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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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
>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.
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".
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?
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. Gotta go to the Nissan Altima forums.
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.
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.
haha "liquidity in human capital" am i right?