[arjie]

The concerns seem to be primarily around trademark and logos? Unless there's more to it, those seem trivial to remedy by requiring removal of logos and renaming in the style of Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw. Google is well-known to be pretty sparing with firing people even for performance, so either this is a change in stance (entirely possible) or there's more to it.

[cynicalkane]

For over the last >1 year, Google has been dismissing people without warning or cause. The days where it was nearly impossible to be fired are over; now you might be severed by surprise for no given reason at all.

[collabs]

Anecdotally speaking, I have seen a change in behavior even from early 2024. I was in a meeting (online) with a few people from Google shortly before Google IO about something fairly small. The technical engineer actually spoke(!) and he talked about revenue and stuff. I was dumbfounded that technical engineers at Google would ever care about "moving the needle".

[stogot]

Are you sure it wasn’t a “customer engineer” role?

[lern_too_spel]

I know many people at Google who have been waiting to get laid off to get better terms than they would from just quitting. Now they know what to do.

[tonfa]

People don't typically get a nice severance package if they're fired for violating company policy.

(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)

[trollbridge]

Firings like this often include a technically voluntary separation agreement that gives you a few extra weeks' pay or some additional months of health benefits etc. precisely to avoid that problem. (Also gets them out of paying unemployment, and means they can get a fresh set of NDAs/nondisparagement etc. signed with the employee.)

I would never fire an employee unilaterally, especially over something like this, when there's valuable IP at stake and you can just talk the person into agreeing to sign over whatever it is you need.

[manwithopinions]

I think that’s a good instinct but this line…

“I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.”

Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Google’s internal processes (which is forgivable) and then demanding to work unilaterally (unforgivable). The amount of positive feedback may have given the author too much confidence that he could dictate to leadership what comes next.

A Google Workspace CLI is a useful project idea but it isn’t groundbreaking, it’s something that the Google Workspace team should be involved in. I suspect he just wanted go steamroll over them. Shipping stuff in a team is never about just producing the code.