This is the nature of large institutions: they have to distrust their own people. You cannot be relied on to act well, you must be checked first.

There is a good reason for this! In a large group of people, there are bad people.

This is also why I am done working at large companies. I learned a lot, met some great people, but am uninterested in a low trust environment. I like relying on my colleagues. When they do something unexpected, I am surprised and study it to learn, not lambast.

Thanks for at least making a CLI in Rust instead of Python. Their gcloud CLI is so annoying (and slow) to use.

Yes. While they may have been justified in firing him for not following policy, they also lost a talented engineer. (I'm sure they don't care) I would have done the intelligent thing here and looked at how the project could have been made official. But that decision would have had to been made at a very high level, maybe even the CEO, because anyone lower down would have made a narrow and parochial decision in favour of the org they were protecting, rather than in the best interests of the company.

Do not use the brand without permission is taught on Day 1. Who can give you permission, not so much.

Couldn't this just be an "Oops! Sorry. I didn't know." and rename it? I don't know why it couldn't be that simple instead of dropping the hammer by firing.

On the plus side, this is the best marketing ever for a new job. "I'm the guy Google fired for making a workspace CLI". Keep on getting rid of your talented dedicated people, Google, we'd love to hire them.

The repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product."

So what is this thing?

Can anyone rely on it with confidence?

Does Google even acknowledge its existence?

If it's not officially supported, why is your name, a (former) Google employee, on it?

Google seems to be filled with really talented people, technology, and every resource anyone would ever need, but their execution and management seems to be severely lacking. This account is a pretty damning indictment of Google.

Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.

The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.

I am appalled at the amount of commenters on HN saying stuff like "well he should have followed proper procedures, it's right and proper that he was fired". When did we all join IBM?

A few points:

1. It's clear from various comments that he might have followed "the process", and that different orgs at Google have varying levels of latitude in publishing to GitHub orgs with the company colors.

2. The repo clearly has no sensitive code or such, it's just using the developer API. Naturally, Google hasn't taken it down, and it is widely popular. Guess what, the author was in DevRel and it was literally their job to showcase the developer API. Which they did, splendidly. What was the internal justification, "What would happen if every employee just wrote and published useful code that leveraged our public APIs? We can't have that!"?

3. There are comments saying that it was "unexpected" that a single person would be able to generate something that looks like a full product. Really? The place where the CEO runs around making claims like "75% of all code here is AI-written" found it unexpected that a person would be able to ship what looks like a product? How low are their expectations about their own tech, exactly?

4. Anecdote, but as soon as the Workspace admins at my place saw this, they went "Holy shit, Google released something useful for Workspace! How can we use it?" It stoops to the level of self-parody that Google would fire the person that created one of the few actually useful tools for Workspace. Steve Yegge's memo about GCP (a different org, I know) sucking at public-facing APIs comes to mind.

Justin -- if you read this, I'm very sorry that this happened to you. Whoever took this decision is a suit and is destroying people's trust in Google and their attitude towards people that use and maintain their APIs. If I was a VC (unfortunately, I'm just a mid-level IC), I would immediately invest in your next startup.

Former Googler here...nah just kidding, I just felt left out.