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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone else that has every bypassed this step, but wasn't fired? What's the definition of an emergency?

Also it seems reasonable to me her complaint that this hurt her reputation, after all you're a Google employee and here you are smearing her in a public board. I know you're gonna say "I don't speak for my company", to which I will reply: It seems you're a Google employee, and you're speaking as a Google employee. It's distasteful that a Google employee find the need to accuse her in public like this. Is that a view shared by your co-workers? Do you all usually go in public boards to speak ill of past employees? To reveal why they were fired?

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People bypass this step all the time. The difference is they all have a good faith belief their managers would approve the change if they were available. Spiers 100% knew her changes wouldn't be approved by project leadership, and she used an emergency push to bypass their review.

Honestly, the fact that she has the gall to complain to the NLRB about this firing is pretty despicable. Google should be suing her for defamation.

> Honestly, the fact that she has the gall to complain to the NLRB about this firing is pretty despicable. Google should be suing her for defamation.

This is such an ill-informed understanding of how labor law works I'm not sure where to even start. You have a legal right to assert your legal rights, as was done here. The NLRB is akin to a trial court that makes the determination and issues judgements.

Winning a legal case is not "defamation".

NRLB cases are not "legal cases", they are administrative proceedings from which one has pretty much no actual legal recourse.

The have redress through the U.S. Court of Appeals for noncompliance with their decisions, so this really isn’t true at all.

The other side have no real recourse, though.

I work at Google, but have no inside knowledge of these events.

I doubt that Google spontaneously published the reason for the firing. AFAICT, the former employees went to the press following their firing, and the "violation of security policies" explanation was the response to articles initiated by the former employees. It's not clear to me how the parent's comments are a smear, unless the statement that "she bypassed restriction in our code change system" is not factual (which I don't know, but I have no reason to doubt it).

Not a Googler, but probably "to fix the json in case someone leaves out a comma causing the notification system to no longer work".

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