Pinterest fired 2 engineers who built an internal layoff tracker

Pinterest said it fired 2 engineers who built an interior instrumentality to way which employees had been laid disconnected pursuing a recent circular of occupation cuts at the societal media company.

The firings travel astir a week aft the manner app said it was cutting 15% of its staff arsenic it invests successful artificial intelligence. Pinterest, which had astir 4,700 employees anterior to the layoffs, said the restructuring should beryllium implicit by Sept. 30.

Pinterest's main information serviceman had told engineering employees successful a gathering that it wouldn't disclose a database of laid-off employees owed to those individuals' privateness rights and the company's privateness policies, according to a root with the company. After that meeting, 2 engineers built an interior instrumentality to make a maestro database of employees who were impacted by the occupation cuts, the idiosyncratic said. 

Privacy violation

The engineers who wrote the scripts were fired, a Pinterest spokesperson told CBS News. 

"After being intelligibly informed that Pinterest would not broadly stock accusation identifying impacted employees, 2 engineers wrote customized scripts improperly accessing confidential institution accusation to place the locations and names of each dismissed employees and past shared it much broadly," the spokesperson said. 

She added, "This was a wide usurpation of Pinterest argumentation and of their erstwhile colleagues' privacy."

"Obstructionist" behavior?

At a companywide gathering past week, according to CNBC, Ready told workers, "Healthy statement and dissent are expected, that's however we marque our decisions. But there's a wide enactment betwixt constructive statement and behaviour that's obstructionist."

Ready besides described Pinterest arsenic facing a "critical moment," and told employees they should see moving elsewhere if they are "working against the absorption of the company," CNBC reported.

Pinterest is the latest successful a fig of ample businesses to mention AI successful reducing headcount. Companies successful 2025 straight pointed to their usage of AI successful announcing 55,000 occupation cuts — much than 12 times the fig of layoffs attributed to AI conscionable 2 years earlier, according to outplacement steadfast Challenger, Gray and Christmas. 

Edited by Alain Sherter

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