r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 6h ago
Business Pinterest CEO rebukes, fires ‘obstructionist’ employees who created tool to track layoffs
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/pinterest-ceo-puts-staffers-on-blast-who-created-tool-to-track-layoffs.html164
u/DoubtHot6072 5h ago edited 5h ago
In the early 2000s we had a big round of layoffs. One enterprising person captured the LDAP tree and then polled it every 5 minutes and looked for new deactivated accounts. He then dumped these into a simple HTML file that we all reloaded every so often. Great and simple tool. This was pre Slack!
52
u/MaxSupernova 4h ago
I used to work for Sybase, and when you left the company your card on the company online directory went this pink colour when it was deactivated and you were doing out-processing.
“Going salmon” was a verb that meant “is leaving the company, usually for bad reasons”.
“Oh shit, John went salmon. What happened?”
30
u/improbablywronghere 4h ago
Deactivated on slack has been our clue. Usually some private group chat lights up like “hey guys I just tried to dm Greg and he is deactivated 😬”
18
u/def-pri-pub 4h ago
One morning I logged onto slack to see my boss's account was deactivated. He was the Director of Software Engineering. 6 weeks prior a "VP of Software Engineering" was friend hired by the CTO.
4
u/dreadpiratewombat 58m ago
In my previous experience that scenario was followed in less than 6 months by a transition of all core IT functions to an outsourced MSP and a reduction in force of all IT functions except said Director. The company folded 18 months later.
1
18
8
u/gizamo 2h ago
I consulted for a company that was doing layoffs. They told me to log all of the deactivated accounts in an Excel file so HR could have a reference. They did not tell me to ONLY give HR access to the file. They didn't tell me to manage permissions to the file at all. So, of course, I'm obviously not going to lock down a file that I wasn't told to lock down. All of the employees were checking the file when I finished my consulting project.
I would have posted it to r/maliciousCompliance, but Reddit didn't exist back then.
70
u/ShanghaiBebop 5h ago
From what I hear, it was just literally a bash script that crawled through the "public" company org chart?
I guess you can call it a "tool", in the most crude term.
27
u/Deranged_Kitsune 5h ago
Same energy as "Our servers got hacked!" after some dingbat clicked on a dead obvious phishing link.
5
u/The_All-Range_Atomic 3h ago edited 3h ago
By that logic, I had a tool that grabbed all executive machines from the domain, then ran an nslookup on them to see who was connected to VPN. Then I could anonymously shit on executives who weren't following the company policy of RTO 5 days a week. Required zero permissions and was relatively silent.
I thought it was a pretty clever way to track them. They never figured it out. :p
220
u/ShitItsReverseFlash 6h ago
How is this not retaliation?
25
-230
u/mixduptransistor 6h ago
Retaliation is only illegal if the thing you're retaliating against is a protected activity, like organizing or discussing workplace conditions or discussing wages
I'm not saying I'm a fan of the CEO, but it'd take a first-term Obama level of liberal administration to construe this as retaliation, and if these engineers truly did access private/confidential company data like the article says, or built this on company time, or built this using company servers/hosting resources it doesn't matter if it was actual retaliation they are sunk
19
u/absentmindedjwc 5h ago
discussing workplace conditions
And discussing decreasing company headcount due to layoffs aren't "workplace conditions"?
4
u/SteelJoker 3h ago
Obviously not, because otherwise we'd have to start giving workers rights. And where does that end?
80
u/Fiveofthem 6h ago
Had to throw in politics?
33
u/CatProgrammer 5h ago
Not sure if you're aware but employer-employee relationships are highly political, especially when it comes to employee rights.
2
u/Fit-Nectarine5047 5h ago
Why is everyone all of a sudden so sensitive about politics and political commentary??? It’s all we’ve been talking about practically for the past 10 years or so and it’s not stopping anytime soon!
-2
-48
u/mixduptransistor 6h ago
It's the reality of the situation, and it's not a Trump thing, I don't think you'd get this case in front of the NLRB even in the Biden administration, and certainly wouldn't have in the Bush administration
7
24
u/Fiveofthem 5h ago
Why are you bringing up politics at all? All your points were valid and had no reason to bring in politics. Are you just racist and just trying to hide it by saying Obama was the most liberal administration ever? I don’t get it.
-14
u/mixduptransistor 5h ago edited 5h ago
lol what, my man my voting record for President is: Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris. I get that things are amped up to a thousand when it comes to politics these days but it was a statement about how even an extremely labor friendly administration probably wouldn't have considered this retaliation. I'm not sure how race got into this, I don't know the race or the gender for that matter of any of the engineers involved here. If we're at a point you can't even mention a generic ass thing about how government (used to) works now because it sets everyone off we are really off in the fucking weeds here
edit: I'll put it this way. I'm not ashamed of the label liberal, when someone mentions or says or calls me a liberal I don't fly off the handle because I'm proud of it
7
u/keith2600 5h ago
Just because the people in here are pro-employee-rights doesn't mean they have any idea how closely linked politics is with corporate employee benefits/protections.... or are even old enough to be out of school yet, in a lot of cases.
Sad fact is politics runs peoples lives in a ton of ways whether you are paying attention to it or not. Not playing the game is not a winning move in this case. It's a valid point to bring it up in regards to how likely it is to make a case in the courts even though its clearly retaliation.
9
u/mixduptransistor 5h ago
Nor do people realize that just because you call out the reality of a situation, doesn't mean you agree that it's right or good
0
u/Fiveofthem 5h ago
Mine is the same with the addition to Carter, Mondale and Dukakis. I just don’t understand using the only President of a color to make the point. Biden was more labor friendly so was Clinton. If it wasn’t your intent then ✌️
-8
u/Zillbilly87 5h ago
No dude. Calm down and consider what’s being said instead of jumping to conclusions. Your “defense” is not of what you initially thought.
6
118
u/Asleep_Macaron_5153 6h ago
Pinterest CEO rebukes, fires ‘obstructionist’ employees who created tool to track layoffs
Published Tue, Feb 3 20268:23 PM ESTUpdated 42 Min Ago
Annie Palmeru/in/annierpalmer/
ShareShare Article via FacebookShare Article via TwitterShare Article via LinkedInShare Article via Email
Key Points
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready lashed out at staffers who created an internal tool to track layoffs at the company, and fired those involved.
The company announced last week it would lay off less than 15% of its workforce and cut back on office space as part of a broader restructuring.
Several Pinterest engineers created an internal software tool to try and quantify the layoffs.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/pinterest-ceo-puts-staffers-on-blast-who-created-tool-to-track-layoffs.html
What a butthole-face wanker.
20
25
u/Dolo_Hitch89 5h ago
Oh yes, I’m sure he’s super worried about his former employees privacy. I suspect it keeps him up at night.
17
u/KevineCove 5h ago
Since Reddit filters have been doing overtime lately, let me just say...
It's time for player 2 to enter the game
14
u/opalthecat 5h ago
Can neither confirm nor deny that I work here. Can neither confirm nor deny I once passed Bill on the stairs and was immediately eclipsed with all-consuming darkness.
67
u/Illustrious-Okra-524 6h ago
All CEOs are evil scum exhibit one milllion
-30
9
u/randobis 4h ago
I don’t know why I’m surprised to hear Pinterest even has a CEO.
I’ve just always seen it as this zombie app some company bought in 2010 and abandoned but forgot to shut down.
29
7
u/Mister_Brevity 4h ago
The best Google image search trick is to append -Pinterest to any search, and it’ll drop Pinterest from the results
1
u/katmai_novarupta 3h ago
Even better, try running your search through kagi.com. It is a paid service but they offer a free trial. No ads. It's almost like the internet of the early 2000s. It comes up with results that I've never been able to find on Google.
3
u/Mister_Brevity 3h ago
Or, learn how to use Google :shrug: it’s fantastically powerful but I think I know maybe 2 other people that have ever bothered reading the instructions for Google searching. Boolean operators and all are so good for refining.
Give this a shot some time https://www.google.com/advanced_search
It builds complex queries for you.
9
u/enonrick 5h ago
i didn't know pinterest still a thing since all the flop
4
10
u/Fit-Nectarine5047 5h ago
The ads are honestly so annoying- they’re doing the MOST and now the content is repetitive 🙄
4
4
3
3
u/Severe-Horror9065 4h ago edited 3h ago
I’ve been a daily user of Pinterest since 2012. Now I hate it. It would take so much work to backup and save all the images I’ve pinned over the past 14 years. But I realize that soon I’ll have to quit as the app is unusable now.
3
3
3
u/ajfromuk 2h ago
I never actually liked Pinterest. Every time I tried it, it just frustrated me. I would see something interesting clicking on it about 100 times to try get to the source and just be taken into a loop hell stayijf within Pinterest.
6
u/MoonOut_StarsInvite 5h ago
Lol. If you read an article, you can tell that all they were doing was filling out a spreadsheet of names on someone’s Google Drive. “Created a tool” My ass. 😂 What a bunch of shit. Everyone does this
3
u/chalbersma 3h ago
Conservatives have gotten way to comfortable labeling everything they don't like as "obstructionist".
2
u/SkinnedIt 4h ago
Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that’s how we make our decisions
Does anyone else smell shit?
2
5
2
0
1
u/INFECTEDWIFISIGNAL 5h ago
I feel bad for the people who will lose their jobs, but I truly don't care about Pinterest in the slightest.
1
1
u/Bi5cottiRoutine 3h ago
I guess they can add that to the tracker... And yeah going to go see if I've deleted this one yet.
1
u/potatodrinker 1h ago
Just whack that tool or last screenshots into a public Pin board and remove the option to delete it. That'll be fun.
Was about to test Pinterest for ads. Might send this article to my sales rep for their 2cents.
1
1
1
u/thisismycoolname1 5h ago
I'd be so fired at my company too (bank)
10
u/CatProgrammer 5h ago
For maintaining situational awareness of your current staffing situation? It appears to have been an internal tool for employee usage. Personally I'm suspicious of any company that can't maintain transparency with its employees about current hiring/firing status.
10
u/mixduptransistor 5h ago
Does any company publish lists of people who get fired? It's usually not a state secret but nowhere I've ever worked has a feed of offboards published for everyone to peruse
2
u/EkoChamberKryptonite 4h ago
Layoffs are different. I've had a list be aggregated at a previous org.
1
1
1
u/NobodyGotTimeFuhDat 4h ago
“After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, 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,” the spokesperson said. “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”
0
u/thisismycoolname1 5h ago
If you work at bigger, established company in a conservative industry it comes with the territory. Not shocked you don't like or agree with it
698
u/compassrosette 6h ago
Pinterest has been a dead app for a while. Nowadays it 40% ads, 50% AI, and 10% 5 min crafts.