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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.
> “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…
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I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me. Personally I think that modifying a work tool to achieve political goals is wrong.
> I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me. It's about as political as informing someone they have a right to be paid the minimum wage.
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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.
These popups are security popups, the ones you would get from your antivirus/firewall and carry a certain Management endorsement weight. It's not a free for all space to put random messages into.
Federally-protected content isn’t random speech.
There are reasonable arguments on both sides. Looking forward to seeing them play out at the NLRB and in the courts.
The only solid takeaway at this time is, if you think this is black-and-white, you’re missing salient detail.
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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?
Because they, like any other organization, tend to become corrupt and exercise their power to the benefit of the "party insiders", at the expense of the everyday member. And I, for one, don't feel any need to have my pay rate negotiated based on some group average or least common denominator. And union dues.
I personally fully support the right of people to bargain collectively, but being a member of a union is not something I'm particularly interested in.
> 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…
She added a message. "Injecting arbitrary javascript." Please.
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> 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 bein…
I can't see how google is in the wrong. Unless google allows anyone to change this extension for personal reasons and they only flagged her. Could someone change it to let everyone know they are selling cookies or accepting donations to their church.
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A pro-union statement may be a "political message", but it is also content that has special protections in labor law. As the article says, as part of a legal settlement over alleged labor violations, Google is required to print out and post a statement of employee rights [0] that begins, "FEDERAL LAW GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO: Form, join, or assist a union;...Act together with other employees for your benefit and protec…
Print out and post is not the same thing as injecting JS in the browser. Was she part of the legal or compliance team?
> Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension > “We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.” The only times I’ve ever seen people fired quickly in Tech without a performance improvement plan or something similar is a security violation.…
one time i was fired for leaving my computer unlocked to go get some coffee. true story.
I don't know why anyone would choose to work at Google anymore.
Giant piles of money. Probably still gets you an easy CTO title at a startup after 2-4 years at Google.
Not anymore, really. It was the case a couple of years ago but right now, for rank-and-file employees, Google downlevels heavily and targets around 80% of the market rate. For some reason, people are still flocking at their doors and because of high supply of candidates, they can afford to be both very selective and very cheap.