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Pinterest fires 2 employees for creating tool to track layoffs. What CEO said
Pinterest has fired two employees involved in creating an internal tool to track which employees have been laid off.
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Pinterest has fired two employees involved in creating an internal tool to track which employees have been laid off. The firings come a week after the social media company announced job cuts.
Last week, Pinterest said it would let go of about 15% of its staff as it focuses on investing in AI. The workforce reduction would impact around 700 roles, the company said, without revealing which departments specifically.
Pinterest employees fired over layoffs tracker
Pinterest has now fired two engineers who created an internal tool to track which employees are affected by the job cuts.
“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 told BBC.
"This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues' privacy," the spokesperson added.
CEO lashes out
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready lashed out at the employees who created the tool.
“Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that’s how we make our decisions,” Ready said at a companywide meeting last week, according to audio obtained by CNBC. “But there’s a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that’s obstructionist.”
The engineers responsible for creating the tool were fired on Friday.
The CEO of Pinterest defended the sackings during the companywide meeting, saying that employees should consider looking for a new job if they are “working against the direction of the company” and disagree with its mission.
However, several Pinterest employees told CNBC that they disagreed with how the company described the incident.
According to them, the engineers were fired after sharing instructions on how to prompt an internal staff directory to reveal which employees had been laid off. The employees said Pinterest’s assertion that the engineers had built custom software was misleading, adding that the directory tool is available to all staff.
