Pinterest Reinvents Itself to Prove It’s Really Worth Billions | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest Reinvents Itself to Prove It’s Really Worth Billions

wired.com

48 pointsyurisagalov49 comments

"Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service. He passed up the McDonald’s hash browns that the engineers ordered"

"Which is why Silbermann has been coming in on the weekend. The changes the company is about to unleash will determine whether Pinterest can earn its deca-corn valuation"

"And in one central location, a product manager named Adam Barton, who had been tasked with running the code and design overhaul, roped off a line of desks."

" “I worked for 42 days straight,” says Barton, whose early experience as a contract negotiator for Google had given him the skills to keep everyone on task. One of his most important jobs: He was the guy who went to McDonald’s every Saturday to pick up the hash browns."

"Goodson was excited about a team trip to Vegas to see Calvin Harris. There was also talk of a camping trip, but someone still had to plan it. Silbermann was already looking beyond; the team will take on the Android platform next."

How do most people view these parts of the article?

My first instinct was to post a message on HN about how yet another company is fetishizing overtime. It's not even productive to work at that pace; IIRC, most if not all people wear down too quickly for that to make sense. If anything, this proves that the management at Pinterest can neither stay on top of their own product nor set deadlines properly.

... all judgment aside, I hope the people working there are doing alright. Hinging your self worth on your work ethic in a company can be exhausting.

Agreed. I'm done with making pithy comments about this sort of thing. It sounds a lot like an unhealthy culture, but I don't want to make that call based on a single article.

I wish the Pinterest team well, and I hope (for their sake) that this sort of behaviour isn't chronic.

Agree but I think it's still a little eye-rolling because the implication is a degree of self-importance that may not be justified.

My impression: PMs are way overvalued. As a simple engineer, can I volunteer to be the guy doing the important work of fetching the hash browns in exchange for a big multi-ten-thousand dollar increase in pay? (I'll skip being blown by the press.) I can even speak with the store manager to assure them that yes, I really want to buy > $50 of food!

Many tech oriented companies pay engineers more than PMs. Although PMs eventually become managers and managers make more.

In the 1980's and 1990's many valley companies maintained dual-career ladders with parallel compensation structures. A Director was the equivalent of an Architect in compensation and rank. Anyone know if this type of structure has been maintained?

If nothing else, if you're going to work like that, skip the McDonald's. Your body needs good fuel to run a marathon.

Not sure who to be more disgusted with, founder who makes engineers do meaningless crunch work on weekends at an established company, or engineers who trade their Saturdays for paltry and disgusting hash browns.

Also not being able to handle iOS and Android concurrently is pretty pathetic for an established company.

The "march of death" method of product development?

Going by the diet and extreme hours they obviously have a young group of engineers convinced that their lives should revolve around work.

I think there isn't anything most people feel about this kind of overtime. Some people prioritize work/life balance, spending time with friends and family, and focusing on a wide variety of hobbies, others prioritize their careers, achieving big things as an engineer beyond what they would be capable of only working 40 hours a week.

Neither lifestyle is better than the other when speaking objectively, it just depends on the person.

People who choose to work for Pinterest know what they are getting into, they have one of the most intense and accomplished engineering organizations out there period. While this kind of a culture might be toxic to some, others dream of a life where they are surrounded by engineers who want to work just as hard as them to accomplish a ton in their careers.

People on both sides judge each other on online forums way to much, and there is no need. One group isn't better than the other, and no one should feel pressure to be on either side of this fight. Its this pressure that makes college students feel inadequate.

> beyond what they would be capable of only working 40 hours a week.

I believe that's a fallacy. Especially in software you just won't get more work done by working longer hours. Your 60 h week will at best be 40 h work + 20 h zooning out. at worst, it'll be 20 h work + 40 h frustration and self loathing because you can't focus on your work.

8 hours / day over 5 days, or 40 hours a week however you like, is a magic number with no real psychological basis. It certainly didn't come about for the benefit of creatives, the subgroup of software devs who can and often do benefit from far more than 40 hours per week "working" and who only by putting in more hours can accomplish their goals. Try telling Michelangelo that if only he had forced himself to stick to 40 hours a week he could have accomplished all he did and even more greatness. Zoning out probably happens to us all, but some are quite capable of limiting it in duration and/or frequency by quite a large degree, or turning it to 'productive zoning out' whereby you progress on a relatively boring task while thinking of other things, some of which might even be what you'll do once the boring groundwork is complete. Another case, try telling a kid he can become as great as Lee Sedol by only practicing Go and playing games for a maximum of 40 hours a week. Better yet, tell Lee Sedol himself that he could get stronger by playing and studying less! And in our actual field: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=JohnCarmack et al.

It's quite possible for x work + y frustration and self loathing to be x=0 and y=30 as you hope no one notices you coming in late / leaving early and being totally vague about progress during daily meetings. I think those behaviors and 'zoning out' are mostly orthogonal to hours 'worked', though.

There's probably some agreement somewhere. I do think a lot of 80 hour, 100 hour work week boasting is just that, boasting, and surely for some doesn't really translate to that many hours of "real work". It comes from creative accounting of work hours and I think is rooted in a poor work/rest of life separation. Think about your startup for a while during dinner? I guess you're technically working, huh? Or for video game testers, your bugs filed / hour playing the game looking for bugs isn't a nice flat line with a sharp drop off after 8 hours, but a lot of people out of the industry will say "you're just playing a video game over and over for 12+ hours a day for weeks and call that work?".

The hatred is natural because in the end both groups are competing for work, and if people are going to work a billion hours, then you're going to be expected to work a billion hours too or go unemployed..

Personally I find it annoying that the article talks about working overtime like it's something to brag about.

no one should feel pressure to be on either side of this fight

The >40h engineer coming into the office on weekends is, by that very act, pressuring the =40h engineers.

Besides, this isn't the Apollo programme, this is Pinterest. What's the maximum upside of your accomplishment, a return to Pinterest's stockholders?

Companies are generally seeking to hire the latter type of engineer; you are required to become one or you don't get (decent) work.

Case in point: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/download/Recruiting%20Giants.pd...

> Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service.

I don't feel like we should be praising people who do this kind of thing. If you are really into your work, that's wonderful and all the power to you. However I hope that if someone is going to have kids they spend proper time with them, and I don't consider bringing them to work a good way to spend time together unless you want to show them what you do.

Personally I feel like all this "love what you do and be inspired" or whatever is just a ploy by companies to get people to work overtime without overtime pay, but if it makes people happy then I have nothing against it.

I almost want to say there is a group of people who take advantage of young developers by telling them they are super awesome rockstar ninja hybrids and using their ego (or probably more likely, lack of) to get them to work more.. But hey it's all fine because capitalism or something right?

Step 1 - Don't force me to create an account just to view your boards.

Agreed. I actually checked this today to see if it had changed.. nope.

I disagree. Pinterest is different from other social networks in that it is about collecting content. With content being your secret sauce, you don't want to give it away for free. Anyone can bookmark an image, not anyone can find the perfect image. Pinterest gives you that super power.

It's common, but I still don't like it. I deleted my Facebook last year and it was shocking to me how much "public" content Facebook hides behind a login requirement. The same with Quora, and apparently Pinterest. They make it look like a public page but after you scroll they're like "uh-uh. We need your personal data if you want to see the rest."

It really soured me against these sites to see the way they take other peoples' content and lock it behind a wall.

I just walk away when I see that stuff now. I miss the old internet that felt more like a public park than an amusement park.

>>> It really soured me against these sites to see the way they take other peoples' content and lock it behind a wall.

At least on Quora, the minute you write something, it's Quora's content. As the user, I'm welcome to put my answer on a blog instead.

> Pinterest is different from other social networks in that it is about collecting content.

How is that any different from other social networks?

> With content being your secret sauce, you don't want to give it away for free.

Huh? Pinterest didn't even produce the content.

> Anyone can bookmark an image, not anyone can find the perfect image. Pinterest gives you that super power.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. What super power?

Casual visitors not interested in actually joining a website (at that moment) can be of value if you don't actively antagonise them. Saying that you need an account to view the content when someone follows a hyperlink posted somewhere to a Pinterest board means that you will turn away a decent percentage of those visitors with a sour taste about your service and brand. Sure, there is the old adage that there is no such thing as bad attention (any attention, good or bad, builds your 'brand'), but I'm not convinced this works in this case.

To illustrate; literally the first thing that popped in my mind when seeing this topic in the list was “Ah, that silly imageboard you can't view without signing up.”

Removing your account used to be very difficult too, I wonder if that changed

> Nearly three dozen designers and engineers have spent the past several months tearing out the skeleton of Pinterest’s iOS app and rebuilding it. They’ve rethought its design, down to the font. Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service. He passed up the McDonald’s hash browns that the engineers ordered, instead pitching in by testing out the new build, surfing the app on an antiquated iPad 3 and iPhone 4 to make sure it worked great even on slower devices.

Those are hardly antiquated and this management style should be considered an example to avoid rather than a foolish attempt to impress people with how "hard" the work was, honestly.

This sort of thing is for handling outages and true emergencies, not meeting arbitrary deadlines.

Yep, to me this says "do not work here, we work weekends due to poor planning and enjoy grinding our employees into a pulp".

Very true, avoid at all costs. I would change your sentence to ". . . grinding our employees into hash browns."

...used to fuel the next generation of gullible employees.

Hash browns are people!

Presented without comment: three dozen designers over several (let's say 5) months is easily a million dollars.

The core Pinterest experience has really been frustrating to me lately, and a lot of it isn't an issue in the Pinterest platform so much as the absolutely horrendous publisher sites that spam Pinterest with images that show up for my searches.

When I visit these sites with their clickbait images (in this case, "california style landscaping"), my iPad 2 slows to a crawl as the publishers load their 50 million ad tags. Often times the image I clicked in hopes of seeing a larger version doesn't exist, and is just a tiny thumbnail on what is clearly a site with content from Demand Media that is meant to drive ad impressions.

I'd LOVE for Pinterest to do something akin to FB's Instant Articles and control the entire experience (which I'm sure publishers would absolutely hate). If they provided monetization options for publishers like FB does, I could see that being very successful for Pinterest, and a huge improvement in the user experience since they wouldn't be punting people to random websites.

It seems that if Pinterest really wants to appeal to international markets in the way that Facebook and Twitter do, they should be testing on even less performant hardware than an iPhone 4 and iPad 3.

Well it's interesting to learn that my iPad 2 and iPhone 4 are 'antiquated' pieces of technology. I figured my dad's 1940s Harley fit that bill but apparently it's not the only one.

At least they're trying to do something about marginally older devices, a large proportion of sites I visit at the moment seem to expect an up-to-the-minute change in hardware of everyone viewing them which is frankly insane and that's just web pages.

I was cleaning the house last night and found that my kids are using the iPad 2 that I bought them as a coaster.

I'm not sure what to think of that: Either I'm spoiling them or it is just a great time to be alive.

Sounds like a failure of imagination. There are all sorts of interesting things you can do with an 'obsolete' iPad, even if just to use it as a wifi kiosk for something else.

My kids use their iPad 1 every day for youtube and games.

Flagged because this post is spam. It has nagware asking for a subscription blocking the article from being read.

Please don't post content that is behind paywalls.

Just turn off your adblocker for wired.

I don't run it. I run FlashBlock, and they seem to demand you run Flash in order to view their website.

Pinterest is a good bet to succeed if it can integrate social commerce into the platform. A lot of E-commerce is going to be done over social media soon, especially fashion.

This is a good story and probably newsworthy. But still can't escape the feeling that it's wholly fed out by the subject.

Can someone TLDR what the changes are?

> Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service.

At least all the usual management anti-patterns were followed.

TLDR: Made things faster, added culture specific fonts/design and recommendations (eg: US wants are different than Japanese, etc)

> But really, the point is to make Pinterest much bigger by making it less of a big deal—less flashy, easier to use, and more of a utility.

They it made it faster and more image focused.

Pinterest jumped the shark

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