[spydum]

I dunno, I'm pretty sure defense* would easily be able to paint the picture that employee spent hours researching and writing an article because he cared about the culture. If you didn't care, you wouldn't be bothered to invest effort into carefully addressing the topic. Heck, you could even go as far as to pull the google doc authoring logs and show (theoretically) that the employee worked on it in off hours (I dont know this to be true, but if it was, even a stronger defense).

His actions after the firing could easily be explained away as hurt feelings for trying to be open and honest, and being publicly shamed?

* it's not the defense I suppose if he originated the suit, but you know what i mean

[eesmith]

Have you not experienced a work environment where someone feels like burning bridges?

There are some people who are "mad as hell, and ... not going to take this anymore", so write such essays to 'prove' that they aren't wrong, the company wrong.

For that matter, there are some people in romantic relationships who do the same.

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, I'm saying that this is what Google's lawyers will argue happened, so a good lawyer would advise him to not make things easier for Google.

* the word you want is 'plaintiff' as this would be a civil suit.

[geofft]

> I dunno, I'm pretty sure defense would easily be able to paint the picture that employee spent hours researching and writing an article because he cared about the culture.

Something like half the citations are to Wikipedia. There are five actual scientific papers there, three or four of which don't even support his thesis, and, if I recall correctly, many of which are in the Wikipedia citations, the classic trick of a rushed undergrad who needs trustworthy citations but has no idea how to find them.