Pros
- Teams are small and the area of ownership is large. Example: Web, iOS, and Android teams have only ~5 Engineers each. - Technology decisions are still evolving, and you have opportunity to guide the direction. Example: recently-created service written in Go, some teams experimenting with Erlang. - Pinterest doesn't yet have a strong engineering brand, so engineers are encouraged to give community talks and open-source. - Passionate about a certain area like "build tools" or "performance"? You can lead an a cross-functional "X-Team" to drive progress in that area. - "Make-a-thons" where there's an explicit goal of shipping a certain number of projects created during the event. - Product metrics are moving in the right direction, and the future of the company looks bright.
Cons
- For engineers, on-call duty is not fairly distributed. - We've been without a VP of Engineering for several months. - A year ago, everyone knew each other's names. Not true any more.