Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs (bbc.com)
- Reference: 0180729702
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/04/114220/pinterest-sacks-workers-for-creating-tool-to-track-layoffs
- Source link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0k670n0ydo
> The company [2]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.
>
> 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.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0k670n0ydo
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/26/01/27/1457232/pinterest-cuts-up-to-15-jobs-to-redirect-resources-to-ai
Have been sacked (Score:5, Funny)
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
Re: (Score:2)
> Those responsible for tracking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
FTFY
Re: (Score:3)
The remainder of the workers, and indeed users, of this social media website have been replaced entirely with automated systems at great expense and at the last minute.
Re: (Score:2)
A moose once bit my sister... oh wait we're already past that part
Re: (Score:2)
"I'll come in again."
Re: (Score:2)
Hello. What?! Well, if you can't work as a team, you're all fired! That's it, you heard me, "Fired". Get your things and go.
Hello, Security. Everyone on Floor 4 is fired. Escort them from the premises. And do it as a team. Remember, you're a team, and if you can't work as a team, you're fired too!
Dawn, get onto recruitment. Get them to look for a security team that can work as a team. They may have to escort the current security team from the building for not acting like a team!
(Yesterday's Jam)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just surprised Pinterest has so many employees remaining. What could they possibly be doing? Pinterest hasn't meaningfully changed in like 15 years now. It was always kind of worthless to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't even know yet what Pinterest is. At some point, I thought it was a fork of the University of Washington Pine email client.
Only the scale was wrong (Score:1)
Remember "I will replace you with a very small shell script" ?
We're essentially replacing people with a very big script now. But they are being replaced. The inevitable has arrived.
Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
They weren't sacked for writing a script, they were sacked for accessing private HR data. Big difference. Most companies would have sacked them.
Re: (Score:2)
Good, because AI probably wrote the script since it's faster.
Re: Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
How is accessing slack deactivations the same as accessing HR data?
Re: Misleading title (Score:2)
Doesn't matter it saved them a few peoples worth of severance
Re: (Score:2)
I could do the same thing at my job (not that I need to since we're the ones deactivating accounts) and nobody would be any the wiser. It's not hard to correlate account deactivations with people being terminated. Their mistake was that they "shared it more broadly" . If they'd just kept quiet nobody would have known, but they decided to go public with the list, and the nail that sticks up...
Not making a judgment btw, it was their choice to make, but anyone could have predicted this outcome.
Re: (Score:2)
It does somehow feel a bit different than accessing "layoffs.xls" on the internal HR website, but it is the same information. It's the sort of thing I can imagine myself having done though, like, "oh look what I can do," and getting canned.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not the same information in terms of privacy.
layoffs.xls is a document that's not shared.
But if the company uses a platform like slack where people can clearly see people disappearing, then they share that data and can't possibly claim people aggregating the data they shared have done anything wrong...
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
They accessed Slack, as they were permitted to do. This is just cowardly management wanting to can people but not wanting to own up to it.
Re: Misleading title (Score:3)
They were sacked for looking at slack statuses. Stop carrying corporate water.
Re: (Score:2)
We tracked that using jira tickets : IT had account deactivation tickets, tracking those gave a very precise overview of what was going on.
Re: (Score:2)
This is why there needs to be another channel to do account activations outside of tracking software such as Jira. The Director of HR should have gone to the Director of IT, and the director of IT should have delegated the task to someone who they trust to take care of the account deletions outside of any tracking software.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, this is very much an ESH situation. Publishing private information about (ex)coworkers is a dick move even if it's done due to a lack of communication from the business itself which is deciding to disrupt people's lives over a fucking tech fad.
A pox on all their houses. As the Pinterest product itself seems successful hopefully a business will be built to replace those jobs when someone addresses the hole in the market when Pinterest inevitably goes bust.
There's more people who should be sacked (Score:2)
The IT person who didn't implement a security policy which would have prevented access to the confidential data. And if the sacked engineers who used slack deactivations, the HR person who preemptively removed the affected employees from slack before the layoffs were conducted and the people escorted out.
Re: (Score:1)
> They weren't sacked for writing a script, they were sacked for accessing private HR data. Big difference. Most companies would have sacked them.
Was it private data? I wrote something like that at a prior company to track the changes in the list of employees returned by a corp DB query over time. The query wasn't restricted internally.
I worked at a place where we had a similar site (Score:5, Informative)
It seemed like there were layoffs every Friday for a period of time. When you were getting the axe they would disable you in Active Directory by adding an underscore in front of your name. So, the internal website, "Death Watch", would just look for accounts that were changed to _username and list them on the website.
oops (Score:3)
posting to destroy a mis-clicked mod. Under- and over- rated should not be next to eachother. Put them in the good or bad grouping of all the other mods!
Remember you don't need a union (Score:1)
You're such a special boy that the company couldn't possibly fire you. The company couldn't stay open if they fired you. And you don't want to pay those union dues right? You could buy a PlayStation with that.
Re: (Score:1)
You talk about getting laid off as though it's a bad thing. IRL it's a bit more nuanced than that.
While it's true that people who get laid off stop getting paychecks (which most of us would immediately miss!) it does come with a gigantic upside.
If you get laid off, then you don't have to go to work anymore. That results in you getting a whole third of the remaining grains in your hourglass-of-life back. Those 8 hours a day of your one-and-only limited life, no longer being wasted on misery.
Now you can reneg
Re: (Score:3)
The number of people who have the luxury of looking at lay-offs this way are probably in the single percentage range of this country. Like....maybe 0.5% of the people running around are truly that 'wanted'. In the other 99.5% of cases, your sole source of income is gone and you're going to be scrambling to get another job before your next mortgage payment is due.
Online job search engines have made this even worse, where a lot of the 'jobs' you see posted are being posted by job clearing houses that are