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Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

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Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#161

Post by bonsai_bar »

QuantumGood wrote: post #146
sanderjd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard. It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies! But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in tro…

Clueness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with perceived freedom. I think it's that cause and effect are not as often connected (consequences). I remember a Google employee updating a Google font that broke thousands of websites. Community members explained that Google recommended (at that time) letting Google host the font, and that they could fork it instead, or find a path that wouldn't break so many websites. The empl…

We take annual training that warns us against doing what this engineer did.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#163

Post by bonsai_bar »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #107
trollbridge wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the reasonable thing here is a stern talking-to about company policies, and then leveraging this thing to get more goodwill in the community about AI, which is an area Google is currently lacking in.

Google is sorely lacking in goodwill, period. I don't know why this guy got fired, and I don't expect we ever will know the whole truth. But even so this seems like a very foolish PR move for Google. Rightly or wrongly people are going to take his side, and they can't really afford to burn goodwill with their customers.

Doesn't seem like many are taking his side based on this thread.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#164

Post by refulgentis »

throwaway23597 wrote: post #62
echoangle wrote: post #53

Interesting that people here seem so sympathetic to the fired guy. Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared? Working for them actually makes it worse because people could look up your name and would see that you actually work for google. It’s kind of obvious that this is a bad idea, right?

I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.

Love Better Call Saul :) The comparison is not even wrong (in the Pauli sense). Required knowledge seems to be DevRels role within Google culture. The absolute last thing this was was “mutiny” from a “product roadmap”. They’re sort of just around to build things to help devs and evangelize. They’re not tied to roadmaps or recruited to work on them.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#165

Post by frollogaston »

fg137 wrote: post #139
justinwp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that it was "personally" releasing something and that the process wasn't followed.

Why isn't it under google's username on github? Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."? Is it actually approved by Google or not? You need to actually answer these questions instead of dodging them.

Are you the "serious consequences for ____" guy?

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#166

Post by khazhoux »

lokar wrote: post #30
alberth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear your story. Since I’ve never work at FAANG, does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product? And if so, did this go through that process?

I’ve been gone a few years, but there was a process for contributing OSS code outside the company, and another for releasing company code externally, etc It seemed to mostly work. Some people complained it was too slow, others seemed to manage fine. I think Chris DiBonas’ team ran all of that.

DiBona definitely started the OSS group and process, and ran it for many years.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#168

Post by qmarchi »

cdata wrote: post #131

I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions. First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives. Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed…

Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.

This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.

If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.

The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.

I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#169

Post by cdata »

frollogaston wrote: post #156
cdata wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google. In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product. As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.

But there's an approval process to create such a repo under the Google name, right? I'm not seeing that he followed that.

When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.

Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#170

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

dmazzoni wrote: post #67
nickv wrote: post #3

Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story. Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it. There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is goi…

When has 20% projects ever been about bypassing every launch process and just posting your product publicly? Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.

There are literally hundreds of projects on googles github with the standard “this is not an official Google project” in the readme.
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