[cdata]

Google contains multitudes. I don't doubt that your personal experience was the opposite end of the spectrum from mine.

I maintain that firing is an extreme resolution here (taking the claims at face value of course). Surely this employee has demonstrated the capacity to deliver impact and could be redirected if properly incentivized.

[argee]

As a Xoogler you should know that the "impact" they want is, making leadership look good, what you shipped or even whether or not you shipped is nigh irrelevant.

This did the opposite, didn’t it?

[jrochkind1]

I don't see anything about the product that made Google leadership look bad? I don't see that anyone else external to Google thought so either, before they fired him? Firing him makes them look bad, however.

[xnx]

Shipping a personal project right before they were going to announce an official tool at Google IO seems like a bad idea.

[jrochkind1]

So it was done on the clock as a project at Developer Relations team, I don't know if that should be called a personal project or not, maybe, it does seem Developer Relations projects could be one person's idea and execution, but just to be clear on what happened.

It was released 2 and a half months before Google IO.

The way I read this, they decided to announce it at Google IO because of the attention the project released by the Developer Relations team got. No one with inside knowledge has said the "official tool" (not from Dev Relations) was already planned when it was released. Maybe it was. Maybe a guy on the Dev Relations team would or should have known it was if it was. Easy for me to believe it was not however.

[etruong42]

Create a product that people loved? This could have been redirected to make leadership look good. This event demonstrates that impactful products can be extremely polarizing - you could become the hero or the villain or a bit of both. You can no longer be a quiet contributor.

[loki49152]

"Google contains multitudes"

It does not contain people who flout Google's privacy, security, or intellectual property policies. Those people are, quite rightfully, un-contained from Google with speed they can't muster for anything else in the company.