Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is totally not the same thing as telling your fellow employees to stop working. I like to think I’m a pretty reasonable fellow, but it’s hard to see that point of view. I felt similarly to you yesterday. Now I’m not so sure. It sounds like she was criticizing company process and was frustrated not being able to have any impact on what she perceived were real problems to the integrity of the process. I can empath…
How is saying "stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference" "totally not the same thing as telling your fellow employees to stop working"? Assuming your fellow employees are writing those documents for their job, isn't telling them to stop doing that exactly the same thing?
You're not wrong. But it's also the least charitable interpretation anyone could have. Why would anyone tell their coworkers "Stop working, go to McDonalds instead"? Nobody would do that, because that would be both unhelpful and dumb.
Now, maybe it's true that she was telling her coworkers to come play dota 2 with her for 8 hours on company time. But without far more context, we can't know. And there's almost zero additional information here.
Think about how you'd want to be judged. Would you want someone to take a single sentence, stripped of context, and parade it around as if you'd said something you didn't? I wouldn't.
Listen, yesterday I was in complete agreement with you and the other commenter. I felt like she might have been an entitled employee, spreading drama wherever she went, and that Google had been generous to humor her for as long as they did. But today I'm (un)surprised to find myself feeling like I was being a judgmental ass based on very little information.
Her actions seemed crazy, but now that the dust has settled, it seems like her heart was probably in the right place, and that Jeff was giving her an exceptionally hard time for unclear reasons. Her reaction reminds me very much of how I acted at the breaking point. It gets exhausting to try to work around someone who is determined to stand in your way.
The principle of charity applies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity#:~:text=I....
You'd be correct to say that I'm guilty of the same thing in reverse: I'm extrapolating far in the other direction, inventing all kinds of plausible-sounding stories about bully managers and such. But it doesn't feel like mental gymnastics to read her comment as "I am extremely frustrated and disappointed that writing these papers seems not to matter whatsoever, and we should probably take a hard look at whether we're having any effect."
That boils right down to "stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference," just offensively curt. And yes, phrasing does matter, but people keep saying she said X when it sounds like she said Y.