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Comment by jpmontez | Hacker News Reader

"Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension. Another source at Google familiar with the update approval process confirmed to NBC news that those two approvals are standard practice for a browser extension update."

She alleges it was done by the book.

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I'm pretty sure that if I stood up in my office, I could find one or two people who would rubber stamp a change for me, assuming it was in good faith/approved, and would discuss implementation details/issues with the code, rather than question the reason for the changes. Particularly if the changes were tagged with a Jira. If your only defence is "well, what I did wasn _technically_ allowed", you lose the benefit of the doubt.

Incidents like this are the reason why red tape ends up introduced on small teams, and are what turn projects into a nightmare to work on.

That sounds suspiciously like a continuous delivery approval process (like needing two approvers for a PR).

Does what she did even pass the sniff test? What if she got permission from her supervisor to inject $political_message_you_dont_agree_with in your browser. Would you be okay with that?

Well no, but considering that she seems to have followed the correct processes if she had done that I'd have expected the response to be rolling back the commit and a follow up postmortem to document what was missing from the process that allowed it to happen and changes made to the process to prevent it from happening in the future. Not firing the employee. You shouldn't blame workers for system failures.

What if your manager told you it was okay to post “Make America Great Again” or “Hope” (Obama’s slogan) slogans on everyone’s desk because he was staunch Republican/Democrat - would you just shrug and say “my manager said it was okay”?

Again, labor/union messaging has protections that political campaigning does not. If you were a manager and you told your employee to throw away the pro-union pamphlet that you taped to your cubicle wall, your manager would be putting the company in legal trouble.

Taping it to your wall is acceptable. Posting it to my computer screen isn’t.

why, and more importantly, why is this an "immediately fire" level of offense, would this have been the result if the popup reminded you that its earth day?

Its naive to think her firing had nothing to do with the fact Google doesn't like unions.

Why? It’s just like religion. If your religion tells you not to drink, I will respect that. If your religion tells you that I’m not allowed to drink I will tell you to f’ off.

The irony being of course, Google's entire business is shoving ads into people's faces that approximately nobody wants to see.

And guess what? I don’t need government intervention for that either. I can install an ad blocker, not use software that is ad based with no way to get rid of the ads and not buy Android phones. Free will is great isn’t it?

But the owners of websites want to show these google ads to you. Who is in control of content: the viewers or creators/hosters?

A pro-union statement may be a "political message", but it is also content that has special protections in labor law. As the article says, as part of a legal settlement over alleged labor violations, Google is required to print out and post a statement of employee rights [0] that begins, "FEDERAL LAW GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO: Form, join, or assist a union;...Act together with other employees for your benefit and protection;"

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...

Print out and post is not the same thing as injecting JS in the browser. Was she part of the legal or compliance team?

FTA: "The tool is managed by the platform security team, for which Spiers worked for almost two years as a security engineer."

Is it part of the security teams mission to insure legal compliance to workplace laws?

I’m part of my company’s “architecture team” but that doesn’t mean I have the right (even though I do have the access) to spin up an X1 AWS instance at work with 2TB of RAM. If my immediate manager said it was okay, I would have sense enough to get it confirmed by my CTO.

Company management does not typically go out of its way to disseminate right-to-unionize speech. They are legally prevented from stifling such speech. And apparently, their alleged labor violations were serious enough that the NLRB mandated as part of their settlement that Google must post more material informing workers of their right to unionize [0].

But my overall point is not that I think her alteration was appropriate (given the context of the tool). But that her mistake could reasonably be seen as one made in good faith, especially because the content itself does not outright violate company policy or labor law. In other words: approved content, unapproved venue. The question is: that's a fireable offense?

So why do you keep likening it to hypotheticals that would reasonably violate standard policy and procedure, such as conspiring with your manager to spend $53K on a Mac Pro that you use at home? Or injecting via browser notification a "political_message_you_dont_agree_with"?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...

A former company I worked for was under a consent decree. Their legal team had to come up with remedies that were acceptable by the government to address them - not their security team.

I was the dev lead responsible for writing software that would be used by the department that was most impacted by the decree. Should I have taken it upon myself to create pop ups informing them to be careful about compliance? Legally, I probably couldn’t have been fired but would that have displayed good judgement?

When you are part of certain departments or positions, you have more access and therefore are expected to have better judgement.

Many startups have a culture where you could spin up an X1 AWS instance with 2TB of RAM if you need it, without having to go and get approval. Similarly, Google has a culture where engineers make various changes to internal tools without needing approval from higher ups.

Well, according to the post, obviously not....

No, the post states that it is obviously the case:

>This kind of code change happens all the time. We frequently add things to make our jobs easier or even to just share hobbies or interests. For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture.

It’s amazing that you think that anecdote is okay or even welcomed....

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