Pinterest sacks workers for creating tool to track layoffs - BBC

ShareSaveKali Hays,Technology reporterandLily Jamali,North America Technology correspondentShareSaveReutersPinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. 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. A script in this sense is essentially computer code written to automate a task within existing software or tweak its functionality for a specific purpose. 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. The identities of the two sacked engineers are not publicly known and the BBC has been unable to contact them. The technology industry has seen waves of layoffs in recent years. Checking Slack and other internal tools for coworkers who disappear from channels of conversation is a common way for people to learn who is no longer working at a company. In the same week that Pinterest announced it was laying off workers, Amazon cut 16,000 roles in its second round of redundancies in three months. Earlier this year, Meta also laid off several hundred employees. Along with Amazon and Meta, Google, Microsoft and others have significantly cut their workforces. Across the entire tech industry, an estimated 700,000 people have been laid off over the last four years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks all reports of such cuts.