Tangential question: does Google allow employees, not directly tasked with it, to represent the company online as they wish? Most companies I know of have a strict ‘do not speak for the company’ policy.
In my case, Cloud PR knows me, but I also knowingly risk my job (I clearly believe I have good enough judgment in what I post). If Urs and Ben think I should be fired, I'm okay with that, as it would represent a significant enough difference in opinion, that I wouldn't want to continue working here anyway.
Finally, for what it's worth, I have been reported before for "leaking internal secrets" here on HN! It turned out to be a totally hilarious discussion with the person tasked with questioning me. Still not fired, gotta try harder :).
Whenever I talk about the inner workings of Google I try to reference to external talks, books, or white papers to go along with my comments. Luckily a lot has already been set externally about how Google works.
I would love to understand the though process of someone going out of their way to remove someone’s livelihood from them because of a comment on HN (when applied in a normal circumstance of adding additional information or correcting a misconception — I’m clearly not saying that bonehead comments shouldn’t have consequences.)
This is not so difficult though. You just need to adjust your starting point to someone who doesn't like boulos' first. That's not so difficult IMO, it's a large org and boulos' seems to be a fairly prolific commenter here.
He certainly shares stuff I wouldn't be comfortable sharing, but then again he's a lot better connected and in the know than I am.
On the other hand, to anonymously submit a complaint feels, to me, like a personal attack. Someone who simply doesn’t like them in for whatever reason. To me, that action seem petty.
Maybe the person making the report said "Hey, I found some internal details on this external site. I'm not sure if this is allowed. Maybe someone who knows more should take a look at it, here's the link to the page."
Submitting a complaint to an internal review because “you’re not sure it’s allowed” is really petty.
In my opinion, and experience, folks who have good intentions usually pull you to the side to get a feel for a situation before filing a formal complaint.
If you haven't read them, you have to!
One of the things I really like about working at Google is that they place a lot of trust in the judgement of the individual employees. I generally make it clear when I'm stating my personal opinion versus the "official" (for whatever that means given how informal the project is) one, but I don't have to carefully go through an approved list of talking points, run my HN by the legal department, etc.
Obviously, in certain situations, things get more official and formal. For example, when I went to Google IO to give a talk, we did have some documentation and coaching beforehand about how to handle various questions we might get about non-public stuff, other projects related to ours, etc. We are also expected to run any slides by legal before being publicly shown in a venue with a wide audience like IO. But, even then, the legal folks I've worked with have been a pleasure to talk to.
The company's culture is basically "We hired you because you're smart. We trust you to use your brain." It would be squandering resources to not let their employees use their own intelligence and judgement.
I work at another FANG with a roughly equal engineering community and I don’t see my kind commenting as much at all!
It's probably okay to say that we know the problem and here are the steps we're taking to mitigate it. It would not be okay to say something with large scale stock price implications for Google it another publicly traded corporation. For instance a Google employee shouldn't say something like "faulty solar panels fried Google's 10 largest data centers and twelve others have been lost to rebel drone strikes", even if false, since it could have a drastic impact on the earnings and future value of Google, Google's customers, and Google's competitors.
Even less obvious things like Google's plans for adding privacy features to the Chromium open source project can have a serious impact (see https://www.barrons.com/articles/google-chrome-privacy-quest...).