601–610 of 779 posts
Basically an intern. Zero engineering credentials despite the title. OMG.
Please don't personally attack her; it's unproductive and irrelevant.
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Was she hired to only add things other people told her to add? Or was she hired to add things she considered relevant?
That's a good question, I don't know, but she claims the latter. In her Medium post she claims that "Part of what makes me a great fit for Google is that the company is always telling us to take initiative to deliver high impact work." and also that she received stellar (4/5, 4/5, 5/5, where 5/5 is apparently top 2%) performance reviews, which reinforced her view that she should act on her judgment.
For example, did her design record sufficient analytics for regulatory compliance reporting? If a regulated company can't verify they did it correctly, it didn't happen. Did it distinguish between contractors, part-time and full-time employees? How did it handle employees outside the U.S.? By IP address or did it look up their country of residence in HR records? What about interns? Did it count these different populations correctly or was it at risk of over-reporting and getting the company fined? Did her design meet the requirements for Spanish-speaking ESL employees based in the U.S. Did her design read-out the text for blind and vision-impaired employees or did it initiate notification via an alternate channel?
In my opinion, she's being extremely disingenuous with her claims.
I'm constantly baffled by how anti-union many Americans are, how willing to give up their rights.
My impression of these tech unionization efforts are that they're mostly about pushing a social/political agenda, with workers rights being an afterthought. Every single time I see these posts the involved employees are activist LGBT folks. Am I wrong here? Why do all these issues seem to stem from the same group of people?
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>Yes, it's company policy, but this is more like running into a meeting and then interrupting it so you can start reciting NLRB policy than it is posting a flyer. True, but it seems kind of shady to come down harder on an employee based on the content of the interruption, and that content notifying of the right to organize. Like, imagine there's a documentation page for http cookies. Consider two scenarios: A) Rogue…
I'm sympathetic to this. But the fact that it's a security tool being misused is what I think made for the very harsh reaction. Two scenarios: A) Rogue employee messages a bunch of internal email lists about having the right to organize B) Rogue employee configures a security extension to issue a popup saying "Happy Birthday Sundar!" every time an employee visits google.com on June 10. I am confident that A) wouldn't…
Yikes! That sounds like a dangerous place to work. If an employee with legitimate, assigned access to such a tool makes a change through normal procedures (not bypassing required code review or anything) and it's still a fireable mistake - well, I'm glad I don't work there.
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The extension is intended to inform Googlers of applications that are not approved for corp data, not just generic "employee guidelines and company policies." This is so you don't e.g. upload PII into a random unsecured S3 bucket. Yes, it's company policy, but this is more like running into a meeting and then interrupting it so you can start reciting NLRB policy than it is posting a flyer. Worse, it misappropriates a…
In her account, she says, > For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture. Is this accurate? If it's culturally acceptable to change everyone's desktop wallpaper (including of…
> 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…
It's still worth discussing if their reaction warranted the offense. Would they have fired her had she added a pop-up on Earth Day encouraging employees to recycle? Or would she have received a slap on the wrist for that. In other words, how much of what she was advocating was part of the decision to fire?
Also, this seems like it is policy rather than an isolated incident. I'd suggest fixing it by maybe correcting people up the food chain. Google is a long way away from their don't be evil motto when they were young, naive, and producing lots of cool new products and services because they weren't held back by corporate idiotism and political correctness.
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Really? So if I hire you to email out my monthly company statement it’s reasonable that you add some of your own thoughts to said email.
If those thoughts are factual and relevant to the topic at hand, it... does seem like it's reasonable? She's an engineer, not someone working a type pool.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-spiers-1b3048a1/
By any measure she's not an engineer.
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I guess the question is did she add a company policy or guideline by adding what she added? I wouldn't classify a union drive as a company policy. Some may think a union drive is a company function. From what I remember about my experience with unions is you are allowed to put up notices in the employee breakroom that is done by the union rep who is voted in within each shop. I would say what she did was more along t…
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...
Requiring Google to post a list at hq doesn't cover other locations and/or browser notification when visiting certain sites.
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Many startups have a culture where you could spin up an X1 AWS instance with 2TB of RAM if you need it, without having to go and get approval. Similarly, Google has a culture where engineers make various changes to internal tools without needing approval from higher ups.
Well, according to the post, obviously not....
>This kind of code change happens all the time. We frequently add things to make our jobs easier or even to just share hobbies or interests. For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture.