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Posted by justinwp 2 days ago

Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI(twitter.com)
https://xcancel.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069482265953087602
715 points | 421 commentspage 5
jazzpush2 2 days ago|
You would think the devrel would be more familiar with OSS policies than anyone else.

Something about their LinkedIn job title at Google ("Developer Relations (Mostly SWE)" also reads odd.

qsxfthnkp2322 2 days ago||
At big tech you do what your piece of shit manager wants you to do (assuming you have one of the typical big tech managers). That’s all you are allowed to do.

Thats my experience at Apple. I even tried to ask for alternatives, mentors, etc. all denied by my one manager because I was reorged into their team and a new manager had something to prove. Directors who I talked to just shrugged their shoulders.

Leadership at these companies is pretty much shit. It’s not surprising something this happens at Google.

Companies could give zero f’s about you, how long you have been there, or what you have done or accomplished there.

Seriously. If you know you have a bad manager (you’ll definitely know) then you need to get the hell out asap. Don’t think if you tough it out it’ll work out. I lasted 5 years total and the last two years with this unnecessary insane stress caused by him. They will let you go after your dog suddenly gets cancer and they dont care you have a mortgage or need health insurance.

I’m sure there are good management out there, but not my experience and clearly not the experience of who posted this on x.

Management and leadership at these companies needs to fucking treat people that work for them like they care. At all.

dekhn 2 days ago||
A long long time ago, Google management cared more about its employees. I saw folks with cancer who were not fired (even though they couldn't work) to keep them access to healthcare. And a coworker whose parachute did not deploy and was brain damaged- my manager spent hours on the phone calling his parents in Iran, arranging special health care, etc. Intrinsic motivation- making a new product out of nothing- was incentivzed, not punished (unless you leaked code intentionally).

But also, the worst managers I've ever had were at Google.

qsxfthnkp2322 2 days ago||
The good days of tech are over due to people like this who have a stronghold in management.

These people. Man.

This manager I had would also be hard to contact, he would schedule meetings on my calendar just to cancel them or change them last minute, all the time. He told me I would never be a software engineer even though I have 15 years experience. He denied me a mentor when I wasn’t too busy or on a pip or anything.

He started this stuff 3 months after be was promoted to management by his best friend. Who I learned from some other people that they have been friends since high school. He is protected by this guy and he controls his narrative better than anyone else.

But ultimately he’s a piece of shit. When I was reorged to this team with the product I worked on it was just me. My first manager told me on our last 1:1 that he fucking hated those people. So I dealt with that for more than 2 years.

I wanted nothing more in my career to work at Apple. And then after two different managers this guy gets promoted and immediately starts this and emailing me about things i didn’t do.

I had good to great performance reviews before him.

Now I have no job for more than half a year and am about to be on the edge of selling my house without somewhere to live. And I’ve applied at soooo many places and I have a great resume.

I enjoy tech but the job market is worse than ive experienced ever. And my beagle of 13 years passed. So it’s been a great year.

whstl 2 days ago||
Big companies just wake up the worst instincts in everyone involved.

I've seen people getting thrown under the bus even for voluntarily quitting due to burnout. Like legitimately doing illegal stuff such as withholding documentation or writing recommendation letters in secret code.

I know of a company that I worked that is currently under fire currently for not following the law and lying to employees by advising them incorrectly about their rights. They can't even fucking fire people properly without breaking laws and treating them like shit.

No company deserves anyone's loyalty or concern.

waterTanuki 2 days ago||
In the README

> This is not an officially supported Google product.

Why was this project published under an account named "Google Workspace"? Google seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, same with the cli creator.

If you want to publish a project under open source and you are the sole creator/owner -> do it in your own time, under your OWN individual github account. Nothing good has ever come from ceeding control of these things to giant corporations who only care how much it will increase their profit next quarter.

ventana 1 day ago|
Xoogler here who also published things within Google repositories. This is a standard phrase that you should have in the README to get an approval to publish your repository to GitHub, even if it is totally related to the Google business (as mine were).

My guess is that it's similar to the regular "no warranty" clause in the licenses, just explicitly opting out this code from any possible agreements Google might have with its customers.

Google's process to publish to open source is well documented and this documentation is public. [1] is the document that requires this disclaimer.

[1]: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...

OJFord 2 days ago||
I don't get it – you called the GitHub org 'googleworkspace' and used the Google logo? Presumably without permission? Don't Googlers regularly open-source side projects under the official org(s)? Did you really think this was going to be fine, or was it 'growth hacking' with tougher consequences than expected?
dekhn 2 days ago||
I believe it's an official or semi-official Google github org. Typically at Google there is some process you are supposed to follow when opensourcing your code, and a repo like this exists specifically to get more people to use the API. The CLI still exists at the repo and the repo still has the Google branding, so it's 99% certain this is a Google repo.

If you do an end-run around the normal open source publishing you can get in trouble- up to and including termination- but my guess is there is more context around the firing than just "posted open source code to work with standard Google APIs". For example, you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.

fg137 2 days ago|||
How come it's not under "google" organization, which is where almost every other Google open source project lives (with the exception of a few notable ones)? That's just weird.

And if you look at the history, the main maintainer for the project was really just one person.

Even today, the repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product." So what is this?

If you told me the "googleworkspace" account is owned and controlled by this individual, not Google, I would have believed it.

dekhn 2 days ago||
Google has multiple orgs on github: google, google-cloud-platform, chromium, android, flutter, angular, tensorflow all have their own top-level orgs because google ships its org chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). Some orgs have been created by google and then released to the wild (kubernetes).

I think but I'm not sure that this is a "semi-official" org run by Google DevRel. Perhaps it has looser rules and ownership than the more official orgs? If I'm using the Wayback Machine properly, https://web.archive.org/web/20201130062102/https://github.co... shows that the site already used the Google logo way back in 2020 (earliest snapshot).

cloche 2 days ago||||
Also, the one person listed in the Organization Members works at Google as a Developer Advocate.
OJFord 2 days ago||||
Ah ok, that makes a lot more sense. Makes it a lot less clear why he was fired, but his side as told makes more sense at least!
fragmede 2 days ago|||
Yes, berating a coworker for being a fucking moron is unacceptable in corporate America.
hilariously 2 days ago||
The truth is that in decent workplaces we've figured out attacking people doesn't generally get what you want, unless what you want is to have a tantrum.

Calling an idea nonsense is fine, calling it not profitable is great, and saying its a waste of time is a Monday. Attacking someone as a fucking moron is pointless, just fire them, deprioritize them, or move on.

fragmede 1 day ago||
It's a reframe for

    > you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.
That makes it sound like Google is really weird for firing people for merely "raising your voice in a meeting", but the reality is that toxic assholes who can't control their emotions and yell racist slurs at people do get fired, but, uh, shouldn't they?
dekhn 1 day ago||
how did you get from "raising your voice in a meeting" to "toxic assholes" and "racist slurs". Those are very different.
whstl 2 days ago||
Google has quite a few of those. It's hard to figure out if they're really official.

https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / https://github.com/googleapis

khurs 1 day ago||
We don't know the full facts, but seems harsh to fire him rather than consider other solutions.
OrvalWintermute 2 days ago||
I remember when Google was a bit rogue, full of brilliant people developing awesome things.
AbstractH24 1 day ago||
lol, I really am starting to appreciate that article I read a month or so ago about how writing a public letter is a right of passage when leaving Google
donatj 2 days ago||
How do the permissions work on Googles GitHub orgs where this guy could somehow create an unapproved public repo. I work for a MUCH smaller org and creating a repo at all requires review, creating a public repo many times more so.
jbverschoor 2 days ago|
I thought this was an official release by Google
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