If you further read the article, she went through the standard approval process for changes. She did it by the book. That's hardly "injecting code".
That sounds like code review approvals, not actual project/management approval of the 'feature'.
We have the same: Cannot commit any code change unless 2 other team members have reviewed it. That has nothing to do with having actual project/management approval for the change.
I don't really see how Google could be in the right here though. If they have an internal program for creating alerts/extensions for specific websites, and Spiers followed the normal procedure for adding such an extension, there doesn't seem to be a problem. The only problem is Google being anti-union, and retaliating against someone for quietly promoting unions in line with existing policies seems a lot like illegal retaliation.
I can't see how google is in the wrong. Unless google allows anyone to change this extension for personal reasons and they only flagged her. Could someone change it to let everyone know they are selling cookies or accepting donations to their church.
It's incredibly obvious this was a violation of her fiduciary duty.
The fact that the message was about employee labor rights means that Google might be in a precarious legal position
I have a poster here in my home office that was mailed to me by my employer's HR department. It advises me of all my rights under state and federal labor laws: equal opportunity, workplace safety, minimum wage, etc. In my mind, it is not at all inappropriate to advise employees of their rights. In fact, the only reason I have this poster is because state and federal labor laws require such notices. Those laws and those requirements are written in the blood of all the serfs, children, and laborers who couldn't earn living wages or who were forced to work at a tender age or who were injured due to corporate malfeasance. The freedom of association is likewise recognized as a right inherent to all people, and its protections were likewise bought with blood. We should all be reminded of our rights and the reasons we safeguard them. An employer who tries to interfere with its employees' freedom of association only seeks to exploit them. If it treated its employees well, it wouldn't need to worry about organized labor—and its employees wouldn't need to organize in the first place.
If Google allows any team member to freely push changes without formal change request, it has to be implied that changes must comply with the scope of the project, company policies, professional standards, etc.
In any case, my point would stand: It does not sound like she had actual project/management approval.
To play devil's advocate, the 'approval' she got does not absolve her (if we suppose that she did something wrong), it just means that the coworkers who approved the change are also in hot water.
I don't see how Google isn't in the right here. The approval process for this security tool was designed to minimize red-tape and maximize contributions because the goal was security, and the assumption was that the lax process wouldn't be abused. The clear intent of the tool is not to push the political agenda. It was there to warn about security-related issues while browsing. She abused the process and deserved to be reprimanded.
Here's an example .. like most companies we have a wiki that anybody can edit. The intent is to get contributions from everybody around product-related issues (e.g. debugging a particular problem, how to configure the product for a specific use-case). Nobody polices usage of this wiki, and the wiki has no specific access controls to bar any individual from editing any page. Certainly though if someone started putting in notes at the top of some of the pages to push a political agenda that would be an abuse of the process, wouldn't you say?
Just to be clear: the message she communicated wasn't about some divisive social issue, it was warning employees to not break federal labor law.
Then be clear. We both know what she was doing, why be obtuse?
This was an activist power-play. Every article that is written about this lists the action as activism. Again, why pretend otherwise?
But if you want more clarification: it's not her job as a SECURITY ENGINEER to send warnings about federal statue compliance through a security tool. I also have yet to have anybody demonstrate that Google was breaking any federal law, and I highly doubt they would. They have entire departments that deal with legal complience.
And you linked to a labour consulting company website, which I take is where this actvist decided to helpfully issue threats to senior management through the security tool she was tasked with maintaining so they think twice about contracting them.
This is a such a clear violation on her part that I am flabbergasted that you would actually defend the move. She deserved to be fired for her arrogant stunt. You don't get to dictate compliance policy (as an early 20-something tech-sister, who knows nothing) to a company employing 50,000 people.
When you use the words like activist and activism you evoke images of people pushing for new things that are politically decisive in some way.
The message she got fired over was expressed pretty settled interpretation of federal labor law that Google recently agreed to disseminate. It's like calling it an "activist power play" to remind the government of the First Amendment when if it tried to censor something or other. It's a stretch.
If anyone's being activist, it's the people who are trying to treat the expression of those rights as some kind of inappropriate activism.
> I also have yet to have anybody demonstrate that Google was breaking any federal law, and I highly doubt they would. They have entire departments that deal with legal complience.
Why do you "highly doubt" Google would break the law? In the past they've broken federal law in pretty obvious ways over labor practices.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
They've also been forced to display the list of rights in question as part of a settlement with the NLRB:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...
Apparently that list is what the notification in question linked to.
> And you linked to a labour consulting company website, which I take is where this actvist decided to helpfully issue threats to senior management through the security tool she was tasked with maintaining so they think twice about contracting them.
I linked to a screenshot of the message we're actually discussing. You can see the so-called "threat" yourself:
> go/nlrbnotice Policy
> Do not violate go/nlrbnotice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.
> View Policy
> This is a such a clear violation on her part that I am flabbergasted that you would actually defend the move.
Black people sitting at lunch counters was once "such a clear violation" of corporate policy, too, but it was pretty defensible, no? Sometimes you have to take a broader view of something than whether it violated policy or not.
I'm not saying this action is fully equivalent to a lunch-counter sit-in, however I do think Google's reaction here was unsupportably harsh. The worst they should have done was issue a reprimand. I'm also "flabbergasted" by the over-the-top condemnation of this engineer's actions.
Because that's what you are when you co-opt an internal tool to put up messaging over the web page of the consulting group that works with your employer. She knew what she was doing. She knew it was a political statement. She may even have even wanted to be martyred.
>The message she got fired over was expressed pretty settled interpretation of federal labor law.
She didn't get fired for her message even though you're trying to spin it that way. The medium matters here. You don't get to co-opt internal tools to post your interpretation of federal labor law, or to send a message to the management team, or whatever else her motivations were. That's why she got fired.
>What are you talking about? I linked to a screenshot of the message we're actually discussing. You can see the so called "threat" yourself:
I know exactly what she did. She made a political statement about a labour consulting group (that they can or do infringe on federal law) and that was directed at least partly at executive management (who else is going to work with IRI Consultants and browse their page). This was a purposeful activist power-play.
The gaslighting that you're engaging in is offputting. This kind of thing would have gotten her fired from pretty much every company in the country and for good reason - she's untrustworthy and cannot seperate her job as a Security Engineer from her activism, and I'm sorry you can't see that.
>Black people sitting at lunch counters was once "such a clear violation" of corporate policy, too, but it was pretty defensible, no?
She's not a black person during Jim Crow era. She's not oppressed, and it's offputing that you would even make that comparison. She's a bay-area engineer who was making a very good salary and betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.
>I'm not saying this action is fully equivalent to a lunch-counter sit-in,
I hope not because that would be insane.
>The worst they should have done was issue a reprimand.
That's your opinion. I think she deserved termination. You don't want this kind of person on your security team. You cannot trust her to seperate activism from work.
And it is interesting that you can claim that she did nothing wrong, and at the same time understand why she should be reprimended.
> This kind of thing would have gotten her fired from pretty much every company in the country and for good reason - she's untrustworthy and cannot seperate her job as a Security Engineer from her activism, and I'm sorry you can't see that.
What Google-specific support do you have for this, than post-hoc rationalizations based on her firing? Every indication I've seen has told me that Google has developed a very unique corporate culture, which makes inferences from "every company in the country" suspect.
I can definitely see your position (which approximately seems to be: a worker's primary moral obligation is to serve his employers to their satisfaction during his employment. Assertion of his own rights on work time with work resources is a severe moral violation as it puts the workers' interest above the employers'.), I just disagree.
> She's not a black person during Jim Crow era. She's not oppressed, and it's offputing that you would even make that comparison. She's a bay-area engineer who was making a very good salary and betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.
I'd say she is oppressed, just in a different, less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era.
> And it is interesting that you can claim that she did nothing wrong, and at the same time understand why she should be reprimended.
Really? I thought it was pretty widely understood that morality and law are not the same. You can have immoral things that are legal, and moral things that are illegal. Corporate policy is a weak kind of law that has even less claim to respect than federal and state law.
That's not post-hoc rationalization. That's the stated reason. That's also clearly the reason if you take an inventory of the facts on hand.
>Every indication I've seen has told me that Google has developed a very unique corporate culture
Yes, "unique" just like every snowflake is unique. And "Unique corporate culture" doesn't mean you can do whatever you want, as James Damore found out. And yes, her actions (not anybody elses) led to her termination, as would have been the case in every other company.
>I can definitely see your position (which approximately seems to be: a worker's primary moral obligation is to serve his employers to their satisfaction during his employment. Assertion of his own rights on work time with work resources is a severe moral violation as it puts the workers' interest above the employers'.)
That's not my position and I don't appreciate this distortion.
And no, she's not a moral arbiter of Google. She doesn't have the right to assert her interpretation of law and morality on the entire corporation. Maybe she thinks she was doing a moral action (though I would argue her action is narcissim and attention-seeking), but Google employs tens of thousands of people across the world, with different religions and politics and beliefs. You don't get to co-opt internal tools to advocate for Jesus Christ as your saviour (and what could be more moral than saving people from eternal damnation) just because you think that's the moral action.
>I'd say she is oppressed, just in a different, less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era.
Talk about an understatement of the century. She's as much oppressed as a grounded teenager, which, you're right, on the oppression scale is "less-severe way than black people during the Jim Crow era".
The stated reason can obviously be a post-hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible that she crossed a line her employer drew after the fact.
> That's not my position and I don't appreciate this distortion.
Well, if you could clarify, that would be great. It's clear to me that there's some moral component to your position, given your language:
>>> she's untrustworthy
>>> [she] betrayed the trust that her position entitled her to.
> She doesn't have the right to assert her interpretation of law and morality on the entire corporation.
(I should note that it's not her interpretation, it is the law.)
> I would argue her action is narcissim and attention-seeking
I does sound like you feel that her overriding moral obligation was to serve her employers to their satisfaction, and that it was a strong moral violation to take a fairly anodyne action that caused her employers some discomfort. No money was lost, no security systems breached, no confidential data exposed. The only thing that happened was a few people saw a required legal notice that her employers would rather have people forget about.
> Spiers' pop-up message was inserted into a tool that notifies employees of privacy and security concerns about using non-Google tools and services, like warning employees not to upload proprietary information to Dropbox, Spiers said. The tool is managed by the platform security team, for which Spiers worked for almost two years as a security engineer.
So, seems like the bulletin was pretty far outside the intended function and should have required more than a code review. I wonder what will happen to the people who accepted the patch?
I’m surprised how many people are jumping through hoops to defend this sort of thing.
I think a reasonable reaction would be to remove the message from the extension, put in place a better review process, better training and possibly some minor negative comments at review time.
No, but I think they'd similarly be fired if they had written an anti-union popup. (Indeed, if someone wrote an anti-union popup and weren't fired for it, I expect that would itself have made the news as a "Google hates unions" story.)
Yes, immediately and for cause. Internal business apps at large companies are not your personal playground.
Yes I do. 100%.
>put in place a better review process,
This is your solution? The process was intentionally lax so that you wouldn't have too much red-tape when soliciting contributions. The assumption was that this wouldn't be abused by your Security engineers(!!). Your solution to this is to make the process more onerous because one individual couldn't behave like an adult? How about you keep the process as is and you fire the individual who couldn't differentiate activism from security work.
Again with the jumping through hoops...
The application maybe, depending on how you set it up. Not the website itself.
Edit: Her warning literally said: "Do not violate NLRB notice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." (see screenshot in article, bottom right.) This is something that Google is already obligated to acknowledge under labor law. They're simply shooting the messenger.
I don't know why there is this pervasive desire to strangle developers. This is a pretty recent phenomena in my opinion and certainly nothing close to a requirement to develop great software.
If I were an employee at Google, actions such as this would let me seriously consider to look for other work. The requirement for the code review for internal tools already seems awefully restrictive.
Give employees power / freedom and fire fast if you do stupid things.
Stricter regulations/ checks so they cannot mess up hard in the first place. At the cost of slower pace and less risks taken.
Google has historically been the former. And it comes with people doing stupid things and getting fired. Just the world is not used for huge companies to keep operating in such mode.
I applaud Google for keeping being open and not enforcing processes. The rest of the world will grow up eventually.
But I fail to see how the employee in question did something that justifies firing her. Maybe there are other factors involved, but I certainly think that people opting for getting rid of her only on the basis of publicly available information shouldn't have any form of responsibility for staff to be honest.
How on earth is that restrictive? Having code review for any important code should be normal at any company. Just because the tool is internal doesn't mean it's trivial and any engineer (especially a 21-year-old: how is she even an employee and not an intern at that age?) should be able to merge anything in willy-nilly.
So to answer your inane question, she wouldn't be an employee because she's not old enough to have graduated college yet. And that's just to get a BS degree; lots of engineers these days (esp. at top-tier companies like Google) get an MS degree before they enter the workforce full-time.
I'm rather appalled that I have to spell this out here on this forum.
Yeah. I don't think so. The tool in question is an internal security tool, not a communication tool to get her message out. The two engineers who signed off on this should also be reprimanded. This is a clear abuse of a process meant to take in security-related contributions without too much red-tape.
And you want a separation of concerns here. You don't want a tool created for security to push the political agenda of some activists.
And she literally says the only reason for her change was because she wanted to get the word out because posters aren't effective enough: "Spiers told NBC News that she was inspired to create a digital notification because “a poster in the cafeteria is not the best way of reaching the majority of Googlers.”" ... yeah. Sorry posters aren't effective enough for you, you can't do that.