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.
The union piece was probably extra motivation but still you just do not do that to security infra, it should always be a firing offense unless it was a truly exceptional circumstance.
Conversely, this guy was in a DevRel role where it sounds like they released open source stuff all the time and the line was a lot more fuzzy (admittedly I've only heard one side of the story).
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.
For one thing, the author of this tool used Google trademarks (the logo) to represent the project.
If you are even slightly larger than a mom and pop small business you pretty much have to defend that trademark or else you risk losing it.
But, okay, fine, you can just tell them not to use your trademark and have them say it's not an official thing. No big deal.
The other thing I would say is that growing beyond even a relatively small number of employees fundamentally changes everything. Once you don't have that face to face with all your employees that trust level between you and them can't possibly be the same, no matter how good your intentions are. Even a modest company with 25-50 people...how well can you know those people, really? Even if you try your hardest to know them?
Once you have a certain number of employees you run into probabilistic realities.
Google has over 100,000 employees, which means statistically speaking a few of them have committed or will commit homicide. The idea of "we trust all our employees" can't exist from a mathematical perspective, even if the leadership happens to be the nicest people in the world who really want their employees to have freedom and autonomy.
Nitpick, but the set of people who work at Google is highly non-random. I am pretty sure Google employees are much less likely to confirm homicide - they are older (homicide rates after 24 drop sharply), more educated (strongly inversely correlated with homicide), richer (same), etc.
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.
It seemed especially sociopathic in how the employee actively avoided understanding what they were told, and actively reframed it. I would have expected a more bureaucratic 'this is how we have do it for internal reasons' kind of reponse, rather than actively avoiding understanding. Similar to traditional complaints in the past about active Wikipedia / Stack Overflow types.
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.