Pinterest Software Developer reviews

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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expect to be able to keep documentation up to date, as there are multiple internal systems and docs are horrendously out of date and scattered between several different systems.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.