GoKawiilIt was late January, and Pinterest engineer Teddy Martin was on edge about recent layoffs at the company. Martin had just survived a round of cuts, but he and other employees were confused about who was being let go and why, and explanations from top executives including CEO Bill Ready had done little to quell the unease. So when Martin saw someone mention a tool that would shed light on the scope of the impact, he decided to share it in Slack.
The tool was a simple command known as ldapsearch — it aggregated a list of deactivated employee accounts from the directory, organized by office location, spitting out only the number of recently deactivated accounts next to the office location. A couple hours later, however, he noticed his post had been removed by a Slack administrator. “I didn’t receive any message that I had done anything wrong. I just noticed that it had been deleted,” he said. “And then the following morning at 11:29, I got an invitation to an urgent 15-minute meeting at 11:30.”
Martin was fired, and according to him, told he’d made “gross misuse of privileged access.” The HR representative told him that his health insurance would end at the end of the month — that was the next day. He began to worry about what that would mean for his family — he had a new house, a toddler, and a wife on medical leave to take care of.
Beside the immediate financial strain, Martin was confounded by how quickly and severely he was disciplined for sharing what at the time he felt was a useful piece of information. In comments to The Verge and other outlets, Pinterest has accused Martin of violating employees’ privacy without their consent. But Martin felt that Pinterest had provided little clarity and sometimes contradictions on its reasons for the layoffs, and thought the tool would help his coworkers “stress less, focus more.” His firing felt to him like a way to boot someone willing to question company decisions. Now Martin is “considering all his legal options,” according to his spokesperson, Douglas Farrar. And amid industry-wide conflicts between workers and tech companies, Pinterest is still pushing back.
Soon after Martin was fired, Ready held an all-hands meeting, and in audio leaked to CNBC, the CEO described “obstructionist” behavior — apparently talking about Martin’s actions — that the company wouldn’t tolerate. “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,” an unnamed Pinterest spokesperson told CNBC. The spokesperson said this violated Pinterest’s policy and employees’ privacy.
This explanation didn’t make sense to Martin. The ldapsearch command was not a custom script, and did not access any information that wasn’t already available to all employees, nor share the names of those impacted.
A current Pinterest employee, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, said that even before seeing the command posted, they had also thought to run a similar one to understand what areas of the business were most impacted by the layoffs. “LDAP is like an IT-managed service that Pinterest provides. We have wiki articles all about how to use it,” the employee said. “If you ask our AI assistants, they will happily tell you all about how to use it. In my view, this was a known method, and I wouldn’t be surprised if half of engineering was already running this command prior to it being shared.” The employee said they’d seen the command shared in a couple different forms, but that the version Martin shared did not output names.
CNBC updated its story to note that several Pinterest employees had contacted the outlet to dispute the company’s account after publication.
“Mr. Martin’s actions undermined his laid-off colleagues’ privacy”
“We fully support our employees discussing layoffs with their colleagues and leaders. That is not in question,” Pinterest spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement to The Verge. “Mr. Martin’s actions undermined his laid-off colleagues’ privacy, disregarding Pinterest’s efforts to protect personal information they may not want shared. Many people don’t want others to know that they were let go, but Mr. Martin made that choice for them. Protecting our laid-off colleagues is the right thing to do. We stand behind that.”
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