Pinterest fires engineers for tracking layoffs using internal tools
What's the story
Pinterest has fired two of its engineers for using internal tools to track the company's recent layoffs. The social media platform had announced job cuts last week, impacting around 15% of its workforce or roughly 700 roles. CEO Bill Ready said in an email that he was "doubling down on an AI-forward approach." However, the company did not specify which teams or employees were affected by these cuts.
Violation
Engineers violated company policy
The two engineers allegedly wrote custom scripts that improperly accessed confidential company information. They used these scripts to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees, which they then shared more broadly. A company spokesperson called this a "clear violation of Pinterest policy and their former colleagues' privacy." The scripts were aimed at internal tools used by the company for employee communication.
Tool manipulation
Scripts alerted which employees were being removed/deactivated
The scripts created alerts for which employee names were being removed or deactivated from tools like Slack, giving an idea of who was affected by the layoffs. The identities of the two sacked engineers remain unknown.
Industry
Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft have also announced layoffs
The tech industry has been hit hard by layoffs in recent years. Just last week, Amazon announced it was cutting 16,000 jobs in its second round of redundancies in three months. Meta also recently laid off several hundred employees. Other tech giants like Google and Microsoft have also made significant workforce reductions. According to Layoffs.fyi, a tracker of such cuts, an estimated 700,000 people have been fired across the entire tech industry over the last four years.