Pinterest sacks two engineers for creating software to identify fired workers

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/04/pinterest-sacks-two-engineers-for-software-identify-fired-workers

by erehweb • 6 months ago

43 13 6 months ago

lovich2• 6 months ago

That’s certainly one way to increase morale.

Separately, I thought the WARN act requirements included notifying who was being laid off ahead of time? Are they not subject to those for some reason or are they just taking advantage of the current government being anti regulation?

0cf8612b2e1e• 6 months ago

AFAIK, you can tell someone today, “Get out” without prior notice, but then you have to continue to pay them for the duration of the WARN period.

Regarding this story, this situation only exists because companies have gotten so secretive about layoffs. I have been through multiple rounds in the past few years and management loves to dance around the issue. No hard numbers on people cut, the teams, or even the dates when it will be effective. No surprise that those with the ability sought to get hard data on the scope of the action.

I also enjoy how the company framed this as practically hacking people’s PII, but I can believe it just took querying the internal company directory for some key metadata. Recently added to the “TO-BE-CUT” OU or something.

winrid• 6 months ago

This is what every company I've been at does. They fire and give severance during the WARN period. Nobody will ever give you a list of who was laid off at any company I've worked at. You would just have to.. figure it out

danjl• 6 months ago

Just wait until they piss off the AI

theragra• 6 months ago

It is weird that 15% of Pinterest is 700 people?

I don't know shit about Pinterest, but it looks insane.

echoangle• 6 months ago

Yeah, more than 4600 employees seems wild for Pinterest. Reddit seems to have about 2200 which still seems a lot but is less than half. I wonder how many of those are programmers and how many are infra, marketing, management, legal etc.

calypso• 6 months ago

The 15% included contractors. Many of the Mobile developers were South American contractors.

Schiendelman• 6 months ago

I would imagine the minority are technical. You usually need a large sales team to handle the relationships in ad sales.

pjsg• 6 months ago

Many companies have internal directories which can be downloaded and (say) committed into git on a daily basis. This could be automated in a cron job. This then gives an immediate view into what is going on.

I believe that the Slack API (if your company uses Slack) can be persuaded to give you the list of deactivated accounts. Then you just check this into git (on a daily basis), and you are done.

And, of course, in this AI Agentic world, you can probably ask your HR bot about the recent layoffs and get the information even more easily!

literallyroy• 6 months ago

Yep you can use your browser cookies to be authenticated and hit the slack api and get deactivated accounts. It’s wild and depressing to watch folks get deactivated in real time

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892452

dylanhouli• 6 months ago

Right after running the software and seeing your own name pop up:

:-O

Pinterest sacks two engineers for creating software to identify fired workers

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