It 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 de …