pinterest is not the place for you. ********************** [Managers] This is the worst part. We used to have really good leaders who are widely acknowledged across the industry. We lost them to our competitors (Lyft, Airbnb, Circle to name a few) and we struggled to hire capable ones. We could be lucky to hire a small number of managers from G/F every year, but the rest are just miserable. They have poor judgements, appreciate talkers instead of doers, and stab people that they don’t like in their back. Their judgment of making impact is based on superficial staff - as a result you’ll see lots of L7’s talking nonsense and making useless suggestions in design meetings just to get their voice heard, or some infra engineer got promoted because they did a nice little formatting in our codebase. There’s a L7 manager who “complained” about too little diversity (68% of eng/company are asian) in an eng AMA event, while he is an asian himself! This attention-seeking behavior is all over the place cause that's how people are rewarded. No one wants to do the real work - cause it’s not appreciated. Real doers are burning out from putting in so much effort and getting no support from managers who only care about how they look in front of upper management. [Executives] They are full of mediocre people in the executive group, incredibly slow at making decisions, and lie blatantly to our faces in all hands meetings. They will tell you they pay by performance etc. but it’s clearly not true (and P.S don’t believe in the refresher part that our recruiters told you - no way it’s guaranteed and things can get real tricky in perf reviews). Imagine someone asked a question about not seeing enough salary increase / refreshers, and our chief people officer spent 5 minutes babbling about their “philosophy” behind the decisions. They are not fixing the compensation due to stock depreciation as some other companies do (such as Snap and even Amazon). Lots of people are also concerned by the attrition numbers in recent months, but all of these questions are ignored. Our head of engineering has dropped our hiring bar to the ground, and turned our place into a process-driven company. He doesn’t know how to recognize or hire top talent. He just pings his directs to get their inputs when he has to make any decisions (which is fine) because he really doesn’t understand the main questions or key levers for moving metrics. He just doesn’t have a point of view or even any original idea. Survives only based on political skill. And as a consequence, more and more terrible EMs survive, or even worse, thrive based on political skills. And by the way, we are hiring lots of contractors to “reduce cost”, but everyone knows we still pay a load to them and the time they spend in ramp-up is generally a waste of $. To make it worse, many of them are sub-par and affecting engineering quality in the long run. It’s simply a net negative action. Perfect example of “penny wise, pound foolish”. [Benefits] We also removed the “pintention day” recently, which is like a last-minute company-wide day off. I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut more benefits. References: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/indecision-at-pinterest https://www.theinformation.com/articles/pinterest-has-lost-at-least-7-senior-execs-in-recent-weeks Internal blind discussions #engineering #pinterest

Indecision at Pinterest

The Information

Pinterest Has Lost at Least 7 Senior Execs in Recent Weeks

The Information