Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs
11 74Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company recently announced job cuts, with chief executive Bill Ready stating in an email he was "doubling down on an AI-forward approach," according to an employee who posted some of the memo on LinkedIn.
Pinterest told investors the move would impact about 15% of the workforce, or roughly 700 roles, without saying which teams or workers were affected. But then "two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly," a company spokesperson told the BBC. "This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues' privacy," the spokesperson added.
The script written by the Pinterest engineers was aimed at internal tools used at the company for employees to communicate, according to a person familiar with the firings who asked not to be identified. The person said the script created an alert for which employee names within a tool like the team communication platform Slack were being removed or deactivated, giving some insight into who at the company was impacted by the layoffs.
11 comments
Re:Remember you don't need a union (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:44AM (#65968668)
The number of people who have the luxury of looking at lay-offs this way are probably in the single percentage range of this country. Like....maybe 0.5% of the people running around are truly that 'wanted'. In the other 99.5% of cases, your sole source of income is gone and you're going to be scrambling to get another job before your next mortgage payment is due.
Online job search engines have made this even worse, where a lot of the 'jobs' you see posted are being posted by job clearing houses that are just resume fishing and not actually looking to fill a position.
Re:Remember you don't need a union (Score: 5, Informative)
by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @12:41PM (#65968892)
I remember a steel union demanding higher wages, the plant meeting their demand, and the union calling a strike anyway because there hadn't been a strike in ages.
This is either BS, or you're grossly misrepresenting what happened.
First, a union that neogiates with an employer that meets their demands and goes on strike anyway is bargaining in bad faith. If either side did such a thing, the other side can go to court to seek remedies.
Second, a union cannot go on strike on a whim. They have to be in a legal strike position (their contract has expired.) The same goes for an employer who locks out employees. And unlike an employer, a union has to have a strike mandate from its membership, i.e., a majority vote for job action.
And finally, no union calls a strike just because there hasn't been one "in ages." Going on strike is a serious thing, with consequences for both sides. No union takes such a decision lightly.
Have been sacked (Score: 5, Funny)
by shadowwynd ( 6310460 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:09AM (#65968566)
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
Re:Have been sacked (Score: 5, Funny)
by quenda ( 644621 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:34AM (#65968638)
Hello. What?! Well, if you can't work as a team, you're all fired! That's it, you heard me, "Fired". Get your things and go.
Hello, Security. Everyone on Floor 4 is fired. Escort them from the premises. And do it as a team. Remember, you're a team, and if you can't work as a team, you're fired too!
Dawn, get onto recruitment. Get them to look for a security team that can work as a team. They may have to escort the current security team from the building for not acting like a team!
(Yesterday's Jam)
Re:Have been sacked (Score: 5, Insightful)
by pete6677 ( 681676 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:07AM (#65968698)
I'm just surprised Pinterest has so many employees remaining. What could they possibly be doing? Pinterest hasn't meaningfully changed in like 15 years now. It was always kind of worthless to begin with.
Re:Have been sacked (Score: 5, Informative)
by pjt33 ( 739471 ) on Thursday February 05, 2026 @05:28AM (#65969962)
/. belongs to the days when people who knew about møøse bites also knew about HTML entities.
Re: Misleading title (Score: 5, Insightful)
by r0nc0 ( 566295 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:17AM (#65968596)
How is accessing slack deactivations the same as accessing HR data?
Re: Misleading title (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Racemaniac ( 1099281 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:12AM (#65968720)
It's not the same information in terms of privacy.
layoffs.xls is a document that's not shared.
But if the company uses a platform like slack where people can clearly see people disappearing, then they share that data and can't possibly claim people aggregating the data they shared have done anything wrong...
Re:Misleading title (Score: 5, Insightful)
by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:44AM (#65968666)
They accessed Slack, as they were permitted to do. This is just cowardly management wanting to can people but not wanting to own up to it.
Re: Misleading title (Score: 5, Informative)
by Luke has no name ( 1423139 ) on <fox@cyberfoxfire.cBOYSENom minus berry> on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:57AM (#65968688)
They were sacked for looking at slack statuses. Stop carrying corporate water.
I worked at a place where we had a similar site (Score: 5, Informative)
by CyberSnyder ( 8122 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @10:21AM (#65968610)
It seemed like there were layoffs every Friday for a period of time. When you were getting the axe they would disable you in Active Directory by adding an underscore in front of your name. So, the internal website, "Death Watch", would just look for accounts that were changed to _username and list them on the website.