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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company.

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.

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The branding and logo on the embed comes from the org it is attached to, which is an official GitHub organisation owned by Google and contains many other open source repositories.

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?

Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.

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.

> but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.

How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?

He probably read the twitter thread, it's all in there

I read the twitter thread, don't see any clear information about what the t's and i's even are, or if they were crossed and dotted.

The twitter thread was more than enough for me to understand what has gone on.

Are we talking about the same twitter thread? This one? https://xcancel.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069482265953087602

Right, but a single link is not enough as there are many off-shoots on the thread (it's not linear); other Google employs chime in and all sorts of other info.

As a customer and dev, it's confusing to me when I look at Google's stuff and see official-looking unofficial CLIs.

* when it's also alongside an official CLI for the same product

As a customer who uses open source I care more about whether it works well than whether it's officially sanctioned but I can see how some of google management and its employees would take a diametrically opposite view to the i dotting and t crossing.

There are a couple of unsanctioned clients in particular where I'd take a dim view of the company trying to kill them and one where it actually happened to wide condemnation.

Unofficial is fine. It's also fine if the only way to use it is some unofficial or not-fully-supported thing, or if there are two ways but the unofficial one is better. It's just, if there's a real supported tool, it'd better not be possible to confuse with the unofficial one. If I were evaluating using a product like this and got confused about such a basic thing, I'd be gone.

Google could definitely be harmed by an unofficial product release that gets lots of users but doesn't have any kind of official support behind it, and hence could make those users pissed off in the future.

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