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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

#131

Post by DanBC »

Touche wrote: post #86
ninly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly bold and perhaps ill-advised, but I would hardly characterize this as "injection" > Spiers told NBC News that she was inspired to create a digital notification because “a poster in the cafeteria is not the best way of reaching the majority of Googlers.” > The message included a link to a statement that the NLRB required the company to post for employees following the settlement of a complaint that was filed…

Prefixing this by saying I am not siding with Google (since people make assumptions). The standard approval process sounds like most merge review processes on any engineering team. There's a sort of assumed good-faith for this process. The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith and was within the bounds of normal types of changes. Any engineer with the freedom to make…

> There's a sort of assumed good-faith for this process.

I don't understand why two people sign off changes if they assume the person making the changes isn't going to make errors or be "malicious". And I'm not sure why two people sign off changes instead of just one. There's a well understood problem when you have more than one person inspecting product - they both assume the other person is competent and will catch anything they've missed, and they each do a lighter inspection.

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

#132

Post by shantly »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
Maxion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Why would any sane person be against unions? I have no horse in this race. But as a counterpoint, pretty much everything in New York is more expensive due to heavy unionisation, particularly around construction and public services.

My understanding is that the if-anything-heavier-unionized EU isn't experiencing the same rapid growth in (especially public) construction costs as the US has been for some time—still faster than inflation, but lower than would be explained by just PPP adjustments or COL vs. the US. Unions may not be helping but there's something else causing runaway cost growth in US public sector construction, in particular.

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

#133

Post by some346 »

iwantagrinder wrote: post #19
kache_ wrote: post #7

>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.” You should get fired…

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?

Do you only know copy and paste the same comment?

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

#134

Post by glofish »

save_ferris wrote: post #38
kawfey wrote: post #18

Bad headline. It should read "Engineer fired her for abusing privileged access to modify an internal security tool." That's a pretty dumb way to notify co-workers of their right to organize, but I guess it's a really good way to get fired and draw up a big media stink about it.

Wrong. She went through the standard review process to get the notification change out. Read the article.

What if the message was: "Make America Great Again".

What if the message was: "H1B - go back to your country".

would it still feel ok to you?

etc

it is grossly unprofessional to insert unrelated messaging and hijack a tool to push your agenda.

"Going through standard protocols" in this case meant two other people approved the change - those two people also show serious unprofessionalism and bear responsibility as well - it is not an excuse.

Edit:

I have now also read the author's take on it.

https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...

I do feel that the way Google went about it was heavy-handed and reflects badly on Google as well.

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

#135

Post by TravHatesMe »

Touche wrote: post #23
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…

It's still worth discussing if their reaction warranted the offense. Would they have fired her had she added a pop-up on Earth Day encouraging employees to recycle? Or would she have received a slap on the wrist for that. In other words, how much of what she was advocating was part of the decision to fire?

That is a good question. Is this a fireable offense regardless of the content? If not, what kind of content is fireable, subject matter that is political, religious, vulgar, or offensive?

Putting this into an internal tool does seem unprofessional in my opinion. Why bite the hand that feeds you?

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

#136

Post by pr0zac »

scarface74 wrote: post #69
jpmontez wrote: post #34

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. 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 alleges it was done by the book.

Does what she did even pass the sniff test? What if she got permission from her supervisor to inject $political_message_you_dont_agree_with in your browser. Would you be okay with that?

Well no, but considering that she seems to have followed the correct processes if she had done that I'd have expected the response to be rolling back the commit and a follow up postmortem to document what was missing from the process that allowed it to happen and changes made to the process to prevent it from happening in the future. Not firing the employee. You shouldn't blame workers for system failures.

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

#138

Post by makomk »

ramraj07 wrote: post #76

I was initially tempted to side with Google, a code review process is not just rigorous enough for catching features being sneaked in. However, it looks like the sole purpose of the extension is to warn employees about security issues in websites, and this engineer coopted that to show a union forming message. The final paragraph suggests that there's legal precedence for doing this: “You’re allowed to put posters up…

I don't buy this analogy. If there's one thing news reporting has demonstrated over the last few years, it's that Google is not lacking in actual digital equivalents of noticeboards where people can put up the equivalent of posters. This seems like she decided that wasn't aggressive enough and implemented the political equivalent of slipping adware into a browser extension instead.

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

#139

Post by extropy »

Touche wrote: post #23
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…

It's still worth discussing if their reaction warranted the offense. Would they have fired her had she added a pop-up on Earth Day encouraging employees to recycle? Or would she have received a slap on the wrist for that. In other words, how much of what she was advocating was part of the decision to fire?

The particular popup looks pretty official and scary as security popups should.

And portrays that Google management is endorsing this instead of a grassroots poster.

IMHO this is at minimum a misrepresentation case. And I would be pretty pissed if it was used for Earth day. Don't mess around with crying wolf.

Working for Google.

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

#140

Post by jacquesm »

ixtli wrote: post #95
scarface74 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course Google is right. She happened to get two coworkers to approve what she was doing. If I got a manager who I was friends with to approve my purchase of a fully decked out $53K Mac Pro so I could finally use Slack at a decent speed when I am working from home, wouldn’t you think there was something fishy?

Since you can’t spend 53000 dollars on a Mac laptop last I checked, yes! However the whole purpose of a managerial hierarchy is to establish a responsibility chain so at very least I would expect the manager to also get fired. Google doesn’t care about these antics. They, like all employers, don’t want their employees to have meaningful bargaining power.

They did say Mac Pro:

https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tech-news-fully-spec-apple-m...

Taking into account the exchange rate that works out to about 55K USD.

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