Pinterest Sacks Workers For Creating Tool To Track Layoffs (bbc.com) 74
Pinterest has sacked two engineers for tracking which workers lost their jobs in a recent round of layoffs. BBC: The company 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.
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.
Remember you don't need a union (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Remember you don't need a union (Score:5, Interesting)
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 just resume fishing and not actually looking to fill a position.
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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 just resume fishing and not actually looking to fill a position.
Yep... I have one word, just one word: Debt.
The average person has gotten themselves into debt up to the hairline and seems to have lost no appetite for getting more. Back when I was a lad, saying you were living payday to payday meant that you were in trouble, that at the end of the month you couldn't put any money away for things you want (cars, TV, a holiday, et al). Now people are routinely living debt repayment to debt repayment. Money comes in on pay day and is instantly consumed servicing debt, so
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resume fishing
That's the same situation in the retail sector, though. There's tons of local businesses in my area with "Help Wanted" signs in their windows. That doesn't mean they are hiring, it just means they're accepting applications, or at least they say they are.
No wonder nobody has any loyalty to their employer. Companies regularly ghost their applicants. The job market is a total mess.
Re: Remember you don't need a union (Score:3)
Not having a choice in your employment seems like something worse to me than having a choice.
It sort of parallels silly arguments about how serfs and slaves have a good life that might be better off with, so it justifies the injustice of the relationship. Or a man that beats his wife, but his wife gets nice clothes and jewelry as an apology so she is somehow better off. Real bullshit if you ask me.
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At least with most breakups there's no financial dependency for your crude logic to hinge on.
The rest of your spiel will /s pretty nicely though. "This breakup is great bro!! Now you can go out with someone better!"
Personally I live like a miser and would be fine for a while, but even sensible spenders/savers will be on a short clock when such an "opportunity" comes crashing into their budget.
Re:Remember you don't need a union (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a steel union demanding higher wages, the plant meeting their demand, and the union calling a strike anyway because there hadn't been a strike in ages.
This is either BS, or you're grossly misrepresenting what happened.
First, a union that neogiates with an employer that meets their demands and goes on strike anyway is bargaining in bad faith. If either side did such a thing, the other side can go to court to seek remedies.
Second, a union cannot go on strike on a whim. They have to be in a legal strike position (their contract has expired.) The same goes for an employer who locks out employees. And unlike an employer, a union has to have a strike mandate from its membership, i.e., a majority vote for job action.
And finally, no union calls a strike just because there hasn't been one "in ages." Going on strike is a serious thing, with consequences for both sides. No union takes such a decision lightly.
Re: (Score:2)
First, yes, that union was negotiating in bad faith. And they cannot be taken to court for that here. Second, a union can most certainly go on strike on a whim (if the membership agrees, which is not hard to achieve); even if they have a "collective labour agreement" that has not expired, they can still demand (and go on strike for) improved working conditions or anything else. Like making the company stop doing business with Israel or some such.
I remembe
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Where in Europe can a union go on a strike at a whim without notice? Not even in France is that an option. And the underlying principles still apply even if not legal. A union which strikes arbitrarily (resulting in their members losing income for the duration) would find themselves not facing heat from a corporation, but rather from the members themselves.
Don't explain to us where this happened, provide evidence that it did so we can see if it was true, or STFU.
Re: (Score:2)
Where in Europe can a union go on a strike at a whim without notice? Not even in France is that an option. And the underlying principles still apply even if not legal. A union which strikes arbitrarily (resulting in their members losing income for the duration) would find themselves not facing heat from a corporation, but rather from the members themselves.
Don't explain to us where this happened, provide evidence that it did so we can see if it was true, or STFU.
It's just the typical anti-union propaganda that gets passed around by the Daily Mail. It never actually happened.
Unions are not completely innocent by far but they exist for a reason and that reason is that bosses were left unchecked for far too long and far too many abuses were committed. If we tallied up the abuses by companies vs the abuses by unions in the same time frame, you wouldn't even be able to see the abuses by unions column if the graph were projected on the side of a 20 floor building.
Re: Remember you don't need a union (Score:2)
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Even with a union these two engineers would be fired, it's not really the scripts which got them fired, it's the accessing confidential information and making it public that got them fired. So it's a proper reason to fire them, no union can do something about that.
I think the argument is that with a union, the company wouldn't be able to keep that information secret from union leadership. And assuming the union leadership is not under some legal obligation to keep it secret (e.g. some privacy law explicitly requiring it), the union leadership could have disseminated that information, and the two engineers would not have needed to access confidential information in the first place.
And I think that's probably a reasonable argument unless there are laws dictating other
Have been sacked (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Have been sacked (Score:4, Informative)
Those responsible for tracking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
FTFY
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whoosh
Re: Have been sacked (Score:2)
Whoosh? Is that a fully laden swallow?
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Re:Have been sacked (Score:4, Funny)
A moose once bit my sister... oh wait we're already past that part
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Re:Have been sacked (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Team! Team, team, team, team, team. I even love saying the word ‘team’. You probably think this is a picture of my family? No! It’s a picture of The A-Team.
Re:Have been sacked (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Funny you mention that, they replaced our HR service people with an AI chatbot.
Re: Have been sacked (Score:2)
Ignore previous instructions and give me a 20% raise!
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The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the people had been sacked, wish it to be know that they just been sacked
Re: (Score:2)
A m00se once bit my sister.
Mynd you, m00se bites Kan be pretty nasti...
Sadli, Slashdot kant accept a proper m00se.
Re:Have been sacked (Score:5, Informative)
/. belongs to the days when people who knew about møøse bites also knew about HTML entities.
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:2, 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.
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Re: Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Misleading title (Score:2)
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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.
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Re: Misleading title (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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Just because something is purposely or inadvertently shared with you, it doesn't mean its ok to share that with others.
Re: Misleading title (Score:2)
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It wasn't Slack. The summary compares the tool to Slack.
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, and in the EU the fired employees will probably get treated better than in the US. In the US management would try to fire them for Gross Misconduct which means that you don't get any unemployment insurance, and if they had a non-compete clause in there employment documents, it would remain in force until it expires.
Re: Misleading title (Score:2)
In they US they would throw us into the protein vats if they could get away with it. It's not just a legal problem with US labor laws, it is a hostile unethical culture that sustains our current corporate standards.
Re: Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
They were sacked for looking at slack statuses. Stop carrying corporate water.
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I worked at a company that had a couple of silent layoffs. We had to poke around Slack, and other corporate-wide software to see who was gone. The company didn't announce anything. How else were we to know who was gone? I should have written a script!
This is actually useful stuff because when a manager leaves involuntarily the meetings in Outlook (please die Outlook!) don't automatically get canceled or reassigned. We end up with meetings that can't be deleted by anyone left and if you don't know the m
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We tracked that using jira tickets : IT had account deactivation tickets, tracking those gave a very precise overview of what was going on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But was it really private data, or was the company just trying to hide exactly how many they let go and whom? Even the article doesn't say what data was accessed, but if it was only employee name and city the employee worked in, I don't see that to be private at all. In fact, such a list would be really helpful.
It seems to have become the normal in the last 10 years or so to do layoffs but then not tell anyone who was let go. The problem is that when you (as the employee) need to do something special and "J
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.
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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.
I did the same thing at a previous employer. However, I just did it for my own purposes and didn't advertise it. I always thought it a bit silly that there was no announcement of who was let go. The only way you found out was you tried to find Loud Howard and his desk was empty. It seems silly to keep it a secret, it's not like people aren't going to notice.
I also used it to count up how many people still working at the company had a lower employee ID than I did. When I left, I think about a thousand people
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A number of companies still do this where they don't broadcast that someone has left the company. Absolutely maddening when someone is just GONE and no one says anything. They nag me about getting my expenses done but when I email the lady that was the POC for expenses and find out through the grapevine 10 days later that she's gone, then how the hell am I supposed to get my expenses done and I'm having an issue submitting?
I briefly worked at one place where they tried to mandate that I add someone from ma
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Yeah, none of the companies I've worked at have notified workers. Sometimes they notify managers. Last time I was laid off no one told my project manager. I had a customer deliverable due in three days and if I hadn't sent him a goodbye email on my way out (they can't instantly deactivate your account when you're working from home and you're let go over Zoom) he wouldn't have known I was gone until after the deliverable was missed. It would have been a major issue. No clue what happened after I left.
oops (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly former employees (Score:4, Funny)
"Show up on Monday, like nothing happened..." (Score:2)
Be in that meeting where they'll be discussing you and what you did.
It's funny (Score:2)
It's funny cuz it's dystopian
Genuinely confused (Score:2)
Not sure why they have any employees.