271–280 of 472 posts
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People ask why Google's Gemini is falling behind the competition in spite of Google's immense resources, this kind of thing is an example why.
the Antigravity AI suite is hugely popular among non-developers
> Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: https://github.com/googleworkspac e/cli - built for humans and agents.
> Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
Yeah, that absolutely looks like an official product announcement from Google. Surely it was obvious they'd get in trouble for that.
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…
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but i…
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The read me clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product.". I am not getting what you want to imply here and what you expect him to reply here.
It's other people on this thread that had questions, more than me. I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
Market validation can change roadmaps. As I stated on Twitter/X, CLIs for agents was not a very interesting thing outside a small group earlier in 2026.
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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 wi…
Google contains multitudes. I don't doubt that your personal experience was the opposite end of the spectrum from mine. I maintain that firing is an extreme resolution here (taking the claims at face value of course). Surely this employee has demonstrated the capacity to deliver impact and could be redirected if properly incentivized.
It does not contain people who flout Google's privacy, security, or intellectual property policies. Those people are, quite rightfully, un-contained from Google with speed they can't muster for anything else in the company.
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I've never worked for an employer, from pizza delivery, to corporate intern, to multiple startup, to FAANG, that didn't have this VERY CLEARLY worded in the employment agreement, right up top: 1. Any work you do during company time/resources/equipment, is company property. 2. Anything public related to work, or that could be considered as competing or providing the service in the same space as work, needs to be vette…
The policy was always crystal clear, but at the same time, tons of people found it confusing. "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal" came up a lot. People would get into huge fights with OSPO over this.
In general, when a talented employee (like OP) does something like this, the response is usually something like:
“We appreciate and love your initiative, and we want to encourage you to keep doing this kind of work. However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.”
Usually, these things are not career-ending moves. Actually it might be even opposite. Sure one might get labeled as a “cowboy”, but there is always some executive who will support “cowboys” because they shake things up. So one can actually get a promotion.
So I think there is something more here.
Either Google handled this very badly (and organization is broken) or the OP did not act in the company’s best interest and intentionally refused to follow certain instructions.
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?
He seems to be a good coder with poor judgment. But I think it would be wiser to manage him better than to fire him so long as he recognizes what he did was wrong. I'm a bit of a softie for the clueless, brilliant coders, though.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
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It sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company. In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it loo…
Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts. I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.