Another Fired Google Employee Claims They Were Targeted for Labor Organizing | Hacker News Reader

Another Fired Google Employee Claims They Were Targeted for Labor Organizing

onezero.medium.com

50 pointsqips55 comments

If you go to her original post linked in the article, there is an interesting and fairly detailed account of what happened from the other side’s view in the comments. That view is much more focused on the fact that she broke protocol for installing the notification just because she wanted to, and if everyone did the same thing, there would be some chaos.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone doesn't understand that, though. Of course there would be chaos if people were allowed to create popup windows to communicate whatever they want. That ought to be clear as soon as you read that she created the popup and Google didn't want her to.

Agreed. Imagine if everyone was allowed to abuse their positions. After years of working in enterprises, I know many that would create popups about the silliest things. The Security VP quoted in the article stated that she abused a security tool, and I agree.

My best story is a popup every time you connected to the main corporate wifi, saying that you've connected and you should disconnect if you're not authorized to connect.

>Imagine if everyone was allowed to abuse their positions.

So it's okay if some people are allowed to abuse their positions by firing someone who essentially added a little footnote on one website in particular with a reminder as to what Federal law actually dictates?

That's my issue with that logic. We are all citizens first. Corporate shenanigans should never undermine civil rights. The right to organize and to do so at work, is protected, just as the right of a corporation to spew as much anti-unionization propaganda is protected. Period.

The employer will find any other excuse besides the blatantly illegal thing on which to pin the rationale for the firing. They just want to reap the benefit of the outcome (one less active organizer) without the hassle of being called to the carpet for a clear violation of labor law. That's how it works. It's all about how to get what you want while having an out to fall back on when someone calls you out. This is why legal departments exist. To ensure a jury in the event of getting called out will have to slog through every conceivable distraction before the company can be held accountable for their actions.

She has the legal right to do union organizing at work, but she doesn't have the right to subvert the company's tools to do it. The idea that misbehavior becomes okay once you say "well I was organizing a union" seems incredibly toxic to me, and fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of freedoms software developers generally enjoy. If Spiers gets her way, and Google is legally barred from expecting line staff to use their powers responsibly, that just means Google will start requiring manager approval for everything potentially disruptive.

Yes, that seems like a really good reason to have a limited set of people who can create such popups. Which Google did.

If someone makes an alert that management wishes to overrule, that seems like a really good reason to be able to revert commits, which I believe Google's version control system is able to do.

If they made a really bad mistake and you want to make sure they don't do it again, that seems like a really good reason to have their manager call them into a meeting.

If they made a really, really bad mistake, then perhaps there's formal disciplinary action, like a negative performance review or a docked bonus.

None of this seems like a reason to fire someone. Definitely none of this seems like a reason to drag them into a conference room and interrogate them to disclose the names of other people they're organizing with. That's what you would do if you were threatened by the content of the notification instead of unhappy with an abuse of process.

We'll never know exactly how the disciplinary process went down. But from Spiers' Medium post, it sounds like they tried to have meetings multiple times and she doubled down. If she told Google what she's telling the public, that she did nothing wrong and it was illegal for Google to stop her, that seems like a plenty good reason to fire her.

I thought she talked this step through others on the team.

Mandatory pop ups are mandatory pop ups; no matter how useful or relevant the message is, it doesn't mask the fact that it's annoying and disrespects the user of the browser. No one would be happy to receive a pop up window every time they visit a site.

I wish they fired people for doing pop ups, that would be Nice.

That was literally her job. https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1207003914718998528

I don't think that really makes sense. If someone edited build tooling to print a labor notice after every compilation, "no it's my job to manage that build tool" would be a really dumb defense.

kccqzy was complaining about the mandatory popup.

If that is the case then that speaks to a whole different level of incompetence that there is not any kind of Change Control or approval at google

The "policy notifier" popup appears to have already existed as an internal tool. Google seemed unhappy with this specific message flowing through it.

Yes that tool was preexisting. But no, all other messages served by that tool are throttled, meaning if you visit an offending site several times, you get the pop up once. She overrode the throttle for her particular message. That turned her message from a gentle reminder to a nanny nag. It's a clear abuse.

That's helpful, and not mentioned in the various articles I've read.

It actually took a second for me to understand you were talking about the article here, because Medium itself insists on serving me a mandatory popup explaining that I can create an account.

And of course every time someone makes a suboptimal UI they should be fired.

A direct post from the fired worker. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/google...

Also, her on Twitter, includes screenshots of the "pop up" https://twitter.com/eiais/status/1206937188409044993

It's somewhat curious to me that neither she not Google are spelling out exactly what was changed in the code.

The "policy notifier" existed already as an internal use Chrome plugin. It apparently had a list of sites that would merit it popping a policy reminder.

So, she clearly mapped a policy reminder for that website. But, elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961447) it's suggested that she also made a special rule to show it every time for that site, where other sites would only show it on first visit.

That's just a config option on the notification whether it shows every time or once per month or whatever.

So there wasn't a "code change" per se, then? She just pushed a config file or similar?

I think so. Note that there's likely not a huge distinction between the two, because Google uses some pretty complicated configuration languages that are often Turing complete (e.g. Blaze essentially allows arbitrary Python). It's all checked into the one true monorepo as well.

Google claims that she was fired for violating security policies, not for being annoying. So neither side is claiming that was the reason.

They claimed change management policy as a reason, so I was curious if any code actually changed.

This is another article about Kathryn Spiers, the fifth person recently to claim that Google fired them for organizing. Earlier ahem spirited discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21813619

too soon to start putting 2019 on titles?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com