151–160 of 779 posts
> “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 aske…
> “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 aske…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah let's be real, if she programmed a popup to appear over twitter with a message like "Don't slack off dummy UwU" and or something equally ill informed she would have been rebuked at worst. To say that it wasn't the union overtones that got her fired is naive.
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Did you read what the extension is for?
For anyone else who didn't get that far the first time: > Spiers' pop-up message was inserted into a tool that notifies employees of privacy and security concerns about using non-Google tools and services, like warning employees not to upload proprietary information to Dropbox, Spiers said. The tool is managed by the platform security team, for which Spiers worked for almost two years as a security engineer. So, seem…
I’m surprised how many people are jumping through hoops to defend this sort of thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
She went through the corporate approved process with her changes. Her only mistake here is being pro union while Google is decidedly anti-union and pro-worker-abuse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yeah let's be real, if she programmed a popup to appear over twitter with a message like "Don't slack off dummy UwU" and or something equally ill informed she would have been rebuked at worst. To say that it wasn't the union overtones that got her fired is naive.
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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.
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> 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.
Is this a precedent that Google or any company wants to have, though? Engineers with access to company-wide tools or extensions can put political or divisive content into them? This is more than just a "poster in the cafe" because of the reach and invasiveness of the approach. Disclaimer: I work for Google, speaking for myself only.
Google is free to pull the tool or change the documented process. (I admit, the process seems lax.) Instead, they fired the employee. That’s an aggressive response.
> the reach and invasiveness of the approach
It’s a pop-up generated when one visits the site of the “firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company”. That sounds like a reasonable scope.
Again, using a tool whose entire purpose is to serve site-specific pop-ups.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/security-engineer-says-goog...
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It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?
No, it feels like wilful cognitive dissonance where you all seem to think having two coworkers of no real managerial importance signing off on your company-wide political statement is somehow 'by the book' and everyone else is just a shill, ignorant and somehow didn't read this press release for this poor, poor person who knew exactly what would happen. EDIT: Let's read the second paragraph of the article again: "eac…