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Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
351–360 of 472 posts
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#352I'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…
Yeah I think I he could have done a better job communicating in that thread that creating Workspace CLI was literally his job. He didn’t go rouge or didn’t follow the process.
He was officially Google DevRel and routinely created such tools in the past. It’s not crazy to assume that if you build 56 tools and everything was fine, 57th tool should be the same.
That massively changes the story in his favor.
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#353I work at Google so was curious. This person did attempt to follow the process, but was belligerent in review and it was cancelled. They continued anyway.
No surprise they were fired. If you work at google just search this CLI and you will see for yourself.
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#354Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not complaining about the downvoting but everything in this comment is verifiable from the links you provided.
People are making a crazy amount of assumptions in those threads only to defend Google and dunk on someone who was just fired. The repo belongs to Google, the organization belongs to Google, the job of the fired dev was to produce code just like the one he was fired for, and there's 56 other repos with similar code in there, a lot of them using the same API.
Yeah, it's pretty telling that comments like the one you replied to are all over this thread, and every time a response like yours is posted, no one seems to have any rebuttal. It's pretty clear that there's plenty of precedent for what this guy did and no legitimate reason to consider it a departure from what he and his coworkers had been doing for a while.
If you only read a condensed summary of what happened, you might be able to come up with a narrative that fits those high-level details that makes the firing seem reasonable. That narrative has no basis in reality though, other than being the theoretically plausible justification they came up with for firing him.
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#356I'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…
> Maybe he did some damage? Did it create a security issue, e.g. if someone handed it to a bad llm agent? Maaaaybe.
Evidently not enough damage that it's worth deleting the repo
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem is that OP is or wants to be an old school disruptor working at what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker). OP crank out a pretty decent and well received, by the community, product and get absolutely canned because they are well out of touch of how Google now works. You don't do risk (without reward) at Google and you certainly don't…
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.
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#358Earlier 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.
Why is the repo still there if it's such an egregious violation of Google's policies?
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#359Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point.
Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing.
Superiors like...his manager, who announced the project for him?
Re: Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
#360I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing. 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,…
> However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.
It's still up now, so it seems like they do not actually think it needs to be taken down