Posted by justinwp 2 days ago
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 Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
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.
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.
This did the opposite, didn’t it?
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.
Also more interesting is the fact the repository is still alive and kicking.
I can see Google firing the dev but HR/Legal giving a bogus reason, as is regular practice.
[0] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/blob/1991d536b4a45e60...
Sure, but it's a slap on the wrists. It seems like an extreme reaction.
> 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.
Again, they could have just asked them to retire theirs in favour of the official one. Rather than be a problem, it could have been an opportunity.
Bonus-promotion disruption.
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
The wording is very ambiguous, but to me it suggests the opposite. If legal was question why the logo was on the account profile picture, not just that specific repo's content, that would imply the entire account was unauthorized, right?
This relies on assuming legal's action made sense, when Justin is likely mentioning it specifically because it didn't make sense.
The Github account is linked to on https://developers.google.com/workspace ("Code Samples" near the bottom).
If that was the issue, it's not very hard to delete it either... Either nobody cares, or that repo is not as bad as for Google as it seems.
The repo wasn't even taken down.
Dude worked there for 7 years. Saying "oh, he just didn't understand the policy for going through legal/management approval" just does absolutely not pass the sniff test.
If there were/are real problems there, Google hasn't acted on them in any proper manner, and has not communicated properly with any of the parts involved, which is natural when legal/HR is involved.
I did think when the guy released the tool that it seemed a bit out of character for google to be that responsive to customer feedback.
At one point Google was there to build cool shit and enable people to do it; not extract maximal amount of value and "being Evil" by the values of its time.
Judging by the screenshot of the repo, I think most people who download this would think that it's official Google software.
It says "This is not an officially supported Google product" because it's a DevRel sample/experiment, just like dozens of other Google repositories made by Google employees as part of their job.
Even some other tools in github.com/google have as much: https://github.com/google/python-fire / https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/main/docs/index.md / https://github.com/google/dopamine / https://github.com/google/go-tika
I would have been fired from every employer I've ever worked for of any size for doing something like that - including Google circa 2018.
What happens when your thing
or nothing close to your thing
will ever see the light of day?
2. If google said no this goes against our goals for the product, don't release it if you want to keep working for google?
This is in a Google-owned organization, with several other similar repositories, a lot of them using the same API.
given that Google was creating an official thing
quite close to his thing
at the same time?
(And why are we writing like this?)
the official google thing,
was quite a lot worse
than his thing.
(I’m quite into the whole “Posting in free verse” idea)
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?
Sam AI am ...
My program made green eggs and ham ...
Just link to it.
I don’t think that’s how APIs work at all.
Upon reflection, the only thing this guy did wrong was put his name on the thing…
By all reasonable measures, they did.
Especially that he's an "engineer" not a "Googler" or "a person."
God what a fall from grace.
“Actions have consequences”
Like, I should be able to even berate my employer, as long as I'm not doing it from a persona that's directly tied to my employer e.g. my real name or git handle etc. They might not like it, but they sure as shit shouldn't be able to fire me for it. This would include working on extending a company's products, so long as I don't use the proprietary knowledge I'm privy to.
I realize that this guy published his thing under an alias directly tied to his work. My question was sparked from the general sentiment of your reply - and I am being genuine, sometimes I feel like this stance of mine is somehow "too radical"
I understand that this is not reality in most of the world, but I'm genuinely asking. I'm in the EU and I'm not in the software/silicon valley industry; if that helps with context.
Was the response short sighted? Up for debate. But unfortunately for the author, they have no real legal standing on this matter. Had it been their own repo, sans any branding, it would likely have been fine.
There are many things you should be able to do publicly without repercussion from your employer. However, your example is berating them, and I'm taking that literally: "to criticize in an angry manner".
If I read this correctly, then you believe your employer should be able to fire you if you angrily criticize them in public under your name. I agree in principle, that could damage their trust in your ability to do your job. Depending on specifics, that damage could be enough to justify firing you.
I don't understand why doing so anonymously should change the potential damage to their trust in you, if they later learn you said what you did.
So one would have to weigh the risks of being let go (and legal consequences if it was indeed whistleblowing) depending on the level of criticism being levied.
Given my stance on a lot of things though I don't know how much evidence this is that this view isn't "too radical" but my (biased) take is that a lot of good ideas are radical until they aren't, and usually the ones don't ever become mainstream have better counterarguments than anything I've heard or been able to come up with against this view. I still don't really expect it to change in my lifetime though (in terms of what's legally allowed) just because of how massive a shift it would be.
Coincidentally, I've only recently learned of the Overton Window [0] which describes that the spectrum of acceptable ideas in a society is subject to shift.
Seems kind of rude.
It clearly wasn't moonlighting or done without management's support/knowledge.
or anywhere else,
unless my contract and pay reflects that.
The space this comes from is the legal undue influence side where they need to give notice to shareholders about potential conflicts of interest, and it needs to be in the form of having a clear positive audit trail that they have told people to follow a clear policy with no grey area so that any deviation is an accident not willful failure to get people to tell them.
Googlers are well paid, and that pay reflects this.
Sorry, not buying that’s for anyone’s good.
What I'm saying is that it might be "obvious" that it's ok to volunteer for a dog rescue group.
Is it equally as ok to volunteer to raise money for a dog rescue group operating in Gaza?
What about other charities operating in Gaza? What about in Israeli occupied territories?
Then you don’t know the history of the non-compete agreement in the tech industry.
For decades, people were wringing their hands and holding themselves back from living well because they couldn’t possibly work for another software company after Google, Microsoft, whomever - because the contract stated they couldn’t work for competitors.
Well, then States showed up and said “that’s not even legal”, and people stopped handwringing.
But before, it looked very much like this thread.
If I was working for a dentist, none of your questions would be viable (let alone reasonable) for the employer to be asking.
1.) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30843644
2.) https://eppscoulson.com/google-got-slapped/
3.) https://www.lcwlegal.com/news/ab-1076-and-sb-699-codify-cali...
Morals imo often have nothing to do with law, but fairness does.
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, so they can pull the plug when you embarrass them.
I do have a problem with the idea that I need to check in with my employer every time I take a shit in my personal life.
Also we are not talking about pooping? Why change the topic?
That’s why I went with it - yes, a one-of-thousands engineer (or janitor, for that matter) from Google who also headed or even founded a dog shelter that shot all of the dogs is non-news, as far as Google and their legal team are concerned.
Same as an employee’s “pooping”.
Enforce or enact a morality clause, or explicitly pay me not to do things - beyond that, my business after hours is mine.
A more fair way of phrasing it would be to say that we should remove the right of companies to require it.
The public face that Googlers put on is extremely sycophantic to Google, imho. At best, this sycophancy is unconscious, self-preserving behavior in a vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt who ostensibly created something people LOVED and still fired them without a clearly articulated reason that counterbalances their positive contributions. At worst, this sycophancy is conscious, brown nosing behavior in order to climb to the highest rung of the career ladder by shedding all burdens of self-consistency, self-reflection, and noble intentions.
Please don't read into this comment what isn't said. I'm not saying Google is entirely evil, nor am I saying everyone other than me is sycophantic. There are those who recognize the callous culture that is often present at Google, and generally speaking, this bad behavior is only called out by Googlers in subtle ways, such as random HN comments :)
> [Googlers live in a] vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt [...] without a clearly articulated reason
At the end of the day, nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason. Not other staff, and certainly not members of the public.
If you were the one fired, would you want HR to announce that you were fired for taking Sundar's special cookies out of the cookie jar labeled "For VIPs ONLY!!!"? That seems like a trifling reason to me, and maybe not justified. But maybe I don't agree with the general population, and maybe that would be held against me in the future.
As the recipient of that information you're welcome to share it. And I haven't seen Justin clearly do so. But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.
Random guy? He was a Google employee. Looks like he was just doing his job.
> Google has spent billions to protect its reputation
Not sure billions are enough here, since Google's reputation is terrible in spite of it, and this episode certainly isn't helping.
Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):
> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.
Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.
The organization hosts repos shown here: https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples
> Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible
That's 100% not true for those kinds of projects. There's plenty of "not officially supported" projects in Google's Github.
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.
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.
It's also possible this is all wrong and the author followed all the rules. That wouldn't be because Google actually benefits from making up reasons to fire good employees, only cause someone on the inside was scapegoating or glory-hogging. Tbh I doubt it.
Every story has three sides, or something like that?
...except when HR/Legal is involved, then it has quite a few more. Lots of secret narratives that are relayed differently to different people.
I don’t know if this guy is telling the full story or not, I can see potential aggravating factors, but on the surface it’s a lot more reasonable than you’re letting on
No they didn't. Any judge would laugh the big corporation out of the courtroom over this. The amount of evidence in favor of the employee would turn this into a frivolous lawsuit.
>Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him.
You're assuming that an improbable event happens and are extrapolating from there. A more realistic case is that this is settled out of court simply to avoid involving the court, which is exactly what happened here: they fired him.
>They also had a case for criminal fraud.
No, they didn't.
I'm not sure in what alternative universe you're living in here.
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 maybe how he reacted to being told off?
Anyway, I can't believe how many people are commenting how ABSOLUTELY you get fired for any tiny breach of policy, have they ever held down a job?
Evidently not enough damage that it's worth deleting the repo
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.
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
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.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
In 2018 I applied for a permission to work on an open-source project, in my own spare time, and I was denied. The problem was the license (AGPL is like poison to corporations), but it's my after-hours side project anyway so I still don't get why it mattered.
They don't really have the teeth to deny it if you live in California, where there are laws partially invalidating those non-compete clauses, but most people will just accept it.
Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.
[1] https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples
It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.
> and is official [1]
FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.
Unclear what you're referring to here. Was it "misrepresented what they would be releasing"?
If that's the case, I disagree that the repo still existing is on its face evidence against that theory. It could be a perfectly fine tool, but if you lie on a release checklist, depending on what you lie about, it's easy enough to imagine a fireable offense. There are multiple ways that "it's easier to ask forgiveness" can backfire if there are legal things or organizational things you are knowingly avoiding.
Again, this is just speculation. I wouldn't personally fire someone for releasing a library that got popular, but its also speculation to suggest that's the only reason he was fired.
Idk if the firing was justified since he supposedly followed process and had manager approval, but that's only one side.
HR/Legal very often will give bullshit reasons for termination, since their main job is to shield the company from lawsuits anyway.
Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.
This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.
So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.
[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
I have the feeling these projects were not deeply intertwined with Google products like this cli is.
This project was not exactly some random devtool or library polished a bit to be published and used outside of Google.
It was a de-facto major feature of a significant Google product.
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.
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 source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?
I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:
>>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"
I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/
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.
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
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
Now, did something cause other issues that converted this from formal "don't do that, use the official process" and nothing more? Sounds like something caused this to escalate. It could be toes were stepped on, could be a bad reaction to the warning, or could just be wanting to cut employee numbers in a shortsighted way.
Tangent: did you really go through people’s histories far back enough to find out they were googlers/ex-googlers? Did you use an agent to do that?
I've never ever seen anyone, especially Apple shareholders disclose this here whenever they brush off something Apple did with malice - Eg. slowing down users' phones, spying on their siri recordings, etc.
Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
I am not an Apple shareholder.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Apple told the Guardian: “A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.” The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long.
That's what they told you to believe. Every other manufacturer also had smartphones with batteries at the time and they were not doing this FYI. That was just marketing speak by Apple. Please stop citing marketing speak.
This is not the core issue, though. The core issue is not disclosing financial incentives while commenting something positive / negative.
> That's what they told you to believe. Every other manufacturer also had smartphones with batteries at the time and they were not doing this FYI. That was just marketing speak by Apple. Please stop citing marketing speak.
So? Apple could just be the only vendor that cares enough about older devices in the wild to ensure they continue to function properly. Keep in mind that this very issue, of shutting off before the battery is actually depleted, plagues all sorts of older Android devices. Also keep in mind that Android devices typically struggle to get updates for 2-3 years as opposed to Apple's norm of 5-7 years. This only changed recently for a few vendors.
> This is not the core issue, though. The core issue is not disclosing financial incentives while commenting something positive / negative.
Having opinions on something you're invested in is a big gray area in general. It tends to cause people to blanket ignore you.
>> Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Sure, I can believe maybe Apple legitimately thought my phone was going to randomly shut down, not that they wanted to slow it to make me buy a new one. Then Apple could've disclosed that they're throttling iPhones due to a known battery defect. They hid that until they were caught. They subsequently discounted the price of battery replacements, but that's still an extra cost that shouldn't have been there. The phone was way too young to be having these issues.
So yeah the iPhone 6 was well below the quality people normally expect from Apple. But it was the only time they screwed up so bad. The thing about planned obsolescence via OS updates is still true and accepted as a constant, your iPhone realistically has 10 years of life. I'll still choose iPhone over the Samsung hamas phones, but also not gonna be gaslit about batterygate, it was real.
Disclaimer: I own 99% of the entire Apple corporation, this is legal advice, this is medical advice
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 show a bit of ankle or look exciting. Google are well out of the market for being interesting (outside of the balance sheet and P&L for those who fetishise in accountancy.
Unfortunately: going viral isn't always a good thing as anyone who has experienced a nasty virus will attest.
I feel sorry for this person, but I would be surprised if this would have been okay at Google in the past 20 years. It wouldn't have been okay at any company I've ever worked at, big or small.
I think there's a valid argument that this started as a simple DevRel script or trick, but due to the way you can write a lot of code very quickly with AI it expanded to something that resembled a full-blown product.
Maybe uncharted territory as the previous assumption was that an individual DevRel person releasing scripts couldn't be mistaken for a supported product because one person couldn't produce that much code in the past.
Google can never be exciting or interesting evermore by design and intent. They dived on in and went "money" full on. They exist to generate revenue for their shareholders. They dumped the "Don't be evil" thing without blushing.
For one thing, the author of this tool used Google trademarks (the logo) to represent the project.
If you are even slightly larger than a mom and pop small business you pretty much have to defend that trademark or else you risk losing it.
But, okay, fine, you can just tell them not to use your trademark and have them say it's not an official thing. No big deal.
The other thing I would say is that growing beyond even a relatively small number of employees fundamentally changes everything. Once you don't have that face to face with all your employees that trust level between you and them can't possibly be the same, no matter how good your intentions are. Even a modest company with 25-50 people...how well can you know those people, really? Even if you try your hardest to know them?
Once you have a certain number of employees you run into probabilistic realities.
Google has over 100,000 employees, which means statistically speaking a few of them have committed or will commit homicide. The idea of "we trust all our employees" can't exist from a mathematical perspective, even if the leadership happens to be the nicest people in the world who really want their employees to have freedom and autonomy.
Nitpick, but the set of people who work at Google is highly non-random. I am pretty sure Google employees are much less likely to confirm homicide - they are older (homicide rates after 24 drop sharply), more educated (strongly inversely correlated with homicide), richer (same), etc.
The union piece was probably extra motivation but still you just do not do that to security infra, it should always be a firing offense unless it was a truly exceptional circumstance.
Conversely, this guy was in a DevRel role where it sounds like they released open source stuff all the time and the line was a lot more fuzzy (admittedly I've only heard one side of the story).
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 trouble for this" narrative.
It seemed especially sociopathic in how the employee actively avoided understanding what they were told, and actively reframed it. I would have expected a more bureaucratic 'this is how we have do it for internal reasons' kind of reponse, rather than actively avoiding understanding. Similar to traditional complaints in the past about active Wikipedia / Stack Overflow types.
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 executive would say: “cool show me your work tomorrow morning so we can replace this with you work”
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.
1: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
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.
It's under "googleworkspace", one of Google's GitHub organizations (linked on https://developers.google.com/workspace).
> Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
This seems to be boilerplate that Google puts on open-source releases, e.g: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko
It's not saying that it's not released by Google, but that it's not an officially supported Google product. I presume to make it clear that it's not covered by support agreements/bug bounties/etc. in the way products like Google Docs would be.
> Is it actually approved by Google or not?
It went through the launch/approval process (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655744) and was announced by Justin's manager.
Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.
_A_ manager boosted it on twitter. It's not an announcement in the sense that companies announce things. You're also assuming that one team knows what the other is doing.
This is literally the reason there are standard procedures for doing things like this.
I don't know the legal situation, so maybe they felt like they had to do this to not face liability of some sort, but this feels like the wrong outcome vs e.g. having engineers rewrite it from scratch or move it to a less obviously google affiliated place.
You shouldn't use your employer's branding for unsanctioned projects, so Google is certainly well within their rights, but I think this is unnecessarily conservative vs someone who was trying to promote the employer's mission/products.
Not really, no. I'd expect a stern reprimand, but getting fired is extreme.
I'm not sure if Google is still an attractive place to work, but this incident certainly isn't helping tip the scales.
It’d like playing a computer game during free library time at the school when I was a kid; I would expect to be reprimanded, however just outright barring use from the computer during free time would probably be justified.
Clearing up the issue would take a single comment that all the correct processes were followed. The fact he hasn't said as much is the elephant in the room here.
Imagine any leader that is not sundar trying to get this person fired. At some point, that leader would need to justify to either their leader, or a similarly leveled peer why they budgeted x SWE-years(where x is probably > 25) for a project that took this person far less than 1 SWE-year.
There are truths to both sides of the argument.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
But allowing customers and agents access to their data is the opposite of Google's purpose here. They fired him and took this down because they don't want to do good by their customers and their Google Workspace: they would rather limit and control how their Workspace products are used and force people to use Gemini.
It seems to be something other people do as well and not out of the ordinary, so no.
This is not even an endorsement of those policies or of this action in enforcing them. I'm just saying it's very well documented there what you can and can't do and how to do things the "right" way. Lots of people understandable chafe at those rules, but the consequences of just saying yolo and ignoring them are fairly predictable...
We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.
I have a hunch that the order of the day within big tech is to let go of anyone they can. As long as they provide a reason, it's one less headcount that needs to be laid off in the next round.
That's cute.
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.
We're in a pretty messed up place in society if we hold individual people to this much of higher bar than a multi-trillion dollar company
It's still up now, so it seems like they do not actually think it needs to be taken down
So there is probably much more to the story. My guess is that this is more of an internal fight, possibly with unwise executive involvement (meaning there were no grown-ups in the room).
His team was supposed to develop GWS API samples. And very good samples can become quite sophisticated and start looking almost like an official product.
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
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EDIT: Others here are saying that Justin released his code with Google's branding without asking for approval. If that's true, it wasn't right of him, and his firing was justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650310 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650192
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You were right above the edit.
But in the long term, we are all dead
I like the law because you can quite easily formulate it without bias.
Large enough orgs will indeed get people whose job is more closely aligned with the goal vs people whose job is more closely aligned with the existence of the org. _Because_ you need to keep investing energy to keep the org in existence. You can’t just do the goal only.
But being responsible for keeping the org in existence is not the same as responsible for the goals that the org was created for in the first place.
_and_ I can see how the people whose job it is to ensure the org keeps existing will gain the majority vote.
It’s like a law of nature: the way things fall out if you’re not consciously working to have them fall out differently.
(So it can be good for google to fire them from a “let’s keep existing standpoint” even though it might be contrary to having the easiest/optimal to use product. And if that is so, the keep existing vote will have the power) I don’t use google products really that much so I can’t speak to the merits of this example.
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 going on there?
In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it look extremely official and blindsided everyone when suddenly there's a viral Google Workspace tool released by a Googler with Google branding that wasn't released by Google.
I'm not saying he should have been fired, necessarily, but he demonstrated _extremely_ poor judgement in doing this the way he did and put his manager and everyone else in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable position.
I think there is probably way more to this story - maybe he was told about the upcoming official use/variant and was asked to not preempt it before the cloud next conference with his one?
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.
There are a couple of unsanctioned clients in particular where I'd take a dim view of the company trying to kill them and one where it actually happened to wide condemnation.
How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?
Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.
Good ideas are now risky because it steps on the toes of someone's fiefdom
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 vetted by the company.
Along with public communication, etc.
In my experience, this isn't some "what happens when MBA's run company" or "they run out of ideas", it's literally every company I've ever worked for.
Was google previously an exception here, or are people just unfamiliar with the details of the 20% policy? Surely they didn't allow you to work on, for example, something for a competitor? There had to be some limitations, rather than a pure free for all, as seems to be suggested in the comments.
This isn't unique to Google. It's basic common law. No contract needs to be signed. Competing with your employer is immoral. If you want to compete then quit and be a competitor. If you're taking their money as an employee then you have a "duty of loyalty"
Interesting. Did they read their contract before signing it?
I saw this play out repeatedly with OSPO and saw many people who believed they had set up firewalls to allow this, and I understood Google's position and appreciated that they made it fairly easy for most people to open source their code.
If I released a tool personally that I hadn't told anyone at work about and put my company's logos all over it and it went insanely viral then I would expect an extremely uncomfortable conversation with my manager, his manager, HR, and at least one lawyer.
"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".
Hence many people are wondering if you released this without approval (that's my guess), if you used a Google repo to do it (from what I can tell you did use a google repo, but not an officially supported one, and other teams at google use this repo to publish code), and whether there were other extenuating circumstances, or if it was "the workspace SVP called my division's VP and told him to fire me" (just a guess for another firing mechanism).
In short, the way the post is framed, and the reality behind it, don't seem to match up, and people with experience are asking for you to clarify. If you don't want to go into more detail, that's fine, but... many people (like me) read what you wrote and thought "there must be more detail than this, because it would be silly for somebody to get fired for doing their job in good faith, and following the rules"
>This includes side projects that have not gone through IARC, even for DevRel engineers.
So did you do this "Launcher2" or "Ariane" thing and get the approvals? If so, it seems your ass would be covered. If not...
I can sympathize that the process seems convoluted and could particularly bite a DevRel accustomed to more autonomy. One would hope Google would do the whole blame free retrospective thing and improve the systems.
https://github.com/google/python-fire / https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/main/docs/index.md / https://github.com/google/dopamine / https://github.com/google/go-tika
Also plenty of official Google organizations that are not /google/ , but have official projects.
https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / you can find plenty more
I wouldn't read too much into it, since it can mean virtually anything.
Thank you for your work on the tool! Paired with a claude skill I wrote around it, it saves me a ton of time creating a logseq meeting note page for important meetings.
I wish you the best of luck landing somewhere that appreciates you a lot more than G did.
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 worked at Google in the past, most recently ending in early 2015, and can confirm that the answer to this question was yes when I was there - presumably still the case today with different details.
I have no idea whether the procedures were followed in this case, nor do I have any other inside information on this story, nor am I speaking for Google or Alphabet here.
Everyone just launched tools internally, although it was pretty easy to get approval to launch something externally, although most people didn't bother. The environment back then had tons of internal tools all over the place.
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.
(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)
I would never fire an employee unilaterally, especially over something like this, when there's valuable IP at stake and you can just talk the person into agreeing to sign over whatever it is you need.
“I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.”
Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Google’s internal processes (which is forgivable) and then demanding to work unilaterally (unforgivable). The amount of positive feedback may have given the author too much confidence that he could dictate to leadership what comes next.
A Google Workspace CLI is a useful project idea but it isn’t groundbreaking, it’s something that the Google Workspace team should be involved in. I suspect he just wanted go steamroll over them. Shipping stuff in a team is never about just producing the code.