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Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

nbcnews.com

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Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#101

Post by SamuelAdams »

Maxion wrote: post #27
iwantagrinder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not read the part where she did, where she followed the process by the book and it was approved? Or did you just have your mind made up to decide to side with Google instead?

I'm honestly a little surprised (and worried) about all the commenters who argue Google is in the right here.

Why is that? You can't just get code review / deployment approval. You need to have approval that a certain feature or process is wanted / needed for the system. My guess is the sec engineer in this story did not get approval for this feature in the first place, she just went ahead and changed the code.

What if this change allowed passwords to be captured in plain text? Browsing history? Surely those are fire-able offenses? So how is this situation any different?

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#102

Post by fiysp »

Maxion wrote: post #64
CodeMage wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read what the extension is for?

It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?

You are right. In fact, why don't we stop having elections? After all, why would any sane person be against your views of the world? ;P

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#103

Post by Kylekramer »

Lot of people are confusing "following standard procedures" with "immune from consequences". To be honest, looks like the employee got a few sympathetic people to sign off on an inappropriate use of a tool. According to the Verge, there are two other people who are also being disciplined.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#104

Post by mariopt »

> “You’re allowed to put posters up on the wall to help organize your workers, and this can be seen as kind of a digital extension of that,”

Well, that digital extension belongs to Google. If she wanted to rally company developers she could have used email, created her own website, slack account, WhatsApp, telegram, etc. There are plenty of channels that don't belong to Google.

I doubt anyone in upper management asked her to do this, maybe she took too much freedom and abused her privileged access? "Oh but someone else approved that PR", well probably they ganged up.

She is a Security Engineer, not HR/Management.

If this approved by HR/Management, there would be no problem at all but I think she/they did whatever they wanted without thinking about it.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#105

Post by claudeganon »

Maxion wrote: post #64
CodeMage wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read what the extension is for?

It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?

Literal decades of highly-funded propaganda by business interests to manufacture this consensus, for starters, Taft-Hartley banning sector-wide bargaining to render unionizing as company-level adversarialism vs. a broader fight for worker security and rights, the purging of leftists from the labor movement with Red Scare postwar...

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#106

Post by GVIrish »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #29
Maxion wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you further read the article, she went through the standard approval process for changes. She did it by the book. That's hardly "injecting code".

> Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension That sounds like code review approvals, not actual project/management approval of the 'feature'. We have the same: Cannot commit any code change unless 2 other team members have reviewed it. That has nothing to do with having actual project/management app…

I'd agree, it sounds a lot like a code review, but at Google that was also the approval standard for deploying such an extension.

I don't really see how Google could be in the right here though. If they have an internal program for creating alerts/extensions for specific websites, and Spiers followed the normal procedure for adding such an extension, there doesn't seem to be a problem. The only problem is Google being anti-union, and retaliating against someone for quietly promoting unions in line with existing policies seems a lot like illegal retaliation.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#107

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cj wrote: post #5

> Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” So basically, the Go…

> injecting javascript into an employer's internal chrome extension

The purpose of the extension is to serve site-specific pop-ups. Spiers added a pop-up to an existing pop-up tool using existing, precedented processes.

The analogy to a poster in a cafeteria, which is explicitly protected by federal law, passes a first-order smell test.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#108

Post by throwaway2048 »

IshKebab wrote: post #9

> I was doing nothing more than notifying my co-workers about Google's obligations under labor law > Kathryn Spiers updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to parti…

This extension popping up messages on various sites was a completely normal thing for it to do, she simply added another message.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#109

Post by bryanrasmussen »

CodeMage wrote: post #41
mytailorisrich wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension That sounds like code review approvals, not actual project/management approval of the 'feature'. We have the same: Cannot commit any code change unless 2 other team members have reviewed it. That has nothing to do with having actual project/management app…

Did you read what the extension is for?

I did but I still have to say it sure sounds like a code review process she went through, not a new feature addition she went through. Although generally I wouldn't approve code unless I could figure out what feature it was related to so I also think huh, maybe it was okay by Google's inner processes - the workings of which I a not informed of.

Re: Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

#110

Post by jefftk »

Maxion wrote: post #20

Did no one read the article? > Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension. Another source at Google familiar with the update approval process confirmed to NBC news that those two approvals are standard practice for a browser extension update. She did it exactly according to internal policy. The exte…

> She did it exactly according to internal policy.

I don't think this person or the other organizers should have been fired, but code review is not the same as organizational approval.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

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