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.
Imagine any leader that is not sundar trying to get this person fired. At some point, that leader would need to justify to either their leader, or a similarly leveled peer why they budgeted x SWE-years(where x is probably > 25) for a project that took this person far less than 1 SWE-year.
There are truths to both sides of the argument.
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.
That's cute.
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.