
Pinterest Reinvents Itself to Prove It’s Really Worth Billions - yurisagalov
http://www.wired.com/2016/04/pinterest-reinvents-prove-really-worth-billions/
======
a_small_island
"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?

~~~
zjaffee
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.

~~~
geon
> 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.

~~~
xyience
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](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?".

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

~~~
JeffreyKaine
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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
praneshp
>>> 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.

------
fweespee_ch
> 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.

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

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

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

~~~
chrisgd
Hash browns are people!

------
shostack
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.

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agandy
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.

~~~
iNerdier
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.

~~~
coredog64
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.

~~~
zyxley
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.

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

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smegel
Please don't post content that is behind paywalls.

~~~
qz_
Just turn off your adblocker for wired.

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

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sbardle
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.

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

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raldi
Can someone TLDR what the changes are?

~~~
officialchicken
> 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.

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dawhizkid
Pinterest jumped the shark

