Pinternship Wrap-Up: Summer 2023
Each summer, Pinterest welcomes Software Engineering Pinterns who spend 12 weeks with us creating impact within our product and teams. While Pinterns are fully immersed in their teams throughout the summer, they also get to attend exciting activities and events hosted by the University Recruiting team and within the company.
Here’s a quick recap from this summer:
- Social events were a hit with boba tea making, creating your own vision board, chocolate making and a virtual escape room.
- Our University Recruiting Team hosted professional development workshops to drive skill-building and discuss topics like imposter syndrome, time management and productivity.
- Pinterns attended executive coffee chats to learn more about different functions of the business from those leading our teams. They had time with Andréa Mallard (Chief Marketing Officer), Jeremy King (Chief Technology Officer), Nichole Barnes Marshall (Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer) and Wanji Walcott (Chief Legal Officer).
- We celebrated National Intern Day on July 27th and introduced six of our Pinterns in this video.
- Pinterns participated in Makeathon, our internal version of a hackathon, where employees collaborate and pitch passion projects.
We sat down with Sierra Lee, Software Engineering Pintern, to learn more about her second summer interning with the Pinterest team.
Hi there! Thanks for joining us, Sierra. Let’s start by getting to know you.
Hi! I’m Sierra Lee, and I go to the University of Washington in Seattle. This summer, I am interning on the Ads Measurement Interfaces team under the Monetization org. I was also a Pintern last summer, and I interned on the Ads Measurement Ingestion team, who partners closely with my current team. Both summers, my work has revolved around increasing conversion visibility for the businesses that advertise on our platform. In essence, my goal is to show them that they are missing out if they are not advertising on Pinterest! The year before last, I started my Pinterest journey participating in the Engage Program, a summer professional development program.
What was your favorite part about working for the Pinterest Engineering team?
From an engineering perspective, I have really enjoyed that Pinterns are given real projects that often make it into production in some shape or form. I feel like I have been treated like a full-time Software Engineer at Pinterest, both in the work that I’ve been able to do and in how others have approached me. On my team, I have been able to work in many different codebases and in tons of different languages. I have always found more joy in doing full stack work, so that is a huge plus for me. In being exposed to many different parts of Pinterest code, I feel I have learned so much more than I expected to. Things move pretty fast at Pinterest, which makes each day exciting and new.
In addition to the work I do, Pinterest’s culture has been inspiring to me. I’ve reached out to many different teams, and every time, they are more than willing to go the extra mile to assist me despite being incredibly busy themselves. The size of Pinterest as a company is also a plus. It feels big enough that I can reap the benefits of a big company and learn best engineering practices, but still small enough that I feel I can create an immense impact and approach anyone across the business. In fact, many people in the Seattle office remembered me from last summer and welcomed me back, which was very sweet. Both summers at Pinterest, I have grown professionally through working with my mentors and managers and truly appreciated their mentorship and guidance. I feel that I’ve gotten the perfect amount of support and independence as a Pintern.
As you mentioned above, all Pinterns have a manager and a mentor. Can you give us some insight into what it was like working with them?
My mentor and manager have been amazing! My mentor has been the person I go to for any onboarding and project related questions I have. It’s my job to communicate to him everything that I’ve been up to, and he reviews code and documents I create as well as helps me out if any unexpected issues come up. While I feel that I have ownership of my project, I also feel like he and I are partnering to make sure everything with my project and internship are successful, which strikes a great balance. I also get to work closely with my manager. I sync regularly with her and have approached her for questions related to a greater scope and for things that I work on that may affect a larger amount of people in our org. Something that has stood out to me is how my mentor and manager are advocating for me and my success. They make sure to help me increase visibility of my work and find other ways to contribute to the team, increasing my impact and scope. Even now, my mentor from last year still checks in with me, supporting me throughout my new internship and rooting for my success. In addition to growing professionally, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know my mentor and manager as people, which I think goes back to how welcoming Pinterest’s culture is.
What was your biggest accomplishment during your internship? What was one challenge you faced?
I think my biggest accomplishment during this internship is largely thanks to my mentor and manager. This year, I was able to work on a couple different projects: one of them a completely frontend project and the other is a backend project. Everything from the coding language to the deployment process for these two projects was vastly different. Being able to successfully complete two distinct projects was my biggest accomplishment because I learned so much. I did encounter some challenges. There was a period of time where I was working on both projects simultaneously, and at first, I felt really overwhelmed juggling them. However, I feel that I really grew from that experience and have grown more comfortable handling many different tasks at once, which I think is important to becoming a really great developer.
At Pinterest, we have five core values: Put Pinners First, Aim for Extraordinary, Create Belonging, Act as One and Win or Learn. Which one resonates with you the most?
I would say that the core value that resonates with me the most is “Create Belonging.” Outside of work, I am part of a few different student organizations that are very people-oriented. I also recently studied abroad in South Korea, where I met people from all over the world and gained an appreciation for learning about other people’s journeys and perspectives. I really enjoy being around others, and I feel very grateful that, for the majority of my life, I have been surrounded by people who have both given me the space to grow and let me feel like I could be myself. I hope to create that sort of environment for others as well. I’ve learned that, for myself, this kind of sentiment extends itself to the workplace: when it comes to a job, the people and culture really matter to me. For me, I’ve found Pinterest to be a great fit culture-wise, and I definitely feel like I belong here!
What’s one thing you’d want others to know about working at Pinterest?
Working at Pinterest is both exactly what you’d expect and also not. For one, the culture is great and what I think most people expect: people are friendly and excited to work on the product. On the other hand, I think a lot of people may get the impression that there’s not that much engineering work to do at Pinterest, but there’s actually a ton of interesting problems to solve, including many explorations into new parts of ML and AI.
Applications are now open for our 2024 Software Engineering Internship Program. Discover open roles and apply on our Careers page. To learn more about engineering at Pinterest, check out the rest of our Engineering Blog and visit Pinterest Labs.
