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

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

#401

Post by boomlinde »

BoorishBears wrote: post #205
CharlesColeman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a cafeteria or break room. Trying to fulfill the requirement by putting the posters up in a broom closet of the CEO's office would be forbidden. I think the employee has a point with the pop-up. Wall posters aren't a good way to reach technology wo…

The idea of the popup isn't the issue I have with this. It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from. It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work. Sure the notice is required, but putting it so it shows up solely on the website for the legal firm hire…

> It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work.

You should probably not work at Google.

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

#402

Post by helen___keller »

kick wrote: post #397
helen___keller wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is just the truth of working at BigCorp. Most engineers can pretend office politics doesn't exist because they're working in primarily nonpolitical roles. But office politics exists, for any office. And unionization is political.

How is a big corporation exclusive from being "broken and probably dangerously hostile"? It seems likely that they all are.

Ok. I perhaps unfairly was defending against the comment "[more] broken and probably dangerously hostile [than other comparable organizations]"

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

#403

Post by fzeroracer »

tdfx wrote: post #122
iwantagrinder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I love that a site full of engineers is pretending that getting a pull request approved by colleagues is the same thing as getting management's approval for a new, most likely controversial feature. Google is clearly trying to squash union organizing at the company but let's not pretend this employee was correct in her actions. Google being evil and this employee being in the wrong are not mutually exclusive.

The employee was not correct in doing her legal obligation to inform people of their right to organize in an app designed to inform employees about various rights and things as they browse the web? Which she had the authority to do because it's literally what she was hired to do?

Can you explain how this makes the employee wrong if they follow the law and their company fires them for doing so?

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

#404

Post by quotemstr »

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…

This isn't the first time either. Just before the walkout, a group of employees force-changed everyone's desktop background to an advertisement for the walkout. That particular change, while obnoxious, was harmless --- but that change could have been anything, including very difficult to detect spyware. It's essential that company-wide code and configuration changes occur only with official approval and process. Emotional and activism do not constute reasons to bypass this process.

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

#405

Post by ExtremePopcorn »

ramblerman wrote: post #345
helen___keller wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't her thoughts it was company policy, or to be specific it's required by law that this notice to be posted in the workplace. It's was her personal judgment that it should be posted in a chrome add-on rather than only by poster like is typical in most workplaces. But assuming her job was to maintain an add-on that informs employees of company policy, and assuming her job typically lets her act with personal ju…

Being in charge of the infrastructure does not mean you are in charge of the content. Those are well defined roles. Specially in a company of that size. She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.

This is inaccurate for internal tools.

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

#406

Post by CodeMage »

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…

> Prefixing this by saying I am not siding with Google (since people make assumptions).

Prefixing this by saying I'm not making an assumption about who you're siding with, but offering my opinion on the argument you're using.

> 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.

Other people have already argued about whether what she added to the extension is in line with the purpose of the extension and whether it was within her purview.

Regardless of that, I would like to point out that we're not hearing that these two coworkers -- or anyone else involved in the process -- have been fired. Only Spiers. If the concern is really about the security and the trust, why is one person singled out?

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

#407

Post by trickstra »

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.

From her description of her job position it seems like programming a popup to appear over twitter with a message like "Don't slack off dummy UwU" was exactly what Google wanted her to do in her job.

> As a security engineer who worked on the Chrome browser’s use within Google, Spiers wrote browser notifications so that employees could be automatically notified of the company’s policies and guidelines as they browse the internet. Spiers said that engineers regularly implement such code changes to make their jobs easier and share personal interests.

But programming a popup to appear over a union busting law firm website with a message that such and such law exists was not.

> Spiers wrote a few lines of code that created a pop-up message asserting Google employees’ labor rights whenever her co-workers visited the consulting firm’s website or Google’s community guidelines. The message reads: "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." The pop-up would have been visible to anyone at Google. > https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgexe8/google-fired-an-en...

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

#408

Post by txcwpalpha »

javajosh wrote: post #399
txcwpalpha wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>probably the worst that might happen is exfiltrating code This is far far from the worst that might (and does) happen. I think you severely underestimate the average dev's access to critical systems. >but presumably all their remote access is 2FA protected hahahahahaha You also severely overestimate the security of most companies. A lot of F500s don't even use 2FA at all , let alone on something like CI/CD. > unlike…

We're talking about Google.

This comment chain started off by talking about getting fired from tech companies, not specifically Google. But okay.

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

#409

Post by drakonka »

It feels weird for me to read comments in this thread debating about and assuming a simple note about unionization or organization by an employee whose job it was to do exactly this kind of thing is "not in good faith" or a "violation". In my mind this kind of thing has the same sentiment as _any_ policy notice. The world in which notifying people that they have the right to organize is a "violation" is a really messed up one. It's simply distributing a fact, as the company is legally required to do, published by an employee who was responsible for distributing exactly these kinds of facts. It's sad when this type of information sparks this kind of a) termination by the company of an otherwise apparently very well performing employee and b) controversy in a forum.

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

#410

Post by qaq »

nonbirithm wrote: post #393
qaq wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security team members modifying their tools that are deployed to a large number of employees for fun ?

Only sort of related, but one time some of the YouTube engineering team made a code change to kill off usage of Internet Explorer 6 by bypassing the usual code screening process to circumvent management. Their boss reprimanded them but eventually got in on it, without going through the appropriate channels. Then the Docs team saw the banner they showed YouTube users, thought they had actually received approval from m…

There is a reason I am specifically talking about security team members.
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