![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/GettyImages-2213037058-e1770238279168.jpg?w=2048\")
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Pinterest fired two employees who created a tool for tracking the company\u2019s layoffs in a move that highlights how power has largely shifted from employees back to employers in corporate America.<\/p>\n
Pinterest last week announced it would lay off less than 15% of its workforce and shed office space as part of a restructuring running through the end of September that will reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and AI products, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p>\n
After the announcement, in a meeting led by the company\u2019s chief technology officer, Matt Madrigal, Pinterest\u2019s chief security officer, Andy Steingruebl, told engineers company leaders wouldn\u2019t be distributing a list of laid-off employees to protect the individuals\u2019 privacy in line with Pinterest\u2019s privacy policies. Two engineers later built their own internal tool to track laid-off employees ahead of an upcoming town hall with CEO Bill Ready last week, according to Pinterest.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter 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,\u201d a Pinterest spokesperson said in a statement shared with Fortune.<\/em> \u201cThis was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues\u2019 privacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Pinterest confirmed the firing of the two employees to Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n During the town hall the following day, CEO Ready reportedly rebuked staffers and said employees should consider finding another job if they\u2019re \u201cworking against the direction of the company\u201d and don\u2019t agree with the company mission, CNBC reported, citing an audio recording of the meeting.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ready\u2019s comments and Pinterest\u2019s move to fire the engineers highlights a new era in which companies hold all the cards as employees have transitioned from job hopping to job hugging. In 2022, during the Great Resignation, 2.5% of employees, or about 4 million workers, on average, switched jobs each month between January and March, and more than half of them saw an earnings boost because of it, according to Pew Research Center.<\/p>\n Those days are long gone, and CEOs are starting to expect more, ZipRecruiter career strategist Sam DeMase told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tone of the CEO today is more demanding than during the Great Resignation in 2021,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a distinct emphasis on efficiency and impact.\u201d <\/p>\n Some CEOs, including Amazon\u2019s Andy Jassy, have already started asking employees for a list of accomplishments, a change from the previous high-level focus on goals and an employee\u2019s best way of working. <\/p>\n Jason Leverant, the chief operating officer of professional staffing and recruitment agency AtWork Group, argues in the post\u2013Great Resignation labor market, companies have moved away from promoting terms such as \u201cflexibility\u201d and \u201cempathy\u201d when seeking out hires.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, companies are prioritizing accountability and productivity. AI, in particular, is accelerating this shift by giving leaders more visibility into performance and more ways to automate repetitive work, he added.?<\/p>\n \u201cPersonally, I believe we\u2019re seeing a clear recalibration of influence in the employer-employee relationship,\u201d he told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/p>\n #Pinterest #cracks #dissent #fires #engineers #internal #layoff #tool #shakeups #employees #edge #line<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pinterest fired two employees … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[2133,6423,10413,684,1199,9387,8471,3522,1829,11823,2188,2947,9581,11824,930,954,4899,3166],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Changing corporate power structure<\/h2>\n