Pinterest fired two employees who created a tool for tracking the company’s layoffs in a move that highlights how power has largely shifted from employees back to employers in corporate America.
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.
After the announcement, in a meeting led by the company’s chief technology officer, Matt Madrigal, Pinterest’s chief security officer, Andy Steingruebl, told engineers company leaders wouldn’t be distributing a list of laid-off employees to protect the individuals’ privacy in line with Pinterest’s 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.
“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,” a Pinterest spokesperson said in a statement shared with Fortune. “This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”
A spokesperson for Pinterest confirmed the firing of the two employees to Fortune.
During the town hall the following day, CEO Ready reportedly rebuked staffers and said employees should consider finding another job if they’re “working against the direction of the company” and don’t agree with the company mission, CNBC reported, citing an audio recording of the meeting.
Changing corporate power structure
Ready’s comments and Pinterest’s 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.
Those days are long gone, and CEOs are starting to expect more, ZipRecruiter career strategist Sam DeMase told Fortune.
“The tone of the CEO today is more demanding than during the Great Resignation in 2021,” she said. “There’s a distinct emphasis on efficiency and impact.”
Some CEOs, including Amazon’s 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’s best way of working.
Jason Leverant, the chief operating officer of professional staffing and recruitment agency AtWork Group, argues in the post–Great Resignation labor market, companies have moved away from promoting terms such as “flexibility” and “empathy” when seeking out hires.
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.
“Personally, I believe we’re seeing a clear recalibration of influence in the employer-employee relationship,” he told Fortune.
