[gerdesj]

The real problem is that OP is or wants to be an old school disruptor working at what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).

OP crank out a pretty decent and well received, by the community, product and get absolutely canned because they are well out of touch of how Google now works. You don't do risk (without reward) at Google and you certainly don't show a bit of ankle or look exciting. Google are well out of the market for being interesting (outside of the balance sheet and P&L for those who fetishise in accountancy.

Unfortunately: going viral isn't always a good thing as anyone who has experienced a nasty virus will attest.

[Aurornis]

> what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker).

I feel sorry for this person, but I would be surprised if this would have been okay at Google in the past 20 years. It wouldn't have been okay at any company I've ever worked at, big or small.

I think there's a valid argument that this started as a simple DevRel script or trick, but due to the way you can write a lot of code very quickly with AI it expanded to something that resembled a full-blown product.

Maybe uncharted territory as the previous assumption was that an individual DevRel person releasing scripts couldn't be mistaken for a supported product because one person couldn't produce that much code in the past.

[gerdesj]

I would encourage this sort of thing in my company. I'm not google. I'm not legally beholden to anyone except myself and my business partners ... and my own sense (which is worryingly odd!)

Google can never be exciting or interesting evermore by design and intent. They dived on in and went "money" full on. They exist to generate revenue for their shareholders. They dumped the "Don't be evil" thing without blushing.

[frollogaston]

Dunno about 20, but 7 years ago, they fired a security engineer for forcing in a CL for their internal Chrome extensions to put a disapproving banner on certain anti-union websites. Wasn't a very harmful change, but because she left a clear paper trail of circumvented code/release reviews, she couldn't be trusted anymore.

[nixon_why69]

That was a security engineer modifying internal security tooling without proper permissions/reviews.

The union piece was probably extra motivation but still you just do not do that to security infra, it should always be a firing offense unless it was a truly exceptional circumstance.

Conversely, this guy was in a DevRel role where it sounds like they released open source stuff all the time and the line was a lot more fuzzy (admittedly I've only heard one side of the story).