Posted by justinwp 2 days ago
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.
I am considering adding Bell Labs, Xerox and Skunkworks Lockheed Martin to my work experience
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.
I suspect the core issue here is that he launched it with Google logos without following any sort of process
But regardless once escalated by legal there have been a process to mitigate this, so either the director fired the OP or someone higher. The direct manger would be not really in the decision making here. There is a clear path to release open source at G, and it seems it wasnt followed. The OP claimed that its confusing, but it isn't - usual the launch tool to get the approval and you covered your bases. If the OP didnt have all launch approvals after 7 years at G, wow thats on him. If the OP actually had all the launch approvals then he has an actually big case against G.
Launch approvals are for all product - internal and external, it usually requires L8+ (Director) levels approvals.
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
They monopolize opportunities, suppressing natural-born entrepreneurs; force us into very narrow roles and fire us if we step out of line ever to slightly. Even when it is beneficial to them.
IMO, we should get rid of trademark laws. They didn't mind their LLMs ripping off people's copyrights. Why should anyone uphold trademarks?
If I work at Google and want to represent myself as Google, I should be able to.
I feel like, even if I don't work at Google, I should be able to use the logo. It's the consumer's mistake for inferring a relationship. I'm just showing a logo of a well known company and letting their dumbass jump to a conclusion.