How Pinterest's firing of two layoff-tracking engineers became a corporate morality play

In an era increasingly defined by constant white-collar layoffs, employees across corporate America have learned to watch Slack $WORK like hawks. When colleagues suddenly go dark on the platform, it's often the first — and sometimes the only — sign that heads are rolling. As one Reddit $RDDT user recently explained on the r/technology subreddit: "Deactivated on slack has been our clue. Usually some private group chat lights up like 'hey guys I just tried to dm Greg and he is deactivated 😬'."

Now this widespread if quiet practice is grabbing headlines, after Pinterest $PINS fired a pair of engineers who used the company’s Slack to build a layoff-tracking tool. The tool helped remaining employees understand who’d been lost to a 15% internal cull, announced last month — one that saw management eliminate about 700 jobs to reallocate “resources to A.I.-focused roles.”

Management did not release a centralized list of who’d been laid off, citing employees’ “privacy.” Meanwhile, the engineers apparently saw something else — an attempt to obscure the full scope of cuts. They were fired on January 30.

CEO Bill Ready, in an all-staff meeting just days later, portrayed the engineers’ tool as "obstructionist" in nature — an effort to prevent the company’s AI pivot, rather than a simple bid to understand the fate of disappearing colleagues — according to CNBC.

"Healthy debate and dissent are expected," Ready reportedly said. "But there's a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that's obstructionist." To those uncomfortable with the company's "AI-forward" direction, his message was blunt: consider working elsewhere.

Wide coverage of the drama speaks to its emblematic feel, as if the Pinterest engineers’ firing made for a kind of corporate morality play — with news readers, Reddit commenters, and other observers seeing their own experience mirrored. For instance, the New York Times has asked whether "A.I. washing" now functions, at scale, to cover efforts to increase leadership's power at the expense of corporate transparency and employees' collective ability to respond to changes in strategy and conditions.

In any case, Pinterest’s own financial trajectory over the last several years likewise mirrors patterns emerging across corporate America, as Pinterest’s management has increasingly aligned itself with AI, focused on shareholder returns, and shed longtime staff as part and parcel of these efforts.

From a $36 million loss in 2023, Pinterest moved swiftly towards profitability, recording nearly $2 billion in net income in 2024. In 2025, the company recorded its first billion-dollar quarter. Over the same period, Pinterest’s user base has grown both larger and younger — key developments for a platform that increasingly positions itself as an "AI-powered shopping assistant" rather than a digital scrapbook. Pinterest now counts some 600 million monthly active users, with Gen Z comprising over half its base.

At the same time, the company has steadily reduced headcount, while increasing R&D spend. The message to Pinterest employees positions AI not only as an aspect of business strategy but as a badge of buy-in with management’s stated objectives — recalling “you’re with us or against us” style logic. Ironically or no, Ready himself once positioned Pinterest, in public filings, as an "oasis for those seeking inspiration, action, and joy."

Whether despite these moves, or because of them, or for broader-market reasons, Pinterest stock has fallen 40% year over year, and is down more than 70% over the last five years.

So, were the fired engineers’ disaffected AI-hating saboteurs? Or were they acting from recognizable motives, such as a desire to understand colleagues’ fate, obtain clues about their own futures, or pierce the self-serving veil of management’s supposed “privacy” concerns?

Ironically, this debate is now likely taking place in group Slack channels as well as private DMs across corporate America. How you see it depends on where exactly you’re sitting.