Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
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First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.
The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.
I maintain that firing is an extreme resolution here (taking the claims at face value of course). Surely this employee has demonstrated the capacity to deliver impact and could be redirected if properly incentivized.
This did the opposite, didn’t it?
It does not contain people who flout Google's privacy, security, or intellectual property policies. Those people are, quite rightfully, un-contained from Google with speed they can't muster for anything else in the company.
Also more interesting is the fact the repository is still alive and kicking.
I can see Google firing the dev but HR/Legal giving a bogus reason, as is regular practice.
Sure, but it's a slap on the wrists. It seems like an extreme reaction.
> The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
Again, they could have just asked them to retire theirs in favour of the official one. Rather than be a problem, it could have been an opportunity.
Bonus-promotion disruption.
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
The wording is very ambiguous, but to me it suggests the opposite. If legal was question why the logo was on the account profile picture, not just that specific repo's content, that would imply the entire account was unauthorized, right?
If that was the issue, it's not very hard to delete it either... Either nobody cares, or that repo is not as bad as for Google as it seems.
The repo wasn't even taken down.
Dude worked there for 7 years. Saying "oh, he just didn't understand the policy for going through legal/management approval" just does absolutely not pass the sniff test.
Seems kind of rude.
It clearly wasn't moonlighting or done without management's support/knowledge.
At one point Google was there to build cool shit and enable people to do it; not extract maximal amount of value and "being Evil" by the values of its time.
I would have been fired from every employer I've ever worked for of any size for doing something like that - including Google circa 2018.
Especially that he's an "engineer" not a "Googler" or "a person."
God what a fall from grace.
“Actions have consequences”
Like, I should be able to even berate my employer, as long as I'm not doing it from a persona that's directly tied to my employer e.g. my real name or git handle etc. They might not like it, but they sure as shit shouldn't be able to fire me for it. This would include working on extending a company's products, so long as I don't use the proprietary knowledge I'm privy to.
I realize that this guy published his thing under an alias directly tied to his work. My question was sparked from the general sentiment of your reply - and I am being genuine, sometimes I feel like this stance of mine is somehow "too radical"
I understand that this is not reality in most of the world, but I'm genuinely asking. I'm in the EU and I'm not in the software/silicon valley industry; if that helps with context.
Was the response short sighted? Up for debate. But unfortunately for the author, they have no real legal standing on this matter. Had it been their own repo, sans any branding, it would likely have been fine.
There are many things you should be able to do publicly without repercussion from your employer. However, your example is berating them, and I'm taking that literally: "to criticize in an angry manner".
If I read this correctly, then you believe your employer should be able to fire you if you angrily criticize them in public under your name. I agree in principle, that could damage their trust in your ability to do your job. Depending on specifics, that damage could be enough to justify firing you.
I don't understand why doing so anonymously should change the potential damage to their trust in you, if they later learn you said what you did.
Given my stance on a lot of things though I don't know how much evidence this is that this view isn't "too radical" but my (biased) take is that a lot of good ideas are radical until they aren't, and usually the ones don't ever become mainstream have better counterarguments than anything I've heard or been able to come up with against this view. I still don't really expect it to change in my lifetime though (in terms of what's legally allowed) just because of how massive a shift it would be.
or anywhere else,
unless my contract and pay reflects that.
The public face that Googlers put on is extremely sycophantic to Google, imho. At best, this sycophancy is unconscious, self-preserving behavior in a vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt who ostensibly created something people LOVED and still fired them without a clearly articulated reason that counterbalances their positive contributions. At worst, this sycophancy is conscious, brown nosing behavior in order to climb to the highest rung of the career ladder by shedding all burdens of self-consistency, self-reflection, and noble intentions.
Please don't read into this comment what isn't said. I'm not saying Google is entirely evil, nor am I saying everyone other than me is sycophantic. There are those who recognize the callous culture that is often present at Google, and generally speaking, this bad behavior is only called out by Googlers in subtle ways, such as random HN comments :)
> [Googlers live in a] vicious culture that can fire someone like Justin Poehnelt [...] without a clearly articulated reason
At the end of the day, nobody other than Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason. Not other staff, and certainly not members of the public.
If you were the one fired, would you want HR to announce that you were fired for taking Sundar's special cookies out of the cookie jar labeled "For VIPs ONLY!!!"? That seems like a trifling reason to me, and maybe not justified. But maybe I don't agree with the general population, and maybe that would be held against me in the future.
As the recipient of that information you're welcome to share it. And I haven't seen Justin clearly do so. But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.
Justin has made this a public issue through their public declarations. If Justin is owed a clearly articulated reason (as you have stated), then Justin has essentially shared that right to the public. If "Google" claims that Justin has been given that reason (which does not appear to be the case), then someone is essentially lying, and this (hypothetical?) claim should be the focus of our conversation.
> But I would wager that in most situations it's better that the company stays silent.
I agree, it's "better" for the "company" by minimizing the risk of blowback to the people with the authority to terminate Justin. It is definitely not better for the "company" as a whole or society as a whole. We have an extremely credible person claiming that the "company" fired them for creating a product that people loved and without any claim that they broke the rules. The "company" has not provided any explanation to other employees about what Justin did so that other employees could avoid the same fate!
I would say this is where our language has shaped our thinking. You used the word "company" in a way that I would argue that it means the authority structure. If we define "company" to also mean collectively all the people of the company and our collective place and impact in the world, I don't think we could conceivably say that "it's better that the company stays silent", especially in this case.
No they didn't. Any judge would laugh the big corporation out of the courtroom over this. The amount of evidence in favor of the employee would turn this into a frivolous lawsuit.
>Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him.
You're assuming that an improbable event happens and are extrapolating from there. A more realistic case is that this is settled out of court simply to avoid involving the court, which is exactly what happened here: they fired him.
>They also had a case for criminal fraud.
No, they didn't.
I'm not sure in what alternative universe you're living in here.
Random guy? He was a Google employee. Looks like he was just doing his job.
> Google has spent billions to protect its reputation
Not sure billions are enough here, since Google's reputation is terrible in spite of it, and this episode certainly isn't helping.
Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):
> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.
Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product.
As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.
Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.
This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.
So, yeah, whatever it is, I'd say it looks normal.
[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
Maybe he did some damage? Did it create a security issue, e.g. if someone handed it to a bad llm agent? Maaaaybe.
Or was someone up the food chain doing the same thing, wit2h 20x the budget and a 12 month timeframe and now looks stupid?
Or maybe it's a bit of both, or maybe how he reacted to being told off?
Anyway, I can't believe how many people are commenting how ABSOLUTELY you get fired for any tiny breach of policy, have they ever held down a job?
Evidently not enough damage that it's worth deleting the repo
One obvious scenario where someone might be canned despite doing no real damage, and where legal might be forced to intervene, is if they made a knowingly false representation to obtain launch approval.
I have the feeling these projects were not deeply intertwined with Google products like this cli is.
This project was not exactly some random devtool or library polished a bit to be published and used outside of Google.
It was a de-facto major feature of a significant Google product.
He was officially Google DevRel and routinely created such tools in the past. It’s not crazy to assume that if you build 56 tools and everything was fine, 57th tool should be the same.
That massively changes the story in his favor.
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
Now, did something cause other issues that converted this from formal "don't do that, use the official process" and nothing more? Sounds like something caused this to escalate. It could be toes were stepped on, could be a bad reaction to the warning, or could just be wanting to cut employee numbers in a shortsighted way.
First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler.
That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?
I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:
>>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"
I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/
Same. Especially next to Google, all I can think of is "serious consequences for disruptive behavior" which meant breaking into an exec's office to protest
Tangent: did you really go through people’s histories far back enough to find out they were googlers/ex-googlers? Did you use an agent to do that?
I've never ever seen anyone, especially Apple shareholders disclose this here whenever they brush off something Apple did with malice - Eg. slowing down users' phones, spying on their siri recordings, etc.
Siri recordings are only ever stored to improve Siri. Apple does not share personal data or recordings with advertisers. There was a lawsuit based on coincidence alone.
I am not an Apple shareholder.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Apple told the Guardian: “A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality requirements.” The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long.
That's what they told you to believe. Every other manufacturer also had smartphones with batteries at the time and they were not doing this FYI. That was just marketing speak by Apple. Please stop citing marketing speak.
This is not the core issue, though. The core issue is not disclosing financial incentives while commenting something positive / negative.
Sure, I can believe maybe Apple legitimately thought my phone was going to randomly shut down, not that they wanted to slow it to make me buy a new one. Then Apple could've disclosed that they're throttling iPhones due to a known battery defect. They hid that until they were caught. They subsequently discounted the price of battery replacements, but that's still an extra cost that shouldn't have been there. The phone was way too young to be having these issues.
So yeah the iPhone 6 was well below the quality people normally expect from Apple. But it was the only time they screwed up so bad. The thing about planned obsolescence via OS updates is still true and accepted as a constant, your iPhone realistically has 10 years of life. I'll still choose iPhone over the Samsung hamas phones, but also not gonna be gaslit about batterygate, it was real.
Disclaimer: I own 99% of the entire Apple corporation, this is legal advice, this is medical advice
OP crank out a pretty decent and well received, by the community, product and get absolutely canned because they are well out of touch of how Google now works. You don't do risk (without reward) at Google and you certainly don't show a bit of ankle or look exciting. Google are well out of the market for being interesting (outside of the balance sheet and P&L for those who fetishise in accountancy.
Unfortunately: going viral isn't always a good thing as anyone who has experienced a nasty virus will attest.
I feel sorry for this person, but I would be surprised if this would have been okay at Google in the past 20 years. It wouldn't have been okay at any company I've ever worked at, big or small.
I think there's a valid argument that this started as a simple DevRel script or trick, but due to the way you can write a lot of code very quickly with AI it expanded to something that resembled a full-blown product.
Maybe uncharted territory as the previous assumption was that an individual DevRel person releasing scripts couldn't be mistaken for a supported product because one person couldn't produce that much code in the past.
Google can never be exciting or interesting evermore by design and intent. They dived on in and went "money" full on. They exist to generate revenue for their shareholders. They dumped the "Don't be evil" thing without blushing.
It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies!
But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in trouble for this" narrative.
Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub).
Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win.
Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart executive would say: “cool show me your work tomorrow morning so we can replace this with you work”
But since this project is still on GitHub, I would say the project itself was probably not so bad that releasing it should be a fireable offense.
So my thinking is this:
Did the employee act with the goal of helping the company?
If the answer is yes, and the action did not cause serious harm to the company, then you do not fire the employee. At my old company, the employee would probably be sent to take a couple of courses related to whatever rule they broke.
In general, smart people should be encouraged to take initiative.
The real problem (and the reason why you have all these HR rules) is when you have stupid employees who take initiative. Actually, you should never hire someone who is both unintelligent and full of initiative. It is okay to hire someone who is stupid and lazy and has no initiative (You need those people too).
And OP is obviously smart and talented and should be encouraged to take initiative.
1: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
Is it actually approved by Google or not?
You need to actually answer these questions instead of dodging them.
It's under "googleworkspace", one of Google's GitHub organizations (linked on https://developers.google.com/workspace).
> Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
This seems to be boilerplate that Google puts on open-source releases, e.g: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kaniko
It's not saying that it's not released by Google, but that it's not an officially supported Google product. I presume to make it clear that it's not covered by support agreements/bug bounties/etc. in the way products like Google Docs would be.
> Is it actually approved by Google or not?
It went through the launch/approval process (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48655744) and was announced by Justin's manager.
Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.
_A_ manager boosted it on twitter. It's not an announcement in the sense that companies announce things. You're also assuming that one team knows what the other is doing.
This is literally the reason there are standard procedures for doing things like this.
I don't know the legal situation, so maybe they felt like they had to do this to not face liability of some sort, but this feels like the wrong outcome vs e.g. having engineers rewrite it from scratch or move it to a less obviously google affiliated place.
You shouldn't use your employer's branding for unsanctioned projects, so Google is certainly well within their rights, but I think this is unnecessarily conservative vs someone who was trying to promote the employer's mission/products.
Not really, no. I'd expect a stern reprimand, but getting fired is extreme.
I'm not sure if Google is still an attractive place to work, but this incident certainly isn't helping tip the scales.
It’d like playing a computer game during free library time at the school when I was a kid; I would expect to be reprimanded, however just outright barring use from the computer during free time would probably be justified.
Clearing up the issue would take a single comment that all the correct processes were followed. The fact he hasn't said as much is the elephant in the room here.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
But allowing customers and agents access to their data is the opposite of Google's purpose here. They fired him and took this down because they don't want to do good by their customers and their Google Workspace: they would rather limit and control how their Workspace products are used and force people to use Gemini.
It seems to be something other people do as well and not out of the ordinary, so no.
This is not even an endorsement of those policies or of this action in enforcing them. I'm just saying it's very well documented there what you can and can't do and how to do things the "right" way. Lots of people understandable chafe at those rules, but the consequences of just saying yolo and ignoring them are fairly predictable...
We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.
I have a hunch that the order of the day within big tech is to let go of anyone they can. As long as they provide a reason, it's one less headcount that needs to be laid off in the next round.
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
--
EDIT: Others here are saying that Justin released his code with Google's branding without asking for approval. If that's true, it wasn't right of him, and his firing was justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650310 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650192
---
You were right above the edit.
But in the long term, we are all dead
I like the law because you can quite easily formulate it without bias.
Large enough orgs will indeed get people whose job is more closely aligned with the goal vs people whose job is more closely aligned with the existence of the org. _Because_ you need to keep investing energy to keep the org in existence. You can’t just do the goal only.
But being responsible for keeping the org in existence is not the same as responsible for the goals that the org was created for in the first place.
_and_ I can see how the people whose job it is to ensure the org keeps existing will gain the majority vote.
It’s like a law of nature: the way things fall out if you’re not consciously working to have them fall out differently.
(So it can be good for google to fire them from a “let’s keep existing standpoint” even though it might be contrary to having the easiest/optimal to use product. And if that is so, the keep existing vote will have the power) I don’t use google products really that much so I can’t speak to the merits of this example.
In general, when a talented employee (like OP) does something like this, the response is usually something like:
“We appreciate and love your initiative, and we want to encourage you to keep doing this kind of work. However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.”
Usually, these things are not career-ending moves. Actually it might be even opposite. Sure one might get labeled as a “cowboy”, but there is always some executive who will support “cowboys” because they shake things up. So one can actually get a promotion.
So I think there is something more here.
Either Google handled this very badly (and organization is broken) or the OP did not act in the company’s best interest and intentionally refused to follow certain instructions.
We're in a pretty messed up place in society if we hold individual people to this much of higher bar than a multi-trillion dollar company
It's still up now, so it seems like they do not actually think it needs to be taken down
So there is probably much more to the story. My guess is that this is more of an internal fight, possibly with unwise executive involvement (meaning there were no grown-ups in the room).
His team was supposed to develop GWS API samples. And very good samples can become quite sophisticated and start looking almost like an official product.
Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.
There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?
In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it look extremely official and blindsided everyone when suddenly there's a viral Google Workspace tool released by a Googler with Google branding that wasn't released by Google.
I'm not saying he should have been fired, necessarily, but he demonstrated _extremely_ poor judgement in doing this the way he did and put his manager and everyone else in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable position.
I think there is probably way more to this story - maybe he was told about the upcoming official use/variant and was asked to not preempt it before the cloud next conference with his one?
I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.
How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?
Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.
Good ideas are now risky because it steps on the toes of someone's fiefdom
1. Any work you do during company time/resources/equipment, is company property.
2. Anything public related to work, or that could be considered as competing or providing the service in the same space as work, needs to be vetted by the company.
Along with public communication, etc.
In my experience, this isn't some "what happens when MBA's run company" or "they run out of ideas", it's literally every company I've ever worked for.
Was google previously an exception here, or are people just unfamiliar with the details of the 20% policy? Surely they didn't allow you to work on, for example, something for a competitor? There had to be some limitations, rather than a pure free for all, as seems to be suggested in the comments.
If I released a tool personally that I hadn't told anyone at work about and put my company's logos all over it and it went insanely viral then I would expect an extremely uncomfortable conversation with my manager, his manager, HR, and at least one lawyer.
"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".
Thank you for your work on the tool! Paired with a claude skill I wrote around it, it saves me a ton of time creating a logseq meeting note page for important meetings.
I wish you the best of luck landing somewhere that appreciates you a lot more than G did.
Since I’ve never work at FAANG, does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product? And if so, did this go through that process?
I worked at Google in the past, most recently ending in early 2015, and can confirm that the answer to this question was yes when I was there - presumably still the case today with different details.
I have no idea whether the procedures were followed in this case, nor do I have any other inside information on this story, nor am I speaking for Google or Alphabet here.
It seemed to mostly work. Some people complained it was too slow, others seemed to manage fine.
I think Chris DiBonas’ team ran all of that.
(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)
“I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.”
Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Google’s internal processes (which is forgivable) and then demanding to work unilaterally (unforgivable). The amount of positive feedback may have given the author too much confidence that he could dictate to leadership what comes next.
A Google Workspace CLI is a useful project idea but it isn’t groundbreaking, it’s something that the Google Workspace team should be involved in. I suspect he just wanted go steamroll over them. Shipping stuff in a team is never about just producing the code.
> Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: https://github.com/googleworkspac e/cli - built for humans and agents.
> Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
Yeah, that absolutely looks like an official product announcement from Google. Surely it was obvious they'd get in trouble for that.
(Google Workspace) CLI vs Google (Workspace CLI)
Because Google has there name in the product for which the CLI was produced it looks like he's using the Google brand when he's only using a descriptor of what his CLI was for. Trademarks are funny, but if I build a thing that only works with Google Workspace wouldn't it be a bit weird to not say that?
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
However, google is filled with personalities and egos and sometimes engineers are the collateral damage.
Also, is this somehow relate to Addy Osmani’s recent departure from Google? (Was it in sympathy, was it a retaliation as this was “the tweet that got OP fired”?)
No surprise they were fired. If you work at google just search this CLI and you will see for yourself.
I'm guessing something more happened here. Maybe someone was displeased with how the author initially responded, or some powerful exec really wanted to make an example out of him (sounds like another group was working on an identically-named official product with the same name?), or they were just looking for an excuse to cut this particular role.
Gog cli - https://github.com/openclaw/gogcli
There is a good reason for this! In a large group of people, there are bad people.
This is also why I am done working at large companies. I learned a lot, met some great people, but am uninterested in a low trust environment. I like relying on my colleagues. When they do something unexpected, I am surprised and study it to learn, not lambast.
Seems like he just didn’t have the authority to release such a project.
Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.
The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.
So what is this thing?
Can anyone rely on it with confidence?
Does Google even acknowledge its existence?
If it's not officially supported, why is your name, a (former) Google employee, on it?
...who did not figure out that this project was published in a google-run github org, it was approved by his manager, etc.
As he has said multiple times: he went through the publishing process with his manager's blessing. Stop making up bullshit about how he didn't follow processes.
I am considering adding Bell Labs, Xerox and Skunkworks Lockheed Martin to my work experience
A few points:
1. It's clear from various comments that he might have followed "the process", and that different orgs at Google have varying levels of latitude in publishing to GitHub orgs with the company colors.
2. The repo clearly has no sensitive code or such, it's just using the developer API. Naturally, Google hasn't taken it down, and it is widely popular. Guess what, the author was in DevRel and it was literally their job to showcase the developer API. Which they did, splendidly. What was the internal justification, "What would happen if every employee just wrote and published useful code that leveraged our public APIs? We can't have that!"?
3. There are comments saying that it was "unexpected" that a single person would be able to generate something that looks like a full product. Really? The place where the CEO runs around making claims like "75% of all code here is AI-written" found it unexpected that a person would be able to ship what looks like a product? How low are their expectations about their own tech, exactly?
4. Anecdote, but as soon as the Workspace admins at my place saw this, they went "Holy shit, Google released something useful for Workspace! How can we use it?" It stoops to the level of self-parody that Google would fire the person that created one of the few actually useful tools for Workspace. Steve Yegge's memo about GCP (a different org, I know) sucking at public-facing APIs comes to mind.
Justin -- if you read this, I'm very sorry that this happened to you. Whoever took this decision is a suit and is destroying people's trust in Google and their attitude towards people that use and maintain their APIs. If I was a VC (unfortunately, I'm just a mid-level IC), I would immediately invest in your next startup.
I suspect the core issue here is that he launched it with Google logos without following any sort of process
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
Its a high paying job. He made people look bad/incompetent that were either:
1. Struggling for a while to ship what he did 2. Couldn't even come up with this to begin with
So they pulled the necessary levers to get him axed. Google salaries are top of the industry. People get robbed for $20. If you don't think someone would cheat/lie/scheme in order to protect their paycheck, you're delusional.
They monopolize opportunities, suppressing natural-born entrepreneurs; force us into very narrow roles and fire us if we step out of line ever to slightly. Even when it is beneficial to them.
IMO, we should get rid of trademark laws. They didn't mind their LLMs ripping off people's copyrights. Why should anyone uphold trademarks?
If I work at Google and want to represent myself as Google, I should be able to.
I feel like, even if I don't work at Google, I should be able to use the logo. It's the consumer's mistake for inferring a relationship. I'm just showing a logo of a well known company and letting their dumbass jump to a conclusion.
Thats my experience at Apple. I even tried to ask for alternatives, mentors, etc. all denied by my one manager because I was reorged into their team and a new manager had something to prove. Directors who I talked to just shrugged their shoulders.
Leadership at these companies is pretty much shit. It’s not surprising something this happens at Google.
Companies could give zero f’s about you, how long you have been there, or what you have done or accomplished there.
Seriously. If you know you have a bad manager (you’ll definitely know) then you need to get the hell out asap. Don’t think if you tough it out it’ll work out. I lasted 5 years total and the last two years with this unnecessary insane stress caused by him. They will let you go after your dog suddenly gets cancer and they dont care you have a mortgage or need health insurance.
I’m sure there are good management out there, but not my experience and clearly not the experience of who posted this on x.
Management and leadership at these companies needs to fucking treat people that work for them like they care. At all.
But also, the worst managers I've ever had were at Google.
These people. Man.
This manager I had would also be hard to contact, he would schedule meetings on my calendar just to cancel them or change them last minute, all the time. He told me I would never be a software engineer even though I have 15 years experience. He denied me a mentor when I wasn’t too busy or on a pip or anything.
He started this stuff 3 months after be was promoted to management by his best friend. Who I learned from some other people that they have been friends since high school. He is protected by this guy and he controls his narrative better than anyone else.
But ultimately he’s a piece of shit. When I was reorged to this team with the product I worked on it was just me. My first manager told me on our last 1:1 that he fucking hated those people. So I dealt with that for more than 2 years.
I wanted nothing more in my career to work at Apple. And then after two different managers this guy gets promoted and immediately starts this and emailing me about things i didn’t do.
I had good to great performance reviews before him.
Now I have no job for more than half a year and am about to be on the edge of selling my house without somewhere to live. And I’ve applied at soooo many places and I have a great resume.
I enjoy tech but the job market is worse than ive experienced ever. And my beagle of 13 years passed. So it’s been a great year.
I've seen people getting thrown under the bus even for voluntarily quitting due to burnout. Like legitimately doing illegal stuff such as withholding documentation or writing recommendation letters in secret code.
I know of a company that I worked that is currently under fire currently for not following the law and lying to employees by advising them incorrectly about their rights. They can't even fucking fire people properly without breaking laws and treating them like shit.
No company deserves anyone's loyalty or concern.
Something about their LinkedIn job title at Google ("Developer Relations (Mostly SWE)" also reads odd.
If you do an end-run around the normal open source publishing you can get in trouble- up to and including termination- but my guess is there is more context around the firing than just "posted open source code to work with standard Google APIs". For example, you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.
And if you look at the history, the main maintainer for the project was really just one person.
Even today, the repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product." So what is this?
If you told me the "googleworkspace" account is owned and controlled by this individual, not Google, I would have believed it.
https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / https://github.com/googleapis
> This is not an officially supported Google product.
Why was this project published under an account named "Google Workspace"? Google seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, same with the cli creator.
If you want to publish a project under open source and you are the sole creator/owner -> do it in your own time, under your OWN individual github account. Nothing good has ever come from ceeding control of these things to giant corporations who only care how much it will increase their profit next quarter.
My guess is that it's similar to the regular "no warranty" clause in the licenses, just explicitly opting out this code from any possible agreements Google might have with its customers.
Google's process to publish to open source is well documented and this documentation is public. [1] is the document that requires this disclaimer.
[1]: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
Seems to me your management chain was thinking “Why the hell is someone on our team releasing a vibe-coded CLI that’s branded to look like an official API, when we’re 2 weeks from announcing the actual CLI??” If you didn’t know there was an official CLI in the works, that’s one thing, but if you did know then that’s pretty shitty to your teammates in Workspace and bad for users who would adopt one CLI (thinking it’s official) just to then see another one 2 weeks later.
Still, I would expect a talking-to and not an actual firing… but who knows what actually happened since you’re not responding to anyone. :shrug:
I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
tasting the rainbow
Sucks for the author. Hope they land a good gig at a frontier lab.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
Nah. Fuck Google. Reasonable humans would talk to him, fix it, and move on. They don't need you carrying an ounce of water.