- 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.
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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.
