Pros
from where i sit: free snacks. pay is OK. benefits are pretty good, particularly the unlimited vacation policy. office is close to bart and caltrain, so my commute is not too bad. i've met many really great people, both personally and professionally, and individual engineers genuinely seem to care about the systems they work on. my team has a significant amount of autonomy to make decisions about what we're going to build during any given quarter, and during my tenure we've made significant strides across performance, efficiency, and reliability, and we've done so with one of the smallest teams in the company. there is still a lot of interesting (to me) work to be done, my day-to-day personal stress level is generally very low, and there is tremendous financial upside if we can execute on our plans and not botch the job. pinterest is still a really good place to be for a lot of people.
Cons
the open floor plan needs to go. being split between multiple buildings has been a net negative on cross-team knitting. the ping-pong and foosball tables used to have lines of people waiting to get a game in at lunchtime or at the end of the day, and this was a great way to meet people from other teams and build a sense of community. it rarely happens now because we're so spread out. the food, while free, is generally not very good, and there is no variety in aforementioned free snacks. the pay is OK, but at least 15% lower than what I could get pretty much anywhere else. many of the great people that i've met have left, all within the last 8 months or so, and some of the ones that have been hired to replace them do not seem of the same caliber. there is much uncertainty within engineering due to recent reorganization, and i don't think senior leadership has placed the right people in the right roles to make us successful. the engineering performance review and promotion processes are both badly broken and demoralizing, and the whole diversity story is nothing but a distraction. there are more important things for us to be focusing on right now, and sadly, i say this from the perspective of a diversity hire. pinterest is not such a great place to be for what seems to be a growing number of people.