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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

I thought they were fired for somehow getting chrome to pop-up notices when visiting the website of a google contractor that was anti-union.

I mean, I like the effort, but... it's unlikely that an employer is going to want to pay employees to do things they don't want to have done?

"Her suspension began just three hours after she published a piece of code that created a pop-up notification when Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants"

I'm curious how one even gets chrome to monitor and pop up a notice when google folks visit a website. If it was some kind of ad that seems OK. If she used google's infrastructure to push a popup to all google employees... do other businesses permit this? Can a chase employee push something to all chase.com users alerting them to something they care about?

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I feel this case will backfire on the ex-employees. Instead of explaining the evil that Google is doing, it'll put focus on why the employees were fired. I'm sure that Google has a very detailed file on reasons for the firing (vs. just laying them off etc.) and those reasons were review by lawyers.

Google's revenge will be to display those reasons every time a potential employer google's their names.

"Don't be evil" != "must let me use their platform for my personal moral crusade", though...

IIRC they added it to one of the utility extensions that many Google employees install, although I no longer recall which one.

Fascinating. You'd think you'd have to be in some kind of security type role to be able to do this if they had access / control over an extension on google employee computers.

Kind of funny seeing maybe some google naivete and the "do no evil" thing come back to bite google.

When I was in high school I had a fair bit of fun going outside the permitted guidelines. By college I'd developed a reasonable sense of boundaries with other folks equipment / jobs with a trust element.

If I pushed a pop-up notice out company wide with a message my employer didn't approve of, I'd definitely be expecting to be going out the door rather than doing the litigation process.

Having worked a bit in govt interesting to see the NLRB pursue this, in govt my experience was a REDICULOUSLY dim view would be taken of something like this.

> If I pushed a pop-up notice out company wide with a message my employer didn't approve of, I'd definitely be expecting to be going out the door rather than doing the litigation process.

If it were relating to anything other than labor organization, it would be a no brainer. But there are special legal protections for labor organization, so I not sure it's clear cut in this particular circumstance.

> You'd think you'd have to be in some kind of security type role to be able to do this if they had access / control over an extension on google employee computers.

There are a lot of employee-written extensions at Google, published in an internal Chrome web store. I even wrote one in a few days and published it. Some of them are owned by teams in one way or another, but a surprising amount of developer tooling at Google is somebody's side project.

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