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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it – you called the GitHub org 'googleworkspace' and used the Google logo? Presumably without permission? Don't Googlers regularly open-source side projects under the official org(s)? Did you really think this was going to be fine, or was it 'growth hacking' with tougher consequences than expected?

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I believe it's an official or semi-official Google github org. Typically at Google there is some process you are supposed to follow when opensourcing your code, and a repo like this exists specifically to get more people to use the API. The CLI still exists at the repo and the repo still has the Google branding, so it's 99% certain this is a Google repo.

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.

Yes, berating a coworker for being a fucking moron is unacceptable in corporate America.

The truth is that in decent workplaces we've figured out attacking people doesn't generally get what you want, unless what you want is to have a tantrum.

Calling an idea nonsense is fine, calling it not profitable is great, and saying its a waste of time is a Monday. Attacking someone as a fucking moron is pointless, just fire them, deprioritize them, or move on.

It's a reframe for

    > you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.

That makes it sound like Google is really weird for firing people for merely "raising your voice in a meeting", but the reality is that toxic assholes who can't control their emotions and yell racist slurs at people do get fired, but, uh, shouldn't they?

how did you get from "raising your voice in a meeting" to "toxic assholes" and "racist slurs". Those are very different.

They are! That's my point! I've raised my voice in a meeting while I was at Google and not gotten fired. I was also around for that bit with "son of a bitch, I'm in" on memegen. I'm not saying that no one anywhere has ever been fired for raising their voice at Google during a meeting but without a more thorough description of the exact circumstances that led to that happening I guess what I'm saying isit's not a normal thing at Google.

Ah ok, that makes a lot more sense. Makes it a lot less clear why he was fired, but his side as told makes more sense at least!

How come it's not under "google" organization, which is where almost every other Google open source project lives (with the exception of a few notable ones)? That's just weird.

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.

Google has multiple orgs on github: google, google-cloud-platform, chromium, android, flutter, angular, tensorflow all have their own top-level orgs because google ships its org chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). Some orgs have been created by google and then released to the wild (kubernetes).

I think but I'm not sure that this is a "semi-official" org run by Google DevRel. Perhaps it has looser rules and ownership than the more official orgs? If I'm using the Wayback Machine properly, https://web.archive.org/web/20201130062102/https://github.co... shows that the site already used the Google logo way back in 2020 (earliest snapshot).

Also, the one person listed in the Organization Members works at Google as a Developer Advocate.

Google has quite a few of those. It's hard to figure out if they're really official.

https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / https://github.com/googleapis

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