Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 779 posts

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

#311

Post by scarface74 »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #305
scarface74 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It’s just like religion. If your religion tells you not to drink, I will respect that. If your religion tells you that I’m not allowed to drink I will tell you to f’ off.

The irony being of course, Google's entire business is shoving ads into people's faces that approximately nobody wants to see.

And guess what? I don’t need government intervention for that either. I can install an ad blocker, not use software that is ad based with no way to get rid of the ads and not buy Android phones. Free will is great isn’t it?

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

#312

Post by dmix »

zozbot234 wrote: post #254
dmix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox has total access to your unencrypted files. That 100% fits the criteria. Especially in regards to file-access between potentially competing megacorps. Again with the jumping through hoops...

> Dropbox has total access to your unencrypted files. The application maybe, depending on how you set it up. Not the website itself.

And I’m sure the law firms homepage wasn’t turning people who visit it into antiunion drones either. What’s your point?

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

#313

Post by thu2111 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #281
scarface74 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unionization is definitely a political issue.

In the US. Decidedly not in other countries, where it is just something you do.

That's certainly not the case, not even close. Unions are regulated by law almost everywhere which makes them an inherently political issue.

But if you look at, say, the UK, then unions actually fund one of the major political parties and have tremendous influence over it. Unions have in the past managed to topple elected governments. Beating the unions was Margaret Thatcher's flagship effort when she was first elected. And union membership has been in steady decline.

It's certainly not a USA specific thing. Union/management wars in the UK got very nasty indeed.

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

#314

Post by foogazi »

shantly wrote: post #229
glofish wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

> A great and entirely "professional" thing to do? Nah

So unprofessional?

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

#315

Post by jmull »

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.

A code review isn't some kind of blessing.

It's just a way to catch some issues before they get further and cause big problems.

It is too bad for this employee that the CR didn't stop this change.

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

#316

Post by bb88 »

zasz wrote: post #215
objclxt wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I'm very pro-labor union, but life as an actor or screenwriter is considerably more precarious. Each job you get lasts only as long as the movie you're currently working on does. Once the movie's done, you're out of a job again. A SWE doesn't experience the same level of chaos, unless they're freelancing.

Maybe not much more. The era of spending your life at a company is long gone, and the role of a distinguished senior engineer over 50 is evaporating. And the number of people who have been screwed out of their options on HN have been too numerous to count.

Yet demand for software engineers are higher than ever. It seems like market forces should counteract these issues, however SV is impervious to these issues.

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

#318

Post by sdenton4 »

Touche wrote: post #303
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith The standard for whether a company is legally allowed to fire an employee for organizing isn't whether their action is in "good faith", but whether their action is concerted. The fact that it passed code review is therefore critical evidence.

IANAL, but California is an at-will state. Again, IANAL, but my educated understanding is that you can fire someone for any reason as long as the reason is not illegal. Lastly, IANAL.

Organizing is protected by law. Firing for organizing is intimidation.

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

#319

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

> "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."

What? Granted, I've only worked for large businesses but that would be grounds for immediate termination at any company I've ever worked at.

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

#320

Post by workthrowaway »

helen___keller wrote: post #265
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…

I agreed with this at first, but according to her medium post ( https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for... ) "Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web" If this is true and her job is literally to create javascript notifications of company policy, then I think it's entire…

from her blog:

> This kind of code change happens all the time.

we have all been there.

i think she knew she wasn't following proper procedure. even if it's done "all the time".

Post reply on HN