Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

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It wasn't her thoughts it was company policy, or to be specific it's required by law that this notice to be posted in the workplace.

It's was her personal judgment that it should be posted in a chrome add-on rather than only by poster like is typical in most workplaces. But assuming her job was to maintain an add-on that informs employees of company policy, and assuming her job typically lets her act with personal judgment, yeah I think that's perfectly reasonable

In fact, you can find further support of her action from the NLRB FAQ:

https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/faq/elections/are-there-any-c...

"The employer is also required to distribute the notice electronically to unit employees if it customarily communicates with employees in the unit electronically, either by email, by posting on an employer intranet site, or both"

Again, it's her judgment to add the notification (which links to the Google intranet posting of the NLRB poster), but considering that Google customarily informs employees of policy via notifications in this add-on, and she is in charge of maintaining said add-on, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable judgment to add this notification

Being in charge of the infrastructure does not mean you are in charge of the content.

Those are well defined roles. Specially in a company of that size.

She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.

I don't really know enough to agree or disagree with you.

She claims she's in a role to make judgment calls on adding content - and that this was reinforced by her previous stellar performance reviews, which made her confident in her judgment - but I don't personally have enough info to know if that's the truth. She very well could be stretching the truth that maybe every other addition she's made was under the direction of HR or product, in which case she is definitely out of line here - it would take the input of a Googler on her team to know for sure.

Googlers are encouraged---well, in the past, have been encouraged---to consider themselves capable of making judgement calls like this one.

That having been said, this would still be considered an unusual call to have made. But had I been on the receiving end of this message, I suspect I'd have found it annoying unless she remembered to suppress it after first display---if she had, I wouldn't have been bothered by it.

Part of being encouraged to exercise personal judgment is being responsible enough to participate in the consequences. Judgment with no/few personal consequences is reserved for children and legislators.

The consequences to something like this should not to be fired. It is a CL rollback and a blameless postmortem.

Getting fired is encouragement to you? Why would anyone input any value if having no platform to excercise judgement calls? 2/3 of typical decisions are either wrong or neutral..

Ethically it’s wrong and it’s a violation of the trust put into IT workers. It wasn’t a judgement call it was a personal choice.

> She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.

That's not so much a matter of opinion as of what her role is, exactly. I don't know. Do you?

The article says she's a security engineer. It would be pretty unlikely for a security engineer's job to include messaging employees about HR rules. It sounds more like this engineer modified a security tool to spam a bunch of coworkers with pro-union popups.

And if the outcome of a trial produces otherwise, would you be willing to retract such baseless claims?

This is inaccurate for internal tools.

> Being in charge of the infrastructure does not mean you are in charge of the content.

Whether or not it was her job has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it was protected activity.

Committing crimes, even just omitting required notices, falls outside of management discretion. At-will doesn't apply.

True, but the optics are terrible on this one. They should have seen this one coming and promoted her instead. They also should stop trying to prevent googlers from unionizing. The google of today is not the google of 15 years ago that's for sure.

While they're at it, they should stop bending (and probably breaking) export controls regarding China, and stop doing immoral DoD and ICE projects.

And heck, why not implement a process by which all private contracts are approved by a company-wide vote? Including the guy that sweeps the floor. Oh, afraid that employees will leak the details of the project? There's always NDAs, but if you are so concerned about leaks, maybe that's not a project you should be doing then.

| And heck, why not implement a process by which all private contracts are approved by a company-wide vote?

Wait, what? How would this work? Who would take a Google bid seriously if, after awarding them the contract, they turn around and have to ask the employee population for permission to proceed?

The big issue I see with a lot of discussion around this issue is not a lot of thought is put into the practicality of running a large business concern. Stuff that works when it's two guys and a server does not (can not) fly when you have a large group of people to manage.

Um, there's already a process whereby private contracts, as well as all other company business is approved by a vote. It's called the shareholder meeting.

Now understandably the janitor has provided a lot less capital than deeply invested shareholder, so their votes are uniformly weighted according to their share of ownership.

I'm guessing the engineer might own about 1/10,000,000th or so of the company if she has a healthy 401K. So as long as she can convince 10,000 or so other employees and 49.91% of the rest of shareholders to go along...

> It wasn't her thoughts it was company policy, or to be specific it's required by law that this notice to be posted in the workplace.

Unless she was asked to do it by management, it was her thoughts. As much as the title makes this seem like David v Goliath this is really just employer v disgruntled former employee.

No matter your thoughts on "its required by law... Blah blah blah" it's not up to her to enforce the law on behalf of an employer. Google has the right to post or not, statements of its choosing. In fact it's absolutely within Google's right to ignore this law, doesn't mean there won't be consequences but it they can do it.

This is so cut and dry I'm surprised she found a lawyer willing to take the case. It's staggering there's even a discussion ok HN about this.

Engineers at Google are not drones. They do not exist to only do exactly what their boss asks. If engineers did do that, they'd never get promoted there. Google's management can't have it both ways.

> It wasn't her thoughts it was company policy

FTA, your personal assertion is quite wrong. Her line of work was security and at most she was tasked with posting content regarding privacy and security concerns regarding non-Google tools and services.

Her personal political views and opinions don't pass off as InfoSec topics.

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