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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

#651

Post by manfredo »

fzeroracer wrote: post #548
BickNowstrom wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would start protesting Google if they did not fire a security engineer for abusing systems like this. A security engineer subverting internal security systems is what is messed up. Turning it all in a horrible PR story about a retaliatory union-busting firing should disqualify your career for many years to come. Maybe she can exchange this loss of career prospect for some activism credit against the Big Bad Google.…

Subverting internal security systems by going through the usual approvals process for a code review? When it was her job to add notices to the tool she was working on? And arguing that she deserves to have her career sunk because of it entirely? What absolute extreme bullshit. By your own arguments if a security engineer was advocating for increased security against management, they would be considered an activist an…

She used an emergency push to deploy this change. Her job was to add notices for security purposes, not political activism:

> "She misused a security and privacy tool to create a pop-up that was neither about security nor privacy," Hansen wrote. "She did that without authorization from her team or the Security and Privacy Policy Notifier team, and without a business justification. And she used an emergency rapid push to do it."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/engineer-says-go...

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

#652

Post by MiroF »

scarface74 wrote: post #193
CharlesColeman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure you have the right to say it. But you can’t follow me to the bathroom stall and keep telling me. She didn’t post it to a common area. She took it upon herself to plaster it on everyone’s computer screen.

> She took it upon herself to plaster it on everyone’s computer screen.

Don't think that is true from the story, if you read it.

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

#653

Post by jefftk »

gnopgnip wrote: post #380
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)

It doesn't really matter if google would approve. There are a lot of activities that would not be organizationally approved, but are protected concerted activities and it would be unlawful to fire someone for.

As I said, I don't think any of them should have been fired.

But I don't think glossing "the change went through code review" as "She did it exactly according to internal policy" is helpful.

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

#654

Post by CharlesColeman »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #624
CharlesColeman wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you want that metaphor, going to court with a union is more like having one lawyer trying to get the best deal for 5 of his clients, even if one is innocent and the other 4 guilty, he would decide instead for a plea deal where all 5 do minimal time. 4 get better off, 1 is fucked and can't really do anything about it.

> having one lawyer trying to get the best deal for 5 of his clients, even if one is innocent and the other 4 guilty

That's stretching the analogy too far, and adding biasing details to force the impression that unions are bad.

Here's another analogy:

Going to work without a union is like going to war without any military organization. If your enemy is well-organized, how smart is it for you and your fellow soldiers to attack individually in an uncoordinated way without any overall strategy?

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

#655

Post by MiroF »

kop316 wrote: post #75
danso wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but could you clarify what you would be fired for in your hypothetical situation? Presumably, it's not automatically against company policy to expense a trip to Hawaii.

I was implying I took the trip to vacation, not to do work. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

If your supervisor knew that you were taking the trip to vacation, why would they approve it?

If the supervisor did not know, then your analogy is flawed. There was no information asymmetry between Spiers and her reviewers - they knew what the change did and they approved it.

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

#656

Post by geofft »

scarmig wrote: post #622
geofft wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am confident that B) would at the least earn the employee a reprimand and plausibly get them fired. 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.

So, let's walk through the reasoning here. Data is simultaneously Google's greatest strength and its biggest liability. If an employee uploads data to a not-known-to-be-secure third party, it can literally cost Google billions of dollars depending on the data locality. Or, it could plausibly cause a severe security breach (if e.g. an employee uploads a security token into a third party decoder). And so the security t…

I'm not disputing that, but that still really doesn't seem like a fireable offense. I'm objecting to the fact that she got fired for it after (presumably) making the change through appropriate channels. There are always appropriate channels to roll back a good-faith change, too.

If you could concisely and cogently explain why this change is a bad idea in an HN comment, surely someone can do that in response to the change, revert it, and move on. If it's SOP for Google to fire people who make well-intentioned changes that have the side effect of alert fatigue, then one, I don't want to work there, and two, I would expect to see a lot more firings.

And surely they could explain the problem, revert it, and move on without calling her into a conference room and grilling her about who else she's organizing with. That makes it seem like it's about the content of the notification, not the alert fatigue.

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

#657

Post by MiroF »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #282
panpanna wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. This section caught my attention: > I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers Sounds more foxconn than Google to me.…

I don't understand this "wouldn't let me" stuff. Pull out your phone and call someone. Some random person in a meeting room at Google isn't the police. You aren't in custody. If you're uncomfortable then walk out. If anyone at my employer was the least bit aggressive to me I would immediately walk away.

Yes, but they are paying you. There's a power dynamic there, even if you aren't literally in custody.

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

#658

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ajross wrote: post #558
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asserting rights you don't have means breaking the law by definition, and it has always been that way - from civil rights movement to the revolution.

Sorry, what? They have the right to unionize. The whole issue at hand is that the employee put a notice of that legal right into an employer tool. What rights do these people not have that you're thinking of? Look, the point here is that if you want to win a unionization fight (which is a legal victory, it will happen in courts and with contracts) you have to fight using legal tools. Pulling anarchist tricks like thi…

I mean sure, my comment was far too pompous, but calling this anarchism is silly.

If we leave rhetoric aside, what she's done is the equivalent of sending a leaflet or putting up a poster on company property. That's not strictly 'proper', but life does not happen in courtrooms. You actually have talk to people, let them know what's happening, organise, etc. Courtroom is where the fight is settled in it's last stages.

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

#659

Post by settsu »

scarface74 wrote: post #371
settsu wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFA. They were literally doing their job.

It wasn’t the security team’s job to disseminate information about unions.

R. T. F. A.

That isn't what happened.

A notification was created that drew attention to a relevant portion of an existing policy.

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

#660

Post by mcrad »

IntelMiner wrote: post #638
mcrad wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you're probably right, but what's unproductive is people believing the lie that she is an engineer, or considering her role in the company as irrelevant.

In what way is she not an engineer?

A cursory search of her name reveals no evidence she participated in any engineering activities, and this whole story is considered substantiating evidence. Sad.

Look, I'd much prefer to see her boss fired than her but obviously Google is not going down that route.

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