90 Day Retrospective After Joining Pinterest
I started at Pinterest in June after deliberation on which of the 3 offers to take. I’ve been extremely happy and wanted to share a quick retrospective on my time since joining.
Onboarding
Pinterest has a similar onboarding process as other large tech companies that I’ve worked in. I had a 2-week firehose onboarding session, and most of the sessions were very relevant to my job. I was given an onboarding plan that included 30, 60, 90 day milestones and assigned a mentor to help ensure that I wasn’t lost in the weeds. My first week was unlike any past experience that I’ve had, as I got the opportunity to attend Knitcon, our internal conference where we bring Pinterest to life. This was the first time in over 2 years that I’ve met colleagues in real life. I learned about talking dogs from Christina Lee and attended lots of other great sessions. I was able to meet my manager and my skip manager.
For my onboarding tasks, they were all relatively straightforward for me to complete. Pinterest uses technology that I’m familiar with: Gradle, Buildkite, and Phabricator (hopefully not for much longer). The custom systems for Analytics and Deployment that we use weren’t all too bad to learn. I was able to surpass my 90 day milestone at 30 days, as I was able to fully roll out Gradle Configuration Cache amongst other things I was responsible for.
What went well
Focus
My team has a more narrow ownership in the Developer Productivity space than my previous team at Dropbox. This leads way more focus and less distractions around priority.
My management chain makes my life easier
This is the first time in my career that I’m reporting to a former Android engineer, and that makes communication so much easier. I was able to quickly build trust with my manager, so I get to spend a lot of my time doing uninterrupted work and coming up for air every so often.
Traveling to DroidconNYC
I wanted to travel to New York for Droidcon, and I was not a speaker. I didn’t need to jump through any hoops on explaining the value of it, it was just approved. I got to meet some amazing people and learned a lot of new things.
Build vs Buy
While we have some pretty neat internal tools for experimentation and analytics, I’m happy that we also are very open to paying for solutions.
People
My team is incredibly talented and great to work with. I haven’t met a jerk at Pinterest yet, I hope it stays that way.
What didn’t go well
Hiring slowdown
Pinterest was hiring pretty aggressively when I joined, but shortly after we instituted a slowdown. The silver lining is that we didn’t overhire and we’re not laying off or rescinding offers.
Digitally Social
People don’t seem to be as talkative on Slack compared to what I’m used to. I know Pinployees can be very chatty in person, maybe everyone is too busy working.
Locality Based Pay
I accepted the job offer knowing that the Los Angeles market gets a 10% cut, but I hope that we will remove that one day.