fix: employee scores don't reset for maternity leave

Show Notes

Six weeks into parental leave, your Slack status turns green by accident, and a coworker texts asking if you're back. You're not back. You're up at 2am with a newborn. But somewhere, a dashboard is still counting your tokens, your commits, your keystrokes, and for those six weeks, the number is zero.

Twenty-six Meta employees just filed over exactly that math. They allege the scoring system used to decide who got laid off pulled from keystroke and activity monitoring data, AI token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance rankings, and that the resulting score structurally could not be earned by anyone on protected medical, parental, or family leave. Not unlikely. Structurally impossible.

I'm not a lawyer and this isn't a legal deep dive. I want to talk about what a token-usage dashboard actually measures, what it silently assumes about the person generating those tokens, and how objective quietly becomes punishes anyone without a keyboard open eight hours a day. Nobody sat in a room and decided to target people on leave. Nobody had to.

If you've ever built, or been ranked by, a system that called itself objective, this one's for you.