[jefftk]

> There's also an argument that she used some sort of "emergency" deployment mechanism, but that doesn't really hold water either. Honestly it's not that unusual to see people deploy some package when they need it rather than wait for a scheduled job to deploy it.

I disagree. The emergency process was highly unusual, in that it had never been done before for this extension, and was very rarely done in general. Triggering a deploy is normal, triggering a deploy that goes immediately to 100% is not.

> essentially it was her job to work on and deploy this extension

The extension wasn't something she had previously worked on.

> I believe that had the message been an April fools day joke she wouldn't have been fired.

I agree, and don't think she should have been fired for this either.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

[nashashmi]

You should read about the conspiracy to kill ie6.

The magical access to add stuff and just have fun was what made google a fun place to work at.

In this case adding stuff for your own corporate employees didn’t hurt the company’s customers and users. It shouldn’t have resulted in a termination. Had the person put a hate message they would have been terminated or penalized for hate but not for adding insecure code.

[username90]

Google is mostly run by sticklers for the rules and has been for a long time (just ask Googlers about their code review process...). In practice most of the time individuals overlook transgressions, but if there is a formal complaint they don't. In this case the manager who hired the anti union org certainly got noticed about this since the notice popped up on their site, I'm pretty sure that person filed a formal complaint. And as Googles employee handbook says that doing things like this will get you fired she got fired, even though it was pretty innocent.

Similarly if someone made anti union messages pop up when you visit union sites I am 100% sure they would get fired as well, for the same reasons. You can talk about almost anything internally, (People like Damore aren't uncommon at all, the outside world just got hung up on him for some reason), just take your job and company code seriously.