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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

#401

Post by frollogaston »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #221
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…

Fascinating! First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler. That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open…

> I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically,

Same. Especially next to Google, all I can think of is "serious consequences for disruptive behavior" which meant breaking into an exec's office to protest

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#402

Post by frollogaston »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #326
NikolaNovak wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating! First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler. That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open…

So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for eg…

He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#403

Post by mewpmewp2 »

xnx wrote: post #357
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case I guess the only other option the person had is to quit to build something of their own or work at another more builder friendly company, but at least in this case they got to release a thing that was valuable to many people and got popular, so they got some good publicity out of that. So ultimately I don't see that their actions were wrong overall.

Getting fired like this and then bad-mouthing your previous company is not good publicity for most employers.

I meant the person got good publicity, not Google. Google got bad publicity.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#404

Post by mewpmewp2 »

frollogaston wrote: post #402
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for eg…

He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.

In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.

Even if he didn't do the proper process, this is just a CLI wrapper, and they should have made it proper after, not fired the person. And they should have thought long and hard why a person felt this had to be done. Or alternatively why was the person able to publish something as a new repository in their devrel github org if the release process is so vital for whatever reason.

Even if you have or had the legal right or whatever, it doesn't mean that you have to actually act on it. It speaks to some other sort of motivation to me.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#405

Post by altmanaltman »

DANmode wrote: post #385
altmanaltman wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, yes. I mean it still depends on a lot of things but mostly at will employment contracts will have clauses about such things. You will have to get approval from legal before you can get on a board of even a dog rescue or a glove repair company. A practical consideration is simple like if you are a google exec and you are on board of a dog rescue company and that company gets hit with allgeations that you are…

> if you are a google exec But that’s not who is being discussed. Why create a new topic? If a low-level employee is part of a rescue accused of shooting all of the dogs, that’s just another day. > News will cover it as "Google Exec on Board of Evil Dog Rescue Company" so you extend that repuation risk to Google as well since you are actively employed there No problem with a standard morality clause in the contract,…

Its not a new topic, the same applies for any employee as well. And no that's not just another day from the pov of google. That example was too extreme but even for minor things that can be a security concern etc if they are in active positions like that.

Also we are not talking about pooping? Why change the topic?

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#406

Post by tlogan »

xnx wrote: post #393
tlogan wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much. Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub). Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win. Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart ex…

What if they were told not to do it and they still did?

I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.

But since this project is still on GitHub, I would say the project itself was probably not so bad that releasing it should be a fireable offense.

So my thinking is this:

Did the employee act with the goal of helping the company?

If the answer is yes, and the action did not cause serious harm to the company, then you do not fire the employee. At my old company, the employee would probably be sent to take a couple of courses related to whatever rule they broke.

In general, smart people should be encouraged to take initiative.

The real problem (and the reason why you have all these HR rules) is when you have stupid employees who take initiative. Actually, you should never hire someone who is both unintelligent and full of initiative. It is okay to hire someone who is stupid and lazy and has no initiative (You need those people too).

And OP is obviously smart and talented and should be encouraged to take initiative.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#407

Post by mewpmewp2 »

xnx wrote: post #393
tlogan wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much. Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub). Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win. Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart ex…

What if they were told not to do it and they still did?

Depends on the reason. If there was a valid reason not to release it, then sure. But it's hard for me to see what can be so problematic about releasing a cli wrapper. It's hard to think of anything non political. And politics isn't valid reason to me. If someone from the leadership was e.g. blocking the release out of pettiness then I'd cheer on the person releasing it - assuming they know the risks.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#408

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

wisty wrote: post #341
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…

You don't need to work at google to have common sense. An employee who does no real damage isn't getting canned unless they made someone look bad. Maybe he did some damage? Did it create a security issue, e.g. if someone handed it to a bad llm agent? Maaaaybe. Or was someone up the food chain doing the same thing, wit2h 20x the budget and a 12 month timeframe and now looks stupid? Or maybe it's a bit of both, or mayb…

It's true that it's rare to get fired for a tiny breach of policy, which is why I'm skeptical that the breach was so tiny as the post makes it seem. Corporate legal departments are busy, they do not generally go around grilling people (his words!) unless something's gone terribly wrong.

One obvious scenario where someone might be canned despite doing no real damage, and where legal might be forced to intervene, is if they made a knowingly false representation to obtain launch approval.

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#409

Post by lokar »

whstl wrote: post #297
lokar wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even setting the legal process aside, I would ask the team before releasing a tool for their product. Seems kind of rude.

The tool was publicly announced by the person's manager. It clearly wasn't moonlighting or done without management's support/knowledge.

Wow, depending on what exactly the manager said / did, that's pretty bad

Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI

#410

Post by thucyd »

Ex-Google here. This is pretty typical in the modern era.

Its a high paying job. He made people look bad/incompetent that were either:

1. Struggling for a while to ship what he did 2. Couldn't even come up with this to begin with

So they pulled the necessary levers to get him axed. Google salaries are top of the industry. People get robbed for $20. If you don't think someone would cheat/lie/scheme in order to protect their paycheck, you're delusional.

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