[echoangle]

Interesting that people here seem so sympathetic to the fired guy. Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared? Working for them actually makes it worse because people could look up your name and would see that you actually work for google. It’s kind of obvious that this is a bad idea, right?

[Eridrus]

He mentioned that he worked in DevRel and making open source tools like this was a common thing they did: https://x.com/JPoehnelt/status/2069535183158812698

I don't know the legal situation, so maybe they felt like they had to do this to not face liability of some sort, but this feels like the wrong outcome vs e.g. having engineers rewrite it from scratch or move it to a less obviously google affiliated place.

You shouldn't use your employer's branding for unsanctioned projects, so Google is certainly well within their rights, but I think this is unnecessarily conservative vs someone who was trying to promote the employer's mission/products.

[genxy]

DevRel does generally get free reign to post stuff to github all the time. Many teams and projects do not have to comply with the standardized open source releasing process.

[djeastm]

He seems to be a good coder with poor judgment. But I think it would be wiser to manage him better than to fire him so long as he recognizes what he did was wrong. I'm a bit of a softie for the clueless, brilliant coders, though.

[Stevvo]

He doesn't recognize it. He claims in the post he was fired because certain leaders were afraid of being disrupted.

[jauntywundrkind]

I agree it's problematic, but I'm pretty sympathetic because it was an obvious and straightforward thing to do, whose benefit is incredibly obvious and good, that made sense. This should obviously be a thing, and not having it hurts customers of your products.

But allowing customers and agents access to their data is the opposite of Google's purpose here. They fired him and took this down because they don't want to do good by their customers and their Google Workspace: they would rather limit and control how their Workspace products are used and force people to use Gemini.

[teraflop]

Where are you getting the information that this project hadn't been cleared? That seems like a big assumption, and I don't see anything in the linked tweet, or the replies, or any of the linked pages that supports it. Unless I missed something?

[sanderjd]

Yeah I'm struggling to believe that this person who worked at Google for 7 years was surprised by this outcome. Google has very clear processes for contributing to open source as an employee. I'm skeptical that this person never navigate to go/opensource (not remembering exactly the link, but it might literally be that) and read the policies there in that amount of time...

This is not even an endorsement of those policies or of this action in enforcing them. I'm just saying it's very well documented there what you can and can't do and how to do things the "right" way. Lots of people understandable chafe at those rules, but the consequences of just saying yolo and ignoring them are fairly predictable...

[throwaway23597]

I tend to agree with you here. This is the equivalent of that scene in Better Call Saul where Jimmy makes a commercial without getting sign-off from the partners. It doesn't matter whether the thing worked - this is essentially a mutiny from the product roadmap.

[chaostheory]

Ofcourse. This is HN and not LinkedIn.

We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.

[echoangle]

You’re supposed to bend stupid rules but the one bent here is kind of important. I couldn’t trust an employee that does this, so I wouldn’t want to continue to employ them.

[sanderjd]

Yes, fair. I do feel like the twitter post walks this line a bit though, between "yes, I broke the rules, for a good reason!" which I think many of us here can probably respect to various degrees and "I don't understand what I did that was wrong".

[lukewarm707]

haha "liquidity in human capital" am i right?