I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
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.
So is it normally allowed to publish a non-Google-affiliated repo under Google's brand? This seems weird to me, and I can't understand why he didn't just do it under his own name.
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.
Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google.
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.
When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.
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.
Maybe at this point it's even more disruptive to delete it since people are using it. There's a real reason to not want someone to release an official-looking CLI when you're already doing an actual official one for the same thing.
Idk if the firing was justified since he supposedly followed process and had manager approval, but that's only one side.
> If that's a real problem and fireable offence, then there's people at Google that should be fired ASAP for failing to delete this repository.
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.
>there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues)
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 basically deny everything. They say they don't want to give bored people a reason to leave, but that's seemingly outweighed but not wanting to give bored people something besides their day job to focus on. Even at Google, plenty spend non-work hours on work, instead they might spend it on a side project.
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.
This project is in an organization that has 57 other public repos with code by several other Google employees, is linked to by Google own documentation, and the only public member of the organization is (hopefully still) a Google employee.
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.
I don't know that I'd call the repo "non-Google-affiliated", but whatever it is, it is still up [1] in a google-owned github organization [2], which also includes several other repos with the line "This is not an officially supported Google product," such as this one that's two years old [3].
So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.
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)
This ethos doesn't gel with the old ethos and that's where the disconnect comes from.
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.
I was there in 2005 and we were basically told point-blank that we couldn't open source _anything_ without running it by a manager first. This was at a time where all engineers were basically housed in the main 4 buildings on the north campus, so not yet all that big. Not sure what grace they fell from, but I found it to be a nauseating sanctimonious place even then.
Build cool shit and follow the proper release procedures for it. There is a huge difference between something unrelated to your employer on a personal repo, youremployerrepo/api-samples, and calling something "Employer Majorproduct CLI" on an official employer repo which is bound to be confused for an official release.
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.
None of that is relevant. You're working on things for their employer, they control when and if anything is released. Most of us have worked on projects that were cancelled - even when that happens you don't just release it anyway.
The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.
This is clearly something done in official capacity, during working hours, with the knowledge and support of his manager, who announced the CLI.
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.
That's because from what i gather so far it is a google repo with other tools using the same api they kept it in there since and even had it announced by the guy's manager at the time.
Pretty sure that the agreement that Google employees sign (a "contract") when hired reflects exactly that. At least at did when I joined (I left > 3 years ago, speaking here only for myself...)
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.
That's political speech, and specifically protected in California outside of work. If you fire your employee for political activities outside of work, you still have to pay them, because they're going to sue you for lost wages, and win.
"Right" is a pretty dubious way of framing it when basically every company works this way. You don't really have any choice in the matter. Passing a law about this wouldn't be removing any rights of individuals any more than we "removed" their right to enter a contract for pay lower than minimum wage or with unsafe working conditions.
A more fair way of phrasing it would be to say that we should remove the right of companies to require it.
Legally, yes. I mean it still depends on a lot of things but mostly at will employment contracts will have clauses about such things. You will have to get approval from legal before you can get on a board of even a dog rescue or a glove repair company. A practical consideration is simple like if you are a google exec and you are on board of a dog rescue company and that company gets hit with allgeations that you are just shooting all the dogs and selling their meat to some foreign nation. 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. Obviously an extereme example but that's the kind of logic they think of.
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.
Its not a new topic, the same applies for any employee as well. And no that's not just another day from the pov of google. That example was too extreme but even for minor things that can be a security concern etc if they are in active positions like that.
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.
The answer is not that it matters, but as a matter of financial and legal controls they need to know and approve. Do they care? They probably are delighted, but also want to get all the paperwork set up to avoid problems.
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.
In California, no. Under Labor Code section 96(k), you generally cannot be disciplined or fired for engaging in legal outside of work activities. If they do, you can sue for lost wages.
It seems like the guy believed he was just doing his job for Google, not moonlighting? He released the project on Google’s own GitHub. It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
> It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
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.
Plus there are 57 projects in that workspace from the same team, most using the same API, in quite a few the fired dev is participating. On top of that, the CLI project wasn't even deleted.
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.
Exactly my thoughts. This reads to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and a scape goat being jettisoned to save face afterwards.
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
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?
Am I crazy for thinking that an employer should and has no say in whatever the fuck I do outside of work? As long as I'm not messing with company IP, I should be able to do what I want, no?
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.
I pretty much agree with you in principle. I'm in the US (not in silicon valley but working in software for over a decade).
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.
Regardless of what you or I think of the policy, most major software companies (Google included) have clauses in your employment contract around how you represent the company in a real or percieved official capacity. This wasn't just some account persona; it was published as if it were an official open source product endorsed by Google (complete with branding). The author apparently didn't have permission or legal right to do so, and publicly violated their agreement.
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.
> 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.
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.
Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.
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.
Google contains multitudes. I don't doubt that your personal experience was the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.
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.
As a Xoogler you should know that the "impact" they want is, making leadership look good, what you shipped or even whether or not you shipped is nigh irrelevant.
Create a product that people loved? This could have been redirected to make leadership look good. This event demonstrates that impactful products can be extremely polarizing - you could become the hero or the villain or a bit of both. You can no longer be a quiet contributor.
I don't see anything about the product that made Google leadership look bad? I don't see that anyone else external to Google thought so either, before they fired him? Firing him makes them look bad, however.
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.
It's weird that he even had the ability to create public repos inside the official Google Workspace org then. That said, I agree that some information seems to be missing. Like, why not instead fire the guy who announced the project on X and who I presume is his manager? Confusing.
Interesting. I did a bit of digging and the disclaimer about not being an officially supported Google product was there from the start. There was briefly a logo that used Google colors[0] but it seems extreme to fire someone over such a small misstep. I'd say either HR gave him a bogus reason like you said or he's not telling the whole story.
> This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
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.
If one Googler mentions anything about the past, another with supposedly longer tenure will come to call him/her not an OG original googler, and say that year wasn't the golden era of Google but an earlier year was
Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned
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
Corporations have money and money attracts lawyers. Some discipline would have been required for the trademark stuff because you have to be very careful about it or lose your job.
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.
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.
It’s a CLI for Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a genuine Google Product.
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.
I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.
Google Workspace is but the CLI is not. These are 2 related but different products. Had he just released it under his name then that wouldn't have been such a big issue, maybe, but he used the Google logo which implied it was Google blessed. If I did the same thing, they would have a case for suing me. Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name. Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible. And support it on any issues that are found along the way. All companies protect their logo to a high degree simply because of the implications it has when people see it.
It was not released under his name. It is in Google's own googleworkspace Github Organization, alongside 57 other similar projects that consume from the same API.
People are making a crazy amount of assumptions in those threads only to defend Google and dunk on someone who was just fired.
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.
Yeah, it's pretty telling that comments like the one you replied to are all over this thread, and every time a response like yours is posted, no one seems to have any rebuttal. It's pretty clear that there's plenty of precedent for what this guy did and no legitimate reason to consider it a departure from what he and his coworkers had been doing for a while.
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.
Here's the rebuttal, look through these https://github.com/orgs/googleworkspace/repositories , one is not like the others. They're things like Python samples or a Google Drive picker web element. The 56 other repos probably got properly approved and this one didn't. This one also got a Twitter announcement saying "Introducing the Google Workspace CLI..." at the same time Google was working on an official Google Workspace CLI.
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.
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.
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 :-/
So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for egotistical or whatever reasons, to me it makes sense what they did. I don't know if that was the case, but if a corporation is forcing you to with legal means not do what is perhaps your life work and good value for the society, there must be way beyond legal to do it. But clearly the pettiness of the company is showing here, who cares if this confuses people a bit, there's many other good ways to solve the situation by Google.
He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.
In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.
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.
It'll probably be both, they look on the inside but the employee is still fired. Doesn't matter if they decide later that the unofficial CLI is better than the real one, it's not justification to publicly break process.
> I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically,
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
> First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
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.
Throttling is to avoid overloading degraded batteries. Replacing the battery alleviates the slowdowns. Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
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.
I read it again. Is that really spying? Is it spying that the activations were accidental, is it spying that they are grading them, or is it spying that sensitive data sometimes appears in recordings? Is it spying that the sensitive data ends up making its way to subcontractors? I don't get what makes this spying to you. All of the above?
My iPhone 6 was throttled so hard I could barely type. When they finally gave an option to disable the throttling, the phone didn't shut down randomly, it was fine. Most other people had already bought new iPhones by then, I only had mine cause idc so much about using a phone.
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
It's true that it's rare to get fired for a tiny breach of policy, which is why I'm skeptical that the breach was so tiny as the post makes it seem. Corporate legal departments are busy, they do not generally go around grilling people (his words!) unless something's gone terribly wrong.
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.
Yeah I think I he could have done a better job communicating in that thread that creating Workspace CLI was literally his job. He didn’t go rouge or didn’t follow the process.
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.
I currently work at Google. If the Eye of Sauron ever casts its gaze on me, I'm sure my history of critical posts will be silently used against me.
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 :)
Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point.
Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing.
Particularly for a company that possibly has to navigate high-volume, often frivolous litigation and brand attacks from trolls. I have been in similar situations having to partner with legal defending the most frivolous things on products released. You literally sign docs to not do such things when u onboard. Not sure what the point of broadcasting this is though.
That's a gross misunderstanding of corporate life.
_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.
Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard.
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.
Clueness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with perceived freedom. I think it's that cause and effect are not as often connected (consequences). I remember a Google employee updating a Google font that broke thousands of websites. Community members explained that Google recommended (at that time) letting Google host the font, and that they could fork it instead, or find a path that wouldn't break so many websites. The employee took the implication of consequences as being connected to ther actions as an aff(r)ont "They can just host it themselves"; "they can switch to another font/redesgin their site". When it was pointed out that the cause would not be known to most, and that budgets would have to be found to ferret out the cause and implement the solution, etc., etc., the Google employee stopped responding.
You continue to dance around this question on this post - did you or did you not follow Google's open source approval process[1]? Did you have an approved Ariane/Launcher2 entry?
The reason you think he's "dodging" the questions is because you clearly don't know anything about the situation, like the fact that it was published under the github organization used by the workgroup he was in, same as a lot of other software the group authored.
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.
The real problem is that OP is or wants to be an old school disruptor working at what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).
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.
> what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).
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.
Dunno about 20, but 7 years ago, they fired a security engineer for forcing in a CL for their internal Chrome extensions to put a disapproving banner on certain anti-union websites. Wasn't a very harmful change, but because she left a clear paper trail of circumvented code/release reviews, she couldn't be trusted anymore.
That was a security engineer modifying internal security tooling without proper permissions/reviews.
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).
I would encourage this sort of thing in my company. I'm not google. I'm not legally beholden to anyone except myself and my business partners ... and my own sense (which is worryingly odd!)
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.
I think your encouragement is admirable but could be interpreted as naive.
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.
In a modest 25 people company you absolutely can just go and do this of your own initiative and it will be tolerated or encouraged. Any company that size where it's not possible will close in 18 months when it runs out of investor money without having accomplished anything. You should still mention you're doing it beforehand, though.
In this case I guess the only other option the person had is to quit to build something of their own or work at another more builder friendly company, but at least in this case they got to release a thing that was valuable to many people and got popular, so they got some good publicity out of that. So ultimately I don't see that their actions were wrong overall.
In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much.
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”
I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.
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.
Depends on the reason. If there was a valid reason not to release it, then sure. But it's hard for me to see what can be so problematic about releasing a cli wrapper. It's hard to think of anything non political. And politics isn't valid reason to me. If someone from the leadership was e.g. blocking the release out of pettiness then I'd cheer on the person releasing it - assuming they know the risks.
I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing.
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.
Given their manager was the one who announced their project I'm leaning closer to Google handling this badly? Which is understandable in an organisation so large tbh. Sometimes things are done badly, no one is perfect, especially not large organisations.
It's amazing how quickly so much of this thread is people vehemently arguing that this person deserved to be fired for not following proper procedures, but when it's the company not following proper procedures for literally firing someone (which is a way more egregious thing to screw up than publishing some code that can easily be deleted, not that Google apparently has bothered to do that yet), there's so much room for patience and understanding because "nobody's perfect".
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
That part is odd, especially the fact that his boss tweeted about it.
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.
Interesting that people here seem so sympathetic to the fired guy. Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared? Working for them actually makes it worse because people could look up your name and would see that you actually work for google. It’s kind of obvious that this is a bad idea, right?
I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.
Love Better Call Saul :) The comparison is not even wrong (in the Pauli sense). Required knowledge seems to be DevRels role within Google culture. The absolute last thing this was was “mutiny” from a “product roadmap”. They’re sort of just around to build things to help devs and evangelize. They’re not tied to roadmaps or recruited to work on them.
Yes, fair. I do feel like the twitter post walks this line a bit though, between "yes, I broke the rules, for a good reason!" which I think many of us here can probably respect to various degrees and "I don't understand what I did that was wrong".
You’re supposed to bend stupid rules but the one bent here is kind of important. I couldn’t trust an employee that does this, so I wouldn’t want to continue to employ them.
My point is a good portion of HN is composed of pirates who don’t like rules and have a higher tolerance for risk. You can dislike that all you want for any given reason both valid and petty. However, what you’re seeing are core values from the people who created this community and the same type of people still run it today so you’re going to keep seeing this kind of thinking moving forward
In this case it seems like a bit of coaching could have retained a talented employee who has a preference for taking initiative.
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.
Yeah I'm struggling to believe that this person who worked at Google for 7 years was surprised by this outcome. Google has very clear processes for contributing to open source as an employee. I'm skeptical that this person never navigate to go/opensource (not remembering exactly the link, but it might literally be that) and read the policies there in that amount of time...
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...
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.
DevRel does generally get free reign to post stuff to github all the time. Many teams and projects do not have to comply with the standardized open source releasing process.
AFAICT his manager and one of the champions for the tool was Addy Osmani, who is one of the top front end Devrel people globally and who has also left Google recently.
He seems to be a good coder with poor judgment. But I think it would be wiser to manage him better than to fire him so long as he recognizes what he did was wrong. I'm a bit of a softie for the clueless, brilliant coders, though.
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.
Where are you getting the information that this project hadn't been cleared? That seems like a big assumption, and I don't see anything in the linked tweet, or the replies, or any of the linked pages that supports it. Unless I missed something?
He's being intentionally vague and combative in his statements. I think it's fair to assume there was a process issue when even as he admits he was "grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories".
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.
There is a two "calendar" launch process for OSS at Google, one "calendar" is org specific, the other OSS. I followed the process and each of the bits were flipped in the same way I had always done it.
I agree it's problematic, but I'm pretty sympathetic because it was an obvious and straightforward thing to do, whose benefit is incredibly obvious and good, that made sense. This should obviously be a thing, and not having it hurts customers of your products.
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.
I don't understand. If a public github project's CLI was being used to access workspace, then clearly they had the APIs for it open? How can they restrict how people do that?
> Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared?
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.
I guess it may be semantics, but I agree that I would have the same expectation. However, I also I think getting fired would be a justified punishment in the situation.
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.
>Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared?
It seems to be something other people do as well and not out of the ordinary, so no.
Looks like a textbook example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[a]
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.
Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.
The other day I learned that the command line interface (or whatever) to Antigravity goes by the abbreviated name "agy", which is awfully close to "agi" as in "artificial general intelligence." I strongly suspect they did that on purpose.
I wonder if it's because non-developers are not exposed to Codex and Claude Code? I try to use Antigravity every now and then, and each time I drop it because of the sheer number of bugs and general brokenness.
Google is worth $4+ TRILLION. There is natural and needed bureaucracy in preserving that. This type of probably well-meaning, but cowboy activity is not worth the risk to Google.
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.
It depends on what you consider ineffectual to mean. Ineffectual at making new products and innovating? Yes, definitely. Ineffectual at preserving business momentum and continuing to grow profits? Well, the latest numbers speak for themselves.
Actually it means less than nothing, it's a negative, because it shows that working outside the system can be popular and potentially woo away users, which challenges the supremacy of the organization.
i think your edit is asinine. google could have requested the removal of the trademark and made everything kosher, but they didn't. They decided to make an example of a guy who built something useful that people liked and now every other engineer at google will think twice before adding any not previously approved value to the business.
EDIT #2: Former Googlers here say that for a long time it was common at Google to let employees publish code with Google branding on github, in which case the firing was not justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652851 Yes, I changed my mind again. I have no qualms about changing my mind if the facts justify it :-)
Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story.
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?
I've never worked for an employer, from pizza delivery, to corporate intern, to multiple startup, to FAANG, that didn't have this VERY CLEARLY worded in the employment agreement, right up top:
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.
The policy was always crystal clear, but at the same time, tons of people found it confusing. "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal" came up a lot. People would get into huge fights with OSPO over this.
Writing at home is irrelevant if what you're doing is related to the company's business. You can't be working for Google and making a browser, a document editor, a spreadsheet, a mapping site, etc... It doesn't matter if you do it on your own time. Yea, you can grow coffee and sell it at retail stores on your own time. No you can't complete directly with your employer. If it's some gray area then you either get permission first or wait for the courts if you get sued.
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"
Keeping a very strict "firewall" between your personal and corporate life is the best way to avoid such situations, but then again, these are Google employees we're talking about...
I'm not 100% sure what your point is here, but the point I was making is that even in theory if you have a "firewall", your contract with Google (that you signed and agreed to) says that Google owns your code output even if it's done at home on your own time. It really comes down to (at least for Googlers in California) whether the work is related to Google's business (which often covers things like games, even if Google is not a game developer), and even then, you need to submit the work to the Googler lawyers and have them make the determination, before you get permission to publish the code on your own.
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.
He released the product with Google branding making it look extremely like an official Google project, and then it went viral and blindsided everyone who would have been involved in creating or approving this kind of tool internally.
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.
You're absolutely allowed to release 20% time projects publicly. As in any large bureaucracy, there's a process for that which is taught during onboarding. What you're not allowed to do is skip the process. There's nothing Google specific about it and I've seen similar firings at other companies too. Skipping legal and corp comms review on any external public communication is grounds for termination.
It sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company.
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.
The branding and logo on the embed comes from the org it is attached to, which is an official GitHub organisation owned by Google and contains many other open source repositories.
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?
Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
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.
As a customer who uses open source I care more about whether it works well than whether it's officially sanctioned but I can see how some of google management and its employees would take a diametrically opposite view to the i dotting and t crossing.
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.
Unofficial is fine. It's also fine if the only way to use it is some unofficial or not-fully-supported thing, or if there are two ways but the unofficial one is better. It's just, if there's a real supported tool, it'd better not be possible to confuse with the unofficial one. If I were evaluating using a product like this and got confused about such a basic thing, I'd be gone.
Google could definitely be harmed by an unofficial product release that gets lots of users but doesn't have any kind of official support behind it, and hence could make those users pissed off in the future.
I am not going to share much more than what I already have, but I think this speaks to the experience of working in big tech and the disruption caused by AI both at the level of teams/roadmaps/incentives and changing user behavior.
I haven't been following along with your story closely so forgive me for asking you to repeat things that you've probably already said, but did they just fire you out of the blue or did they talk to you and it didn't go well?
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?
> does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product?
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.
It was certainly the case for me back circa... I can barely remember, 2008/2009?
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.
I’ve been gone a few years, but there was a process for contributing OSS code outside the company, and another for releasing company code externally, etc
It seemed to mostly work. Some people complained it was too slow, others seemed to manage fine.
Something in the explanation is missing here. It's still not clear to me from any of the provided context whether you got approval to release this. At least from my understanding of your role, if you had approval and used an official google repository, you would not get fired for merely publishing code that accesses a documented API through documented endpoints.
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).
...By the way, on a different subject, 4 days ago, had read your comments on a different post dealing with Alzheimer's. Just now, asked you a follow up question, and it's easy for them to get buried in your hackernews comments threads, so thought I'd just mention it. Thanks!
then there is some detail missing from your report- for example, if leadership asked you to take down the repo (perhaps because another team was building/releasing/launching their own) and you refused, then you weren't fired for creating the Google workspace CLI, but for something else.
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.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it really sounds like you knew the policy in depth, and even contributed to the design of the policy, but when it came to your pet project you ignored it by skipping the release process? Am I missing something?
Really sorry to hear about this. It's so ironic because your tool is something that made G workspace so much more useful to me personally and was a deciding factor in which calendar project I used. Getting fired for making a product more useful to customers is quite ironic.
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.
5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.
Justin’s blog is the consistently the best resource for Google Apps Script content and he genuinely seemed to connect with the platform. He always stood out, as Googlers don’t typically seem to connect with anyone/anything.
Is the issue primarily caused by the English language?
(Google Workspace) CLI vs Google (Workspace CLI)
Because Google has there name in the product for which the CLI was produced it looks like he's using the Google brand when he's only using a descriptor of what his CLI was for. Trademarks are funny, but if I build a thing that only works with Google Workspace wouldn't it be a bit weird to not say that?
Probably contributes to the fact. In Opensource to avoid legal threats for instance with USB/HDMI and the likes you usually say "Compatible with" to avoid claiming certification/trademark infringement.
If you launched a “google workspace cli”, as a random person not affiliated with google, wouldn’t you expect to get sued too?
You could maybe try to get away with “CLI for google workspace” (although clarifying it with “compatible with google workspace” or something like that would be better), but the first one just sounds like it’s an official thing. If you namedrop a copyrighted name, you have to make sure that people won’t think you’re officially affiliated with that.
The concerns seem to be primarily around trademark and logos? Unless there's more to it, those seem trivial to remedy by requiring removal of logos and renaming in the style of Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw. Google is well-known to be pretty sparing with firing people even for performance, so either this is a change in stance (entirely possible) or there's more to it.
For over the last >1 year, Google has been dismissing people without warning or cause. The days where it was nearly impossible to be fired are over; now you might be severed by surprise for no given reason at all.
Anecdotally speaking, I have seen a change in behavior even from early 2024.
I was in a meeting (online) with a few people from Google shortly before Google IO about something fairly small. The technical engineer actually spoke(!) and he talked about revenue and stuff. I was dumbfounded that technical engineers at Google would ever care about "moving the needle".
Firings like this often include a technically voluntary separation agreement that gives you a few extra weeks' pay or some additional months of health benefits etc. precisely to avoid that problem. (Also gets them out of paying unemployment, and means they can get a fresh set of NDAs/nondisparagement etc. signed with the employee.)
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.
It's both. They're usually more lenient than other companies when it comes to performance, but then there are random waves of layoffs that have more to do with what org you're in than anything else.
“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.
Put aside whether this was justified or not, or the potential Streisand effect or PR damage (or vice versa). What signal is this sending to the young Google engineer who wants to build the next Gmail? Even if this violated every internal policy, firing someone who created something that people actually want is sending a very disturbing message (internally and externally).
Also, is this somehow relate to Addy Osmani’s recent departure from Google? (Was it in sympathy, was it a retaliation as this was “the tweet that got OP fired”?)
IMO: If the project leverages Google branding or authority improperly, then it shouldn't be on github and should not be under active development by Google employees; yet it is. If Google is suddenly alright with the way the project leveraged Google branding and authority, then the cause for firing the original developer, especially given Google's famously lax stance toward 20% projects and internal open source, is a lot weaker. In other words: Healthy companies do not fire individuals simply for breaching branding guidelines in a way that is ultimately beneficial and looked favorably upon by the company. That's literally just not a thing that happens; at worst you get a reprimand, and in many healthy companies you'd actually get a promotion.
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
There are more than a few plausible scenarios here. I've been inside google and I've seen other "i was fired" posts before. almost always, there is some additional context which gets left out. For example, I could see a path where the author wrote the code, got approval, published it, and then another part of the company (workspace) found out and wanted to use the same space/place or another place to publish their "competing but official" system, and the author refused (programmers are notorious for this) to take down his code when asked, at which point any number of different paths could lead to the employee being fired for not complying.
However, google is filled with personalities and egos and sometimes engineers are the collateral damage.
It'd be a fairly major faux pas to release a "non-product" open-source project in a way that smells like a product, but I don't think it's an automatic firing offense in most of big tech, especially if you're just releasing some technical (CLI) tool. It's more of a "stern talking-to" situation.
I'm guessing something more happened here. Maybe someone was displeased with how the author initially responded, or some powerful exec really wanted to make an example out of him (sounds like another group was working on an identically-named official product with the same name?), or they were just looking for an excuse to cut this particular role.
Great that it was available, but compared to Peter's version this one is inferior. It didn't have draft email as a default and asking it to write a draft would just send the email, oops lol. And doesn't have mutli-account support or a number of other features. I think one thing it could do better was inline commenting (maybe), but neither CLI can initiate their own comments...
For me it hangs on how the author describes his product “THE google workspace CLI” as opposed to “A google workspace CLI”. That sounds very much like an official google product to me.
Former Google employee here. This is exactly the kind of shit-for-brains action I'd expect from Google executives. Bravo on further dragging your image through the mud.
I work at Google so was curious. This person did attempt to follow the process, but was belligerent in review and it was cancelled. They continued anyway.
No surprise they were fired. If you work at google just search this CLI and you will see for yourself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe this is just one of the AI firing? It just happen OP did something before the firing announced and put that and firing together. This would explain why others also let go and the repo still there.
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.
His manager would the first line manager, and really not a decision maker at G. it possible that his manager would put him under a bus after getting called out by legal. Dunno.
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.
Ex-Google here. This is pretty typical in the modern era.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
Funny to think about this when he got fired releasing a well-received product. On the other hand, Google released a subpar antigravity 2.0, full of bugs, almost unusable. The tech lead of Antigravity went on X to claim users don't know what they want.
It's amazing the number of people (many of whom claim to be Google employees past or present) who probably consider themselves smarter than everyone else in any room they walk into...
...who did not figure out that this project was published in a google-run github org, it was approved by his manager, etc.
As he has said multiple times: he went through the publishing process with his manager's blessing. Stop making up bullshit about how he didn't follow processes.
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?
> 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.
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.
This reminds me of how the founders of the so-called 'open source' cryptocurrency project I joined suppressed my work in the community.
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.
I see justinwp is commenting here… Justin, people are asking questions that you’re not replying to. Sorry, but it’s pretty disingenuous to tweet your story and post it here, but then refuse to answer requests for more info.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
Seems to me your management chain was thinking “Why the hell is someone on our team releasing a vibe-coded CLI that’s branded to look like an official API, when we’re 2 weeks from announcing the actual CLI??” If you didn’t know there was an official CLI in the works, that’s one thing, but if you did know then that’s pretty shitty to your teammates in Workspace and bad for users who would adopt one CLI (thinking it’s official) just to then see another one 2 weeks later.
Still, I would expect a talking-to and not an actual firing… but who knows what actually happened since you’re not responding to anyone. :shrug:
The read me clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product.". I am not getting what you want to imply here and what you expect him to reply here.
It's other people on this thread that had questions, more than me.
I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
Market validation can change roadmaps. As I stated on Twitter/X, CLIs for agents was not a very interesting thing outside a small group earlier in 2026.
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
Yeah, the reasonable thing here is a stern talking-to about company policies, and then leveraging this thing to get more goodwill in the community about AI, which is an area Google is currently lacking in.
He probably got that talking to, and continued to be stubborn and unapologetic. Getting fired is quite difficult, as there will be multiple attempts at resolving any issue.
Google is sorely lacking in goodwill, period. I don't know why this guy got fired, and I don't expect we ever will know the whole truth. But even so this seems like a very foolish PR move for Google. Rightly or wrongly people are going to take his side, and they can't really afford to burn goodwill with their customers.
Around that time I built a CLI to access and manage monitoring cameras that my company is selling. After giving a demo to my leadership I strongly adviced against releasing it to public. Giving agents access to some stuff is bad for customers.
I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
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.
Used to be part of Google’s culture until the AI wars and walled garden present we find ourselves in.
So is it normally allowed to publish a non-Google-affiliated repo under Google's brand? This seems weird to me, and I can't understand why he didn't just do it under his own name.
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.
Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google.
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.
But there's an approval process to create such a repo under the Google name, right? I'm not seeing that he followed that.
When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
Releasing vibe coded handling of google account credentials seems like the biggest problem with this.
Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.
The repo is still online and is official [1], so Google doesn't really seem to care about its existence.
[1] https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples
It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.
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.
[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/issues/780
If that's a real problem and fireable offence, then there's people at Google that should be fired ASAP for failing to delete this repository.
Maybe at this point it's even more disruptive to delete it since people are using it. There's a real reason to not want someone to release an official-looking CLI when you're already doing an actual official one for the same thing.
Idk if the firing was justified since he supposedly followed process and had manager approval, but that's only one side.
Google doesn’t even care to tell its side.
HR/Legal very often will give bullshit reasons for termination, since their main job is to shield the company from lawsuits anyway.
> If that's a real problem and fireable offence, then there's people at Google that should be fired ASAP for failing to delete this repository.
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.
>there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues)
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 basically deny everything. They say they don't want to give bored people a reason to leave, but that's seemingly outweighed but not wanting to give bored people something besides their day job to focus on. Even at Google, plenty spend non-work hours on work, instead they might spend it on a side project.
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.
This project is in an organization that has 57 other public repos with code by several other Google employees, is linked to by Google own documentation, and the only public member of the organization is (hopefully still) a Google employee.
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.
I don't know that I'd call the repo "non-Google-affiliated", but whatever it is, it is still up [1] in a google-owned github organization [2], which also includes several other repos with the line "This is not an officially supported Google product," such as this one that's two years old [3].
So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.
[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
[2] https://github.com/googleworkspace
[3] https://github.com/googleworkspace/redriveapp
Is it so extreme?
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)
This ethos doesn't gel with the old ethos and that's where the disconnect comes from.
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.
Just a very sad departure from more humanistic values towards "well technically their legal rights take precedence over common good."
Especially that he's an "engineer" not a "Googler" or "a person."
God what a fall from grace.
I was there in 2005 and we were basically told point-blank that we couldn't open source _anything_ without running it by a manager first. This was at a time where all engineers were basically housed in the main 4 buildings on the north campus, so not yet all that big. Not sure what grace they fell from, but I found it to be a nauseating sanctimonious place even then.
According to the Twitter thread his manager is the one who announced it.
I'd much rather be an "engineer" than a "Googler" (I don't work at Google) or any other corporate cutesy name. No thanks...
Build cool shit and follow the proper release procedures for it. There is a huge difference between something unrelated to your employer on a personal repo, youremployerrepo/api-samples, and calling something "Employer Majorproduct CLI" on an official employer repo which is bound to be confused for an official release.
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.
> follow the proper release procedures for it
What happens when your thing
or nothing close to your thing
will ever see the light of day?
1. If google said ok but don't release under google’s name/in google’s repo, do that.
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?
It was clearly greenlighted by management. The person who made the announcement was Addy Osmani, who was manager of the fired developer at the time.
This is in a Google-owned organization, with several other similar repositories, a lot of them using the same API.
Looks like Addy Osmani is leaving, too.
Is that relevant here,
given that Google was creating an official thing
quite close to his thing
at the same time?
(And why are we writing like this?)
> Google was creating an official thing quite close to his thing
Just link to it.
It's mentioned in the original link for this post.
Fair to point out,
the official google thing,
was quite a lot worse
than his thing.
(I’m quite into the whole “Posting in free verse” idea)
Would you like them
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?
AI am Sam ...
Sam AI am ...
My program made green eggs and ham ...
Is there a smell of toast burning where you are?
None of that is relevant. You're working on things for their employer, they control when and if anything is released. Most of us have worked on projects that were cancelled - even when that happens you don't just release it anyway.
> they control when and if anything is released
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…
>Build cool shit and follow the proper release procedures for it.
By all reasonable measures, they did.
Ya we all can build cool shit all day if the world isn’t a litigious bitch.
“Actions have consequences”
The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.
And it's not just about open source, it's about the author of this tool using trademarks and effectively impersonating Google.
Judging by the screenshot of the repo, I think most people who download this would think that it's official Google software.
tbh i assumed that is an official product too
This is clearly something done in official capacity, during working hours, with the knowledge and support of his manager, who announced the CLI.
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
That's because from what i gather so far it is a google repo with other tools using the same api they kept it in there since and even had it announced by the guy's manager at the time.
Even setting the legal process aside, I would ask the team before releasing a tool for their product.
Seems kind of rude.
The tool was publicly announced by the person's manager.
It clearly wasn't moonlighting or done without management's support/knowledge.
Wow, depending on what exactly the manager said / did, that's pretty bad
Being an employee of Google doesn’t give them any sway over my board position at an animal rescue,
or anywhere else,
unless my contract and pay reflects that.
Pretty sure that the agreement that Google employees sign (a "contract") when hired reflects exactly that. At least at did when I joined (I left > 3 years ago, speaking here only for myself...)
Is it legal (or moral) for an employer to keep you from being a board member of a dog rescue or a glove repair company without review?
The obvious answer is that "obvious lines" aren't at all obvious at the scale of Google.
Googlers are well paid, and that pay reflects this.
People said the same thing about non-compete agreements.
Sorry, not buying that’s for anyone’s good.
I don't understand your point.
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?
> I don't understand your point.
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.
California has had a ban on noncompetes since the gold rush.
and yet this is all very recent:
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...
That's political speech, and specifically protected in California outside of work. If you fire your employee for political activities outside of work, you still have to pay them, because they're going to sue you for lost wages, and win.
Another way to frame that question is: Should we remove the right for people to enter into such contracts?
"Right" is a pretty dubious way of framing it when basically every company works this way. You don't really have any choice in the matter. Passing a law about this wouldn't be removing any rights of individuals any more than we "removed" their right to enter a contract for pay lower than minimum wage or with unsafe working conditions.
A more fair way of phrasing it would be to say that we should remove the right of companies to require it.
Legally, yes. I mean it still depends on a lot of things but mostly at will employment contracts will have clauses about such things. You will have to get approval from legal before you can get on a board of even a dog rescue or a glove repair company. A practical consideration is simple like if you are a google exec and you are on board of a dog rescue company and that company gets hit with allgeations that you are just shooting all the dogs and selling their meat to some foreign nation. 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. Obviously an extereme example but that's the kind of logic they think of.
Morals imo often have nothing to do with law, but fairness does.
> if you are a google exec
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.
Its not a new topic, the same applies for any employee as well. And no that's not just another day from the pov of google. That example was too extreme but even for minor things that can be a security concern etc if they are in active positions like that.
Also we are not talking about pooping? Why change the topic?
I like your shooting all of the dogs example.
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.
The answer is not that it matters, but as a matter of financial and legal controls they need to know and approve. Do they care? They probably are delighted, but also want to get all the paperwork set up to avoid problems.
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.
In California, no. Under Labor Code section 96(k), you generally cannot be disciplined or fired for engaging in legal outside of work activities. If they do, you can sue for lost wages.
It seems like the guy believed he was just doing his job for Google, not moonlighting? He released the project on Google’s own GitHub. It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
> It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
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.
Plus there are 57 projects in that workspace from the same team, most using the same API, in quite a few the fired dev is participating. On top of that, the CLI project wasn't even deleted.
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.
This is definitely helps make the case that it was a spiteful exec primarily concerned with their own fiefdom that got the guy canned.
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.
There's a small chance they actually still don't get it and that blog post is just a testimony to how unfairly hurt they feel.
Policies change or have subtle context-specific details. Even after 7 years, people can lack basic knowledge for certain situations.
Exactly my thoughts. This reads to me like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, and a scape goat being jettisoned to save face afterwards.
The repo wasn't even taken down.
It looks like the account where this repo was published was the one used by Google Workspace DevRel? (And that’s the team this guy worked on.)
That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
> That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
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.
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
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?
> If legal was question why the logo was on the account profile picture [...] 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).
Obviously a Hackernews thread on Google internal policy is related to Google (your employer).
Am I crazy for thinking that an employer should and has no say in whatever the fuck I do outside of work? As long as I'm not messing with company IP, I should be able to do what I want, no?
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.
I pretty much agree with you in principle. I'm in the US (not in silicon valley but working in software for over a decade).
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.
Regardless of what you or I think of the policy, most major software companies (Google included) have clauses in your employment contract around how you represent the company in a real or percieved official capacity. This wasn't just some account persona; it was published as if it were an official open source product endorsed by Google (complete with branding). The author apparently didn't have permission or legal right to do so, and publicly violated their agreement.
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.
> 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.
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.
Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.
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.
Google contains multitudes. I don't doubt that your personal experience was the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.
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.
As a Xoogler you should know that the "impact" they want is, making leadership look good, what you shipped or even whether or not you shipped is nigh irrelevant.
This did the opposite, didn’t it?
Create a product that people loved? This could have been redirected to make leadership look good. This event demonstrates that impactful products can be extremely polarizing - you could become the hero or the villain or a bit of both. You can no longer be a quiet contributor.
I don't see anything about the product that made Google leadership look bad? I don't see that anyone else external to Google thought so either, before they fired him? Firing him makes them look bad, however.
"Google contains multitudes"
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.
It's weird that he even had the ability to create public repos inside the official Google Workspace org then. That said, I agree that some information seems to be missing. Like, why not instead fire the guy who announced the project on X and who I presume is his manager? Confusing.
The manager, Addy Osmani, also reportedly left Google, which is interesting.
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.
Interesting. I did a bit of digging and the disclaimer about not being an officially supported Google product was there from the start. There was briefly a logo that used Google colors[0] but it seems extreme to fire someone over such a small misstep. I'd say either HR gave him a bogus reason like you said or he's not telling the whole story.
[0] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/blob/1991d536b4a45e60...
> ...likely leading to significant internal confusion...
Bonus-promotion disruption.
> This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
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.
> I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
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?
How do you know that a HN commenter worked at Google - they will tell you.
If one Googler mentions anything about the past, another with supposedly longer tenure will come to call him/her not an OG original googler, and say that year wasn't the golden era of Google but an earlier year was
Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned
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
Corporations have money and money attracts lawyers. Some discipline would have been required for the trademark stuff because you have to be very careful about it or lose your job.
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.
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.
It’s a CLI for Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a genuine Google Product.
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.
I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.
Google Workspace is but the CLI is not. These are 2 related but different products. Had he just released it under his name then that wouldn't have been such a big issue, maybe, but he used the Google logo which implied it was Google blessed. If I did the same thing, they would have a case for suing me. Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name. Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible. And support it on any issues that are found along the way. All companies protect their logo to a high degree simply because of the implications it has when people see it.
It was not released under his name. It is in Google's own googleworkspace Github Organization, alongside 57 other similar projects that consume from the same API.
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.
Not complaining about the downvoting but everything in this comment is verifiable from the links you provided.
People are making a crazy amount of assumptions in those threads only to defend Google and dunk on someone who was just fired.
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.
Yeah, it's pretty telling that comments like the one you replied to are all over this thread, and every time a response like yours is posted, no one seems to have any rebuttal. It's pretty clear that there's plenty of precedent for what this guy did and no legitimate reason to consider it a departure from what he and his coworkers had been doing for a while.
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.
Yeah, people are just going wild with assumptions.
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.
Here's the rebuttal, look through these https://github.com/orgs/googleworkspace/repositories , one is not like the others. They're things like Python samples or a Google Drive picker web element. The 56 other repos probably got properly approved and this one didn't. This one also got a Twitter announcement saying "Introducing the Google Workspace CLI..." at the same time Google was working on an official Google Workspace CLI.
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.
The director that did the announcement tweet may have provided some authority. He seems to have left Google voluntarily recently after 14 years.
> and then you have a random guy put out a self create product
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.
Are you suggesting Google's lawyers haven't done a good job at protecting Google's reputation? Watch out, you don't want to get sued by them!
Going for the little guy who wants to build cool stuff here would be the thing that makes them waste their billions on the wrong thing.
You made a typo, it should be "Google spent billions eroding its reputation" [0]
[0](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
They should've fired whoever signed off on 999 duplicate Google chat apps existing at once around 2018. Probably Sundar.
To me the random guy comes off much more likable here than someone who has spent billions protecting its reputation and still failing.
>They had a case for suing him for millions.
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.
Fascinating!
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 :-/
So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for egotistical or whatever reasons, to me it makes sense what they did. I don't know if that was the case, but if a corporation is forcing you to with legal means not do what is perhaps your life work and good value for the society, there must be way beyond legal to do it. But clearly the pettiness of the company is showing here, who cares if this confuses people a bit, there's many other good ways to solve the situation by Google.
He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.
In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.
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.
It'll probably be both, they look on the inside but the employee is still fired. Doesn't matter if they decide later that the unofficial CLI is better than the real one, it's not justification to publicly break process.
> I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically,
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
> First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
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.
Throttling is to avoid overloading degraded batteries. Replacing the battery alleviates the slowdowns. Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
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.
> 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...
> Apple didn't want your phone to shut off at 15% when the battery can't supply enough current to sustain full performance.
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.
How does that disprove anything I said?
> 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.
> How does that disprove anything I said?
>> 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...
I read it again. Is that really spying? Is it spying that the activations were accidental, is it spying that they are grading them, or is it spying that sensitive data sometimes appears in recordings? Is it spying that the sensitive data ends up making its way to subcontractors? I don't get what makes this spying to you. All of the above?
My iPhone 6 was throttled so hard I could barely type. When they finally gave an option to disable the throttling, the phone didn't shut down randomly, it was fine. Most other people had already bought new iPhones by then, I only had mine cause idc so much about using a phone.
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
Did you consider that the person might be just outright withholding information and not telling the whole story?
You don't need to work at google to have common sense. An employee who does no real damage isn't getting canned unless they made someone look bad.
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?
> Maybe he did some damage? Did it create a security issue, e.g. if someone handed it to a bad llm agent? Maaaaybe.
Evidently not enough damage that it's worth deleting the repo
It's true that it's rare to get fired for a tiny breach of policy, which is why I'm skeptical that the breach was so tiny as the post makes it seem. Corporate legal departments are busy, they do not generally go around grilling people (his words!) unless something's gone terribly wrong.
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.
The situation has been changed. Google is no longer the one it was.
Yeah I think I he could have done a better job communicating in that thread that creating Workspace CLI was literally his job. He didn’t go rouge or didn’t follow the process.
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.
I currently work at Google. If the Eye of Sauron ever casts its gaze on me, I'm sure my history of critical posts will be silently used against me.
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 :)
> was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs.
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.
Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point.
Your ships would have been sunk during the 2002 Millennial challenge and an entire bureaucracy would defend you for the next 20 years.
Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing.
His boss is the one that announced the tool.
Superiors like...his manager, who announced the project for him?
If that's really the case (which isn't really clear from this post) then I feel like we're missing some details.
Particularly for a company that possibly has to navigate high-volume, often frivolous litigation and brand attacks from trolls. I have been in similar situations having to partner with legal defending the most frivolous things on products released. You literally sign docs to not do such things when u onboard. Not sure what the point of broadcasting this is though.
Not only that but not clearing with your management that you're not working on something that is actually being worked on as a product.
Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.
Management literally announced it for him.
That's a gross misunderstanding of corporate life.
_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.
Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard.
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.
Clueness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with perceived freedom. I think it's that cause and effect are not as often connected (consequences). I remember a Google employee updating a Google font that broke thousands of websites. Community members explained that Google recommended (at that time) letting Google host the font, and that they could fork it instead, or find a path that wouldn't break so many websites. The employee took the implication of consequences as being connected to ther actions as an aff(r)ont "They can just host it themselves"; "they can switch to another font/redesgin their site". When it was pointed out that the cause would not be known to most, and that budgets would have to be found to ferret out the cause and implement the solution, etc., etc., the Google employee stopped responding.
We take annual training that warns us against doing what this engineer did.
yes we all pay attention to 'the training'
Again, I'm pretty skeptical that this person completely missed this part of the training for seven years.
You are assuming that it was "personally" releasing something and that the process wasn't followed.
You continue to dance around this question on this post - did you or did you not follow Google's open source approval process[1]? Did you have an approved Ariane/Launcher2 entry?
1: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
Yes
Did you have your launch approved? So did you follow the process?
Why isn't it under google's username on github?
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.
Are you the "serious consequences for ____" guy?
The reason you think he's "dodging" the questions is because you clearly don't know anything about the situation, like the fact that it was published under the github organization used by the workgroup he was in, same as a lot of other software the group authored.
Why is the repo still there if it's such an egregious violation of Google's policies?
> Why isn't it under google's username on github?
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.
The real problem is that OP is or wants to be an old school disruptor working at what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).
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.
> what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).
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.
Dunno about 20, but 7 years ago, they fired a security engineer for forcing in a CL for their internal Chrome extensions to put a disapproving banner on certain anti-union websites. Wasn't a very harmful change, but because she left a clear paper trail of circumvented code/release reviews, she couldn't be trusted anymore.
That was a security engineer modifying internal security tooling without proper permissions/reviews.
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).
I would encourage this sort of thing in my company. I'm not google. I'm not legally beholden to anyone except myself and my business partners ... and my own sense (which is worryingly odd!)
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.
I think your encouragement is admirable but could be interpreted as naive.
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.
In a modest 25 people company you absolutely can just go and do this of your own initiative and it will be tolerated or encouraged. Any company that size where it's not possible will close in 18 months when it runs out of investor money without having accomplished anything. You should still mention you're doing it beforehand, though.
In this case I guess the only other option the person had is to quit to build something of their own or work at another more builder friendly company, but at least in this case they got to release a thing that was valuable to many people and got popular, so they got some good publicity out of that. So ultimately I don't see that their actions were wrong overall.
Getting fired like this and then bad-mouthing your previous company is not good publicity for most employers.
I meant the person got good publicity, not Google. Google got bad publicity.
In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much.
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”
What if they were told not to do it and they still did?
I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.
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.
Depends on the reason. If there was a valid reason not to release it, then sure. But it's hard for me to see what can be so problematic about releasing a cli wrapper. It's hard to think of anything non political. And politics isn't valid reason to me. If someone from the leadership was e.g. blocking the release out of pettiness then I'd cheer on the person releasing it - assuming they know the risks.
I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing.
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.
My guess is he didn't say "ok sorry I'll double check in future" but got into an argument with them about how he was right.
Given their manager was the one who announced their project I'm leaning closer to Google handling this badly? Which is understandable in an organisation so large tbh. Sometimes things are done badly, no one is perfect, especially not large organisations.
It's amazing how quickly so much of this thread is people vehemently arguing that this person deserved to be fired for not following proper procedures, but when it's the company not following proper procedures for literally firing someone (which is a way more egregious thing to screw up than publishing some code that can easily be deleted, not that Google apparently has bothered to do that yet), there's so much room for patience and understanding because "nobody's perfect".
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
What procedure did the company not follow here?
> However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.
It's still up now, so it seems like they do not actually think it needs to be taken down
That part is odd, especially the fact that his boss tweeted about it.
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.
Interesting that people here seem so sympathetic to the fired guy. Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared? Working for them actually makes it worse because people could look up your name and would see that you actually work for google. It’s kind of obvious that this is a bad idea, right?
I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.
Love Better Call Saul :) The comparison is not even wrong (in the Pauli sense). Required knowledge seems to be DevRels role within Google culture. The absolute last thing this was was “mutiny” from a “product roadmap”. They’re sort of just around to build things to help devs and evangelize. They’re not tied to roadmaps or recruited to work on them.
Ofcourse. This is HN and not LinkedIn.
We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.
Yes, fair. I do feel like the twitter post walks this line a bit though, between "yes, I broke the rules, for a good reason!" which I think many of us here can probably respect to various degrees and "I don't understand what I did that was wrong".
You’re supposed to bend stupid rules but the one bent here is kind of important. I couldn’t trust an employee that does this, so I wouldn’t want to continue to employ them.
My point is a good portion of HN is composed of pirates who don’t like rules and have a higher tolerance for risk. You can dislike that all you want for any given reason both valid and petty. However, what you’re seeing are core values from the people who created this community and the same type of people still run it today so you’re going to keep seeing this kind of thinking moving forward
> a good portion of HN is composed of pirates who don’t like rules and have a higher tolerance for risk
That's cute.
Yeah the risk tolerance here is probably well below average.
In this case it seems like a bit of coaching could have retained a talented employee who has a preference for taking initiative.
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.
haha "liquidity in human capital" am i right?
Yeah I'm struggling to believe that this person who worked at Google for 7 years was surprised by this outcome. Google has very clear processes for contributing to open source as an employee. I'm skeptical that this person never navigate to go/opensource (not remembering exactly the link, but it might literally be that) and read the policies there in that amount of time...
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...
He worked for devrel under Osmani. These guidelines and processes do not apply to them, last I checked.
Well, fair enough if the situation is "the rules are complicated to navigate specifically for devrel people".
He mentioned that he worked in DevRel and making open source tools like this was a common thing they did: https://x.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069535183158812698
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.
DevRel does generally get free reign to post stuff to github all the time. Many teams and projects do not have to comply with the standardized open source releasing process.
AFAICT his manager and one of the champions for the tool was Addy Osmani, who is one of the top front end Devrel people globally and who has also left Google recently.
He seems to be a good coder with poor judgment. But I think it would be wiser to manage him better than to fire him so long as he recognizes what he did was wrong. I'm a bit of a softie for the clueless, brilliant coders, though.
He doesn't recognize it. He claims in the post he was fired because certain leaders were afraid of being disrupted.
This seems pretty plausible. This tool probably did threaten some product line or other with cannibalisation.
Is it plausible?
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.
You’d be surprised how petty some people are.
sounds even more plausible under that scenario?
It's pretty easy to justify that sort of thing off the notion that doing something "properly" requires more man hours.
There are truths to both sides of the argument.
it makes them look lazy for not doing it already, this tool was sorely needed.
My bet is that he was reprimanded for this and then didn't back down, hes even in the comments here now arguing about it
I suspect he ported over/heavily referenced how the official cli worked and got into massive legal trouble by open sourcing it.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
Where are you getting the information that this project hadn't been cleared? That seems like a big assumption, and I don't see anything in the linked tweet, or the replies, or any of the linked pages that supports it. Unless I missed something?
He's being intentionally vague and combative in his statements. I think it's fair to assume there was a process issue when even as he admits he was "grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories".
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.
There is a two "calendar" launch process for OSS at Google, one "calendar" is org specific, the other OSS. I followed the process and each of the bits were flipped in the same way I had always done it.
I agree it's problematic, but I'm pretty sympathetic because it was an obvious and straightforward thing to do, whose benefit is incredibly obvious and good, that made sense. This should obviously be a thing, and not having it hurts customers of your products.
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 doesn't look like anything has been taken down.
I don't understand. If a public github project's CLI was being used to access workspace, then clearly they had the APIs for it open? How can they restrict how people do that?
> Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared?
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.
I guess it may be semantics, but I agree that I would have the same expectation. However, I also I think getting fired would be a justified punishment in the situation.
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.
Releasing open source tools showing off what you can do with your company’s APIs is part of the job description for a devrel (signed: a devrel).
>Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared?
It seems to be something other people do as well and not out of the ordinary, so no.
Looks like a textbook example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[a]
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.
--
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
---
[a] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
People ask why Google's Gemini is falling behind the competition in spite of Google's immense resources, this kind of thing is an example why.
the Antigravity AI suite is hugely popular among non-developers
So is every other AI tool
Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.
The other day I learned that the command line interface (or whatever) to Antigravity goes by the abbreviated name "agy", which is awfully close to "agi" as in "artificial general intelligence." I strongly suspect they did that on purpose.
I wonder if it's because non-developers are not exposed to Codex and Claude Code? I try to use Antigravity every now and then, and each time I drop it because of the sheer number of bugs and general brokenness.
antigravity is one of the worst tools i have ever encountered with
Every other AI suite provider claims the same.
Google is worth $4+ TRILLION. There is natural and needed bureaucracy in preserving that. This type of probably well-meaning, but cowboy activity is not worth the risk to Google.
Unlikely that the bureaucracy is what will keep them valuable in the long-term.
Yes, very true
But in the long term, we are all dead
How long is has a different answer for everyone.
Google will likely outlast everyone walking the earth at this moment.
You’re not disagreeing with gp.
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.
Sounds like exactly why they're now a lumbering ineffectual beast, rather than the center for innovation that they used to be.
It depends on what you consider ineffectual to mean. Ineffectual at making new products and innovating? Yes, definitely. Ineffectual at preserving business momentum and continuing to grow profits? Well, the latest numbers speak for themselves.
Can't argue with that. You'll never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator.
Actually it means less than nothing, it's a negative, because it shows that working outside the system can be popular and potentially woo away users, which challenges the supremacy of the organization.
I think your first take still stands.
i think your edit is asinine. google could have requested the removal of the trademark and made everything kosher, but they didn't. They decided to make an example of a guy who built something useful that people liked and now every other engineer at google will think twice before adding any not previously approved value to the business.
You were right above the edit.
EDIT #2: Former Googlers here say that for a long time it was common at Google to let employees publish code with Google branding on github, in which case the firing was not justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652851 Yes, I changed my mind again. I have no qualms about changing my mind if the facts justify it :-)
Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story.
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?
its what happens when a company runs out of ideas and is mostly run by people with MBAs.
Good ideas are now risky because it steps on the toes of someone's fiefdom
There have always been lots of ideas. The issue is the management consultants and finance took over.
They’ve been GE’d.
Maybe the policy is that you can’t just release 20% time projects publically?
I've never worked for an employer, from pizza delivery, to corporate intern, to multiple startup, to FAANG, that didn't have this VERY CLEARLY worded in the employment agreement, right up top:
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.
The policy was always crystal clear, but at the same time, tons of people found it confusing. "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal" came up a lot. People would get into huge fights with OSPO over this.
> "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal"
Interesting. Did they read their contract before signing it?
yes, many engineers (especially at google) are armchair lawyers and have all sorts of opinions about contracts and licenses.
Writing at home is irrelevant if what you're doing is related to the company's business. You can't be working for Google and making a browser, a document editor, a spreadsheet, a mapping site, etc... It doesn't matter if you do it on your own time. Yea, you can grow coffee and sell it at retail stores on your own time. No you can't complete directly with your employer. If it's some gray area then you either get permission first or wait for the courts if you get sued.
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"
Its almost like the junior technofeudalists think the rules dont apply to them.
Keeping a very strict "firewall" between your personal and corporate life is the best way to avoid such situations, but then again, these are Google employees we're talking about...
I'm not 100% sure what your point is here, but the point I was making is that even in theory if you have a "firewall", your contract with Google (that you signed and agreed to) says that Google owns your code output even if it's done at home on your own time. It really comes down to (at least for Googlers in California) whether the work is related to Google's business (which often covers things like games, even if Google is not a game developer), and even then, you need to submit the work to the Googler lawyers and have them make the determination, before you get permission to publish the code on your own.
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.
He released the product with Google branding making it look extremely like an official Google project, and then it went viral and blindsided everyone who would have been involved in creating or approving this kind of tool internally.
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.
You're absolutely allowed to release 20% time projects publicly. As in any large bureaucracy, there's a process for that which is taught during onboarding. What you're not allowed to do is skip the process. There's nothing Google specific about it and I've seen similar firings at other companies too. Skipping legal and corp comms review on any external public communication is grounds for termination.
When has 20% projects ever been about bypassing every launch process and just posting your product publicly?
Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.
There are literally hundreds of projects on googles github with the standard “this is not an official Google project” in the readme.
It sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company.
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.
The branding and logo on the embed comes from the org it is attached to, which is an official GitHub organisation owned by Google and contains many other open source repositories.
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?
Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
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.
> but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?
He probably read the twitter thread, it's all in there
I read the twitter thread, don't see any clear information about what the t's and i's even are, or if they were crossed and dotted.
As a customer and dev, it's confusing to me when I look at Google's stuff and see official-looking unofficial CLIs.
* when it's also alongside an official CLI for the same product
As a customer who uses open source I care more about whether it works well than whether it's officially sanctioned but I can see how some of google management and its employees would take a diametrically opposite view to the i dotting and t crossing.
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.
Unofficial is fine. It's also fine if the only way to use it is some unofficial or not-fully-supported thing, or if there are two ways but the unofficial one is better. It's just, if there's a real supported tool, it'd better not be possible to confuse with the unofficial one. If I were evaluating using a product like this and got confused about such a basic thing, I'd be gone.
Google could definitely be harmed by an unofficial product release that gets lots of users but doesn't have any kind of official support behind it, and hence could make those users pissed off in the future.
I am not going to share much more than what I already have, but I think this speaks to the experience of working in big tech and the disruption caused by AI both at the level of teams/roadmaps/incentives and changing user behavior.
I haven't been following along with your story closely so forgive me for asking you to repeat things that you've probably already said, but did they just fire you out of the blue or did they talk to you and it didn't go well?
Sorry to hear your story.
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?
> does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product?
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.
It was certainly the case for me back circa... I can barely remember, 2008/2009?
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.
Oh yeah, I'm referring to external launches, not to internal launches.
I’ve been gone a few years, but there was a process for contributing OSS code outside the company, and another for releasing company code externally, etc
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.
DiBona definitely started the OSS group and process, and ran it for many years.
Their process is a well-known template other organizations look at when creating their own:
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing
It would help if you clarify whether you followed the OSS release process guidelines, which are very clearly documented.
"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".
To clarify, I was on the Google Workspace Developer Relations team, the majority of my work was that exact OSS release process. It is not clearly documented and always changing. You can read some of it here, https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/..., but like I said it is always changing. Relevant: https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/27/what-is-goog...
Something in the explanation is missing here. It's still not clear to me from any of the provided context whether you got approval to release this. At least from my understanding of your role, if you had approval and used an official google repository, you would not get fired for merely publishing code that accesses a documented API through documented endpoints.
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).
...By the way, on a different subject, 4 days ago, had read your comments on a different post dealing with Alzheimer's. Just now, asked you a follow up question, and it's easy for them to get buried in your hackernews comments threads, so thought I'd just mention it. Thanks!
There was a Ariane/Launch with bits flipped including the eng bit from my manager.
then there is some detail missing from your report- for example, if leadership asked you to take down the repo (perhaps because another team was building/releasing/launching their own) and you refused, then you weren't fired for creating the Google workspace CLI, but for something else.
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"
The OSS release process has always stated that you can't use Google branding for a unilateral launch. You aren't making yourself look better
The "G" logo is a GitHub organization setting that applies to all repos in GitHub.com/googleworkspace and has for years.
Straight from that page:
>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.
Yes there was a launch with eng bit flipped by manager.
what is this bit flipping shit you keep alluding to?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it really sounds like you knew the policy in depth, and even contributed to the design of the policy, but when it came to your pet project you ignored it by skipping the release process? Am I missing something?
Wasn't ignored or skipped.
How do you explain "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
There are plenty of such projects with similar disclaimers under Google's own /google/ organization. To give a few examples:
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.
Really sorry to hear about this. It's so ironic because your tool is something that made G workspace so much more useful to me personally and was a deciding factor in which calendar project I used. Getting fired for making a product more useful to customers is quite ironic.
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.
5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.
Justin’s blog is the consistently the best resource for Google Apps Script content and he genuinely seemed to connect with the platform. He always stood out, as Googlers don’t typically seem to connect with anyone/anything.
The text of their "tweet that got me fired" is:
> Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: https://github.com/googleworkspac e/cli - built for humans and agents.
> Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
Yeah, that absolutely looks like an official product announcement from Google. Surely it was obvious they'd get in trouble for that.
Is the issue primarily caused by the English language?
(Google Workspace) CLI vs Google (Workspace CLI)
Because Google has there name in the product for which the CLI was produced it looks like he's using the Google brand when he's only using a descriptor of what his CLI was for. Trademarks are funny, but if I build a thing that only works with Google Workspace wouldn't it be a bit weird to not say that?
Probably contributes to the fact. In Opensource to avoid legal threats for instance with USB/HDMI and the likes you usually say "Compatible with" to avoid claiming certification/trademark infringement.
Good point. "CLI for Google Workspace" would be less ambiguous.
If you launched a “google workspace cli”, as a random person not affiliated with google, wouldn’t you expect to get sued too? You could maybe try to get away with “CLI for google workspace” (although clarifying it with “compatible with google workspace” or something like that would be better), but the first one just sounds like it’s an official thing. If you namedrop a copyrighted name, you have to make sure that people won’t think you’re officially affiliated with that.
The concerns seem to be primarily around trademark and logos? Unless there's more to it, those seem trivial to remedy by requiring removal of logos and renaming in the style of Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw. Google is well-known to be pretty sparing with firing people even for performance, so either this is a change in stance (entirely possible) or there's more to it.
For over the last >1 year, Google has been dismissing people without warning or cause. The days where it was nearly impossible to be fired are over; now you might be severed by surprise for no given reason at all.
Anecdotally speaking, I have seen a change in behavior even from early 2024. I was in a meeting (online) with a few people from Google shortly before Google IO about something fairly small. The technical engineer actually spoke(!) and he talked about revenue and stuff. I was dumbfounded that technical engineers at Google would ever care about "moving the needle".
Are you sure it wasn’t a “customer engineer” role?
No, it was not a sales call.
I know many people at Google who have been waiting to get laid off to get better terms than they would from just quitting. Now they know what to do.
People don't typically get a nice severance package if they're fired for violating company policy.
(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)
Firings like this often include a technically voluntary separation agreement that gives you a few extra weeks' pay or some additional months of health benefits etc. precisely to avoid that problem. (Also gets them out of paying unemployment, and means they can get a fresh set of NDAs/nondisparagement etc. signed with the employee.)
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.
It's both. They're usually more lenient than other companies when it comes to performance, but then there are random waves of layoffs that have more to do with what org you're in than anything else.
I think that’s a good instinct but this line…
“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.
Put aside whether this was justified or not, or the potential Streisand effect or PR damage (or vice versa). What signal is this sending to the young Google engineer who wants to build the next Gmail? Even if this violated every internal policy, firing someone who created something that people actually want is sending a very disturbing message (internally and externally).
Also, is this somehow relate to Addy Osmani’s recent departure from Google? (Was it in sympathy, was it a retaliation as this was “the tweet that got OP fired”?)
I support your opinion but if you think Google is concerned about the image you've been in the coma for the last 15 years :)
IMO: If the project leverages Google branding or authority improperly, then it shouldn't be on github and should not be under active development by Google employees; yet it is. If Google is suddenly alright with the way the project leveraged Google branding and authority, then the cause for firing the original developer, especially given Google's famously lax stance toward 20% projects and internal open source, is a lot weaker. In other words: Healthy companies do not fire individuals simply for breaching branding guidelines in a way that is ultimately beneficial and looked favorably upon by the company. That's literally just not a thing that happens; at worst you get a reprimand, and in many healthy companies you'd actually get a promotion.
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
There are more than a few plausible scenarios here. I've been inside google and I've seen other "i was fired" posts before. almost always, there is some additional context which gets left out. For example, I could see a path where the author wrote the code, got approval, published it, and then another part of the company (workspace) found out and wanted to use the same space/place or another place to publish their "competing but official" system, and the author refused (programmers are notorious for this) to take down his code when asked, at which point any number of different paths could lead to the employee being fired for not complying.
However, google is filled with personalities and egos and sometimes engineers are the collateral damage.
Usable link for anyone else without a twitter account: https://xcancel.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069482265953087602
Auto-redirect for FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toxcancel/
It'd be a fairly major faux pas to release a "non-product" open-source project in a way that smells like a product, but I don't think it's an automatic firing offense in most of big tech, especially if you're just releasing some technical (CLI) tool. It's more of a "stern talking-to" situation.
I'm guessing something more happened here. Maybe someone was displeased with how the author initially responded, or some powerful exec really wanted to make an example out of him (sounds like another group was working on an identically-named official product with the same name?), or they were just looking for an excuse to cut this particular role.
Great that it was available, but compared to Peter's version this one is inferior. It didn't have draft email as a default and asking it to write a draft would just send the email, oops lol. And doesn't have mutli-account support or a number of other features. I think one thing it could do better was inline commenting (maybe), but neither CLI can initiate their own comments...
Gog cli - https://github.com/openclaw/gogcli
For me it hangs on how the author describes his product “THE google workspace CLI” as opposed to “A google workspace CLI”. That sounds very much like an official google product to me.
He worked at Google and released it in a Google owned GitHub organization.
Seems like he just didn’t have the authority to release such a project.
Former Google employee here. This is exactly the kind of shit-for-brains action I'd expect from Google executives. Bravo on further dragging your image through the mud.
I work at Google so was curious. This person did attempt to follow the process, but was belligerent in review and it was cancelled. They continued anyway.
No surprise they were fired. If you work at google just search this CLI and you will see for yourself.
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.
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.
This is how these things usually play out. Unless OP was being difficult and defending his position that he did nothing wrong.
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.
Do not use the brand without permission is taught on Day 1. Who can give you permission, not so much.
Former Googler here...nah just kidding, I just felt left out.
Apparently LinkedIn doesn’t stop you from adding Google or any other company to your employment history. Go for it!
I'm gonna do it! A dream come true!
Why stop there?
I am considering adding Bell Labs, Xerox and Skunkworks Lockheed Martin to my work experience
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.
Maybe this is just one of the AI firing? It just happen OP did something before the firing announced and put that and firing together. This would explain why others also let go and the repo still there.
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?
How foolish creating something of value while under the foot of such evil
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.
Doesn’t appear to be at feature parity to GAM yet. https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM/wiki
I'm confused, this tweet reads like the lead-in or movie-trailer to a story, but where is the actual story?
So... they fired him for doing a 20% time project? I'm glad I don't have any of their stock to sell, what terrible management.
20% time project != able to just launch it YOLO style
I suspect the core issue here is that he launched it with Google logos without following any sort of process
That would be dumb but I don’t think it should result in firing still
2 months later, I think we can assume some kind of process behind that didnt go well for our friend here.
It looks like he wants his former manager to be fired too. This only gives bad signals to hiring teams.
His manager would the first line manager, and really not a decision maker at G. it possible that his manager would put him under a bus after getting called out by legal. Dunno.
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.
His former manager left Google last week
Yeah there is always more to these stories
I'd guess he was fired for refusing to comply after legal talked with him
That doesn't make sense because the repo is still up
Maybe it should not, but when I worked there, I certainly knew something like this probably would. At least, if it blew up and drew a lot of eyeballs.
Yeah, endorsement matters. It can represent the whole. You have to be careful with it.
Not for doing it, for releasing it publicly, presumably without permission. (If he did have permission, he probably has a pretty good case to bring.)
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.
We don't know the full facts, but seems harsh to fire him rather than consider other solutions.
Ex-Google here. This is pretty typical in the modern era.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yes, berating a coworker for being a fucking moron is unacceptable in corporate America.
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.
It's a reframe for
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?
how did you get from "raising your voice in a meeting" to "toxic assholes" and "racist slurs". Those are very different.
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!
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.
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).
Also, the one person listed in the Organization Members works at Google as a Developer Advocate.
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
I thought this was an official release by Google
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.
Funny to think about this when he got fired releasing a well-received product. On the other hand, Google released a subpar antigravity 2.0, full of bugs, almost unusable. The tech lead of Antigravity went on X to claim users don't know what they want.
Testing the keyboard.
tasting the rainbow
It's amazing the number of people (many of whom claim to be Google employees past or present) who probably consider themselves smarter than everyone else in any room they walk into...
...who did not figure out that this project was published in a google-run github org, it was approved by his manager, etc.
As he has said multiple times: he went through the publishing process with his manager's blessing. Stop making up bullshit about how he didn't follow processes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655744
I remember when Google was a bit rogue, full of brilliant people developing awesome things.
Very lame of Google.
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?
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.
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/...
This reminds me of how the founders of the so-called 'open source' cryptocurrency project I joined suppressed my work in the community.
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.
I see justinwp is commenting here… Justin, people are asking questions that you’re not replying to. Sorry, but it’s pretty disingenuous to tweet your story and post it here, but then refuse to answer requests for more info.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
Seems to me your management chain was thinking “Why the hell is someone on our team releasing a vibe-coded CLI that’s branded to look like an official API, when we’re 2 weeks from announcing the actual CLI??” If you didn’t know there was an official CLI in the works, that’s one thing, but if you did know then that’s pretty shitty to your teammates in Workspace and bad for users who would adopt one CLI (thinking it’s official) just to then see another one 2 weeks later.
Still, I would expect a talking-to and not an actual firing… but who knows what actually happened since you’re not responding to anyone. :shrug:
The read me clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product.". I am not getting what you want to imply here and what you expect him to reply here.
It's other people on this thread that had questions, more than me.
I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
> they were about to announce in 2 weeks
Market validation can change roadmaps. As I stated on Twitter/X, CLIs for agents was not a very interesting thing outside a small group earlier in 2026.
Thanks for the reply.
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
> But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google.
Nah. Fuck Google. Reasonable humans would talk to him, fix it, and move on. They don't need you carrying an ounce of water.
Yeah, the reasonable thing here is a stern talking-to about company policies, and then leveraging this thing to get more goodwill in the community about AI, which is an area Google is currently lacking in.
He probably got that talking to, and continued to be stubborn and unapologetic. Getting fired is quite difficult, as there will be multiple attempts at resolving any issue.
Google is sorely lacking in goodwill, period. I don't know why this guy got fired, and I don't expect we ever will know the whole truth. But even so this seems like a very foolish PR move for Google. Rightly or wrongly people are going to take his side, and they can't really afford to burn goodwill with their customers.
Doesn't seem like many are taking his side based on this thread.
This is what happens when companies are run by boomers who care more about building their orgs, instead of doing hard cutting edge engineering work.
Sucks for the author. Hope they land a good gig at a frontier lab.
Around that time I built a CLI to access and manage monitoring cameras that my company is selling. After giving a demo to my leadership I strongly adviced against releasing it to public. Giving agents access to some stuff is bad for customers.