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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.

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The director that did the announcement tweet may have provided some authority. He seems to have left Google voluntarily recently after 14 years.

>They had a case for suing him for millions.

No they didn't. Any judge would laugh the big corporation out of the courtroom over this. The amount of evidence in favor of the employee would turn this into a frivolous lawsuit.

>Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him.

You're assuming that an improbable event happens and are extrapolating from there. A more realistic case is that this is settled out of court simply to avoid involving the court, which is exactly what happened here: they fired him.

>They also had a case for criminal fraud.

No, they didn't.

I'm not sure in what alternative universe you're living in here.

> and then you have a random guy put out a self create product

Random guy? He was a Google employee. Looks like he was just doing his job.

> Google has spent billions to protect its reputation

Not sure billions are enough here, since Google's reputation is terrible in spite of it, and this episode certainly isn't helping.

Are you suggesting Google's lawyers haven't done a good job at protecting Google's reputation? Watch out, you don't want to get sued by them!

Going for the little guy who wants to build cool stuff here would be the thing that makes them waste their billions on the wrong thing.

It’s a CLI for Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a genuine Google Product.

Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):

> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.

Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.

I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.

This is extremely precedented. Google developer relations people do exactly that, all the time. Or at least they used to, all the folks I used to follow have left the company. You’ll find lots of open source projects in Google’s repositories which are just personal tools they built to scratch an itch, but are published under Google‘s name because that’s the preferred approach per their internal legal guidance.

I don’t know if this guy is telling the full story or not, I can see potential aggravating factors, but on the surface it’s a lot more reasonable than you’re letting on

Google Workspace is but the CLI is not. These are 2 related but different products. Had he just released it under his name then that wouldn't have been such a big issue, maybe, but he used the Google logo which implied it was Google blessed. If I did the same thing, they would have a case for suing me. Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name. Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible. And support it on any issues that are found along the way. All companies protect their logo to a high degree simply because of the implications it has when people see it.

It was not released under his name. It is in Google's own googleworkspace Github Organization, alongside 57 other similar projects that consume from the same API.

The organization hosts repos shown here: https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples

> Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible

That's 100% not true for those kinds of projects. There's plenty of "not officially supported" projects in Google's Github.

Not complaining about the downvoting but everything in this comment is verifiable from the links you provided.

People are making a crazy amount of assumptions in those threads only to defend Google and dunk on someone who was just fired.

The repo belongs to Google, the organization belongs to Google, the job of the fired dev was to produce code just like the one he was fired for, and there's 56 other repos with similar code in there, a lot of them using the same API.

Yeah, it's pretty telling that comments like the one you replied to are all over this thread, and every time a response like yours is posted, no one seems to have any rebuttal. It's pretty clear that there's plenty of precedent for what this guy did and no legitimate reason to consider it a departure from what he and his coworkers had been doing for a while.

If you only read a condensed summary of what happened, you might be able to come up with a narrative that fits those high-level details that makes the firing seem reasonable. That narrative has no basis in reality though, other than being the theoretically plausible justification they came up with for firing him.

Yeah, people are just going wild with assumptions.

Every story has three sides, or something like that?

...except when HR/Legal is involved, then it has quite a few more. Lots of secret narratives that are relayed differently to different people.

Here's the rebuttal, look through these https://github.com/orgs/googleworkspace/repositories , one is not like the others. They're things like Python samples or a Google Drive picker web element. The 56 other repos probably got properly approved and this one didn't. This one also got a Twitter announcement saying "Introducing the Google Workspace CLI..." at the same time Google was working on an official Google Workspace CLI.

It's also possible this is all wrong and the author followed all the rules. That wouldn't be because Google actually benefits from making up reasons to fire good employees, only cause someone on the inside was scapegoating or glory-hogging. Tbh I doubt it.

> one is not like the others

> probably got properly approved

> also possible

That's not a rebuttal of anything, that's just a series of wild assumptions.

To me the random guy comes off much more likable here than someone who has spent billions protecting its reputation and still failing.

You made a typo, it should be "Google spent billions eroding its reputation" [0]

[0](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

They should've fired whoever signed off on 999 duplicate Google chat apps existing at once around 2018. Probably Sundar.

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