Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by conanbatt » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

impalallama wrote: post #111

Touche wrote: post #86

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.

If she had made a popup that said women and men don't share the same predilection for software engineer she would have been fired as well.

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

#222

Post by pysxul » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #182

jefftk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

What is the purview of a code review? Is it only about making sure the code meets technical standards, or are reviewers expected to comment holistically?

It kind of depends, not every task are the same. you won't review a trivial change the same way as a brand new feature.

Let's take for instance the fictional case of adding a list of website to a whitelist.txt. Maybe the source file had thousands of websites to be added. Anyone could add or remove some in the middle and no one would ever know

It looks good when you review it. but there is no way to check the data integrity (at review time), you can only rely on the good faith of your coworkers.

I am not saying that's what happened but this is a good example of how anyone could sneak-in arbitrary code that pass the code review.

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

#223

Post by macspoofing » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

Maxion wrote: post #16

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…

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.

Yeah. I don't think so. The tool in question is an internal security tool, not a communication tool to get her message out. The two engineers who signed off on this should also be reprimanded. This is a clear abuse of a process meant to take in security-related contributions without too much red-tape.

And you want a separation of concerns here. You don't want a tool created for security to push the political agenda of some activists.

And she literally says the only reason for her change was because she wanted to get the word out because posters aren't effective enough: "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.”" ... yeah. Sorry posters aren't effective enough for you, you can't do that.

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

#224

Post by magduf » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

GhettoMaestro wrote: post #209

Touche wrote: post #86

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…

If all of them signed off then they all should be canned. Work is called work for a reason. Millennials struggle with this core concept.

No, it really depends. It's easy to overlook stuff on a merge request. I'd interview both of the reviewers, and with them look at the actual MR and see what they were looking at, and ask them how they missed this and why they thought it was OK to merge.

I've seen some pretty glaring stuff get through a review process, particularly with junior engineers.

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

#225

Post by mmcwilliams » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:25 PM UTC

kawfey wrote: post #119

krageon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't political. It's about unionising.

Unionizing is inherently political. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/unions-collective-bargaining-...

And firing workers for unionizing is political and illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/how-we-work/national-labor-relations-ac...

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

#226

Post by mrep » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:26 PM UTC

objclxt wrote: post #148

School-Cotton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sane, and don't want to join a union (I'm not against them in general ; there are certainly fields where they make sense). I don't know if your question was serious, but in case it was: I don't feel like my employer is a rival or an enemy; I feel like they are a partner in our mutual goal to make a lot of money. I've never worked at Google, but I've worked at similarly famous large companies, making several times…

> I don't feel like my employer is a rival or an enemy; I feel like they are a partner in our mutual goal to make a lot of money [...] it's not hard to understand why many of us feel no draw to unions. It's hard for me to understand when you look at other similar industries. We're not talking about blue collar unions here: we're talking about white collar unions. They're very different. Take Hollywood as an example.…

Aren't those industry wide unions whose main purpose is to set wage floors because there are so many people desperately trying to get into the industry that without them, employee conditions would be terrible for those just starting out? I don't think that is a problem for programmers and it is way different than a company specific union.

If you want to start an industry wide programmer union, by all means, start one and then try and get people to join it. I'd love to hear what benefits you think I would get by joining an industry wide programmer union.

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

#227

Post by magduf » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #131

Touche wrote: post #86

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…

> 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…

>And I'm not sure why two people sign off changes instead of just one.

Because more eyes catch more bugs. I work in a time like this where we have 2 or even 3 people review stuff; it's extremely common for one engineer to miss stuff that another one catches. It's particularly notable I think with junior vs. senior engineers: I think you really need at least one senior engineer reviewing everything before a merge, but you don't want to keep junior engineers out of the process because then they'll never learn. With trivial tickets, however, you can relax this rule and just have one person review before a merge.

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

#228

Post by CharlesColeman » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

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?

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

Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.

Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves in court pro se (without a union). The sad thing is the campaign has worked surprisingly well.

Dropping the analogy, I think many tech workers are treated relatively well for now by employers. Sort of like a well-treated personal assistant to the boss, who is comfortable and has their small privileges compared to those in the factory floor, and therefore feels like they're more like a boss than a worker, even though that's not at all the case.

The startup ecosystem has also encouraged tech workers to think of themselves as future bosses rather than present-day workers, so they favor the policies they imagine their hypothetical future selves benefiting from, even though it hurts themselves and their friends today.

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

#229

Post by shantly » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

glofish wrote: post #134

save_ferris wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wel…

It's more like posting a reminder of the current legal minimum wage—and only showed up, apparently, if the user visited the site of a consulting firm Google hired to help them figure out how to avoid unionization.

A great and entirely "professional" thing to do? Nah, but hardly worth the vigorous harumphing and tut-tutting it's receiving. It's not like she contributed code to Amp or spearheaded putting ads inline with and above search results. You know, nothing terribly evil.

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

#230

Post by extropy » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #169

thrower123 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they need to rethink the book. I'm not sure a Googley culture of permissiveness can exist at the kind of scale that they have now, and with the competing activist factions that they have cultivated.

If they really fired her for just this bagatelle, it speaks more against Google. I don't know why there is this pervasive desire to strangle developers. This is a pretty recent phenomena in my opinion and certainly nothing close to a requirement to develop great software. If I were an employee at Google, actions such as this would let me seriously consider to look for other work. The requirement for the code review f…

Google needs to choose between two evils here:

Give employees power / freedom and fire fast if you do stupid things.

Stricter regulations/ checks so they cannot mess up hard in the first place. At the cost of slower pace and less risks taken.

Google has historically been the former. And it comes with people doing stupid things and getting fired. Just the world is not used for huge companies to keep operating in such mode.

I applaud Google for keeping being open and not enforcing processes. The rest of the world will grow up eventually.