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Comment by justinwp | Hacker News Reader

I am not going to share much more than what I already have, but I think this speaks to the experience of working in big tech and the disruption caused by AI both at the level of teams/roadmaps/incentives and changing user behavior.

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It would help if you clarify whether you followed the OSS release process guidelines, which are very clearly documented.

"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".

To clarify, I was on the Google Workspace Developer Relations team, the majority of my work was that exact OSS release process. It is not clearly documented and always changing. You can read some of it here, https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/..., but like I said it is always changing. Relevant: https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/27/what-is-goog...

Something in the explanation is missing here. It's still not clear to me from any of the provided context whether you got approval to release this. At least from my understanding of your role, if you had approval and used an official google repository, you would not get fired for merely publishing code that accesses a documented API through documented endpoints.

Hence many people are wondering if you released this without approval (that's my guess), if you used a Google repo to do it (from what I can tell you did use a google repo, but not an officially supported one, and other teams at google use this repo to publish code), and whether there were other extenuating circumstances, or if it was "the workspace SVP called my division's VP and told him to fire me" (just a guess for another firing mechanism).

...By the way, on a different subject, 4 days ago, had read your comments on a different post dealing with Alzheimer's. Just now, asked you a follow up question, and it's easy for them to get buried in your hackernews comments threads, so thought I'd just mention it. Thanks!

There was a Ariane/Launch with bits flipped including the eng bit from my manager.

then there is some detail missing from your report- for example, if leadership asked you to take down the repo (perhaps because another team was building/releasing/launching their own) and you refused, then you weren't fired for creating the Google workspace CLI, but for something else.

In short, the way the post is framed, and the reality behind it, don't seem to match up, and people with experience are asking for you to clarify. If you don't want to go into more detail, that's fine, but... many people (like me) read what you wrote and thought "there must be more detail than this, because it would be silly for somebody to get fired for doing their job in good faith, and following the rules"

The OSS release process has always stated that you can't use Google branding for a unilateral launch. You aren't making yourself look better

The "G" logo is a GitHub organization setting that applies to all repos in GitHub.com/googleworkspace and has for years.

Straight from that page:

>This includes side projects that have not gone through IARC, even for DevRel engineers.

So did you do this "Launcher2" or "Ariane" thing and get the approvals? If so, it seems your ass would be covered. If not...

I can sympathize that the process seems convoluted and could particularly bite a DevRel accustomed to more autonomy. One would hope Google would do the whole blame free retrospective thing and improve the systems.

Yes there was a launch with eng bit flipped by manager.

what is this bit flipping shit you keep alluding to?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it really sounds like you knew the policy in depth, and even contributed to the design of the policy, but when it came to your pet project you ignored it by skipping the release process? Am I missing something?

Wasn't ignored or skipped.

How do you explain "This is not an officially supported Google product."?

https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli

There are plenty of such projects with similar disclaimers under Google's own /google/ organization. To give a few examples:

https://github.com/google/python-fire / https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/main/docs/index.md / https://github.com/google/dopamine / https://github.com/google/go-tika

Also plenty of official Google organizations that are not /google/ , but have official projects.

https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / you can find plenty more

I wouldn't read too much into it, since it can mean virtually anything.

Really sorry to hear about this. It's so ironic because your tool is something that made G workspace so much more useful to me personally and was a deciding factor in which calendar project I used. Getting fired for making a product more useful to customers is quite ironic.

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.

Sorry to hear your story.

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?

> does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product?

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 was certainly the case for me back circa... I can barely remember, 2008/2009?

Everyone just launched tools internally, although it was pretty easy to get approval to launch something externally, although most people didn't bother. The environment back then had tons of internal tools all over the place.

Oh yeah, I'm referring to external launches, not to internal launches.

I’ve been gone a few years, but there was a process for contributing OSS code outside the company, and another for releasing company code externally, etc

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.

DiBona definitely started the OSS group and process, and ran it for many years.

Their process is a well-known template other organizations look at when creating their own:

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing

I haven't been following along with your story closely so forgive me for asking you to repeat things that you've probably already said, but did they just fire you out of the blue or did they talk to you and it didn't go well?

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