[NikolaNovak]

Fascinating!

First, to your point, I'm Not a googler or ex googler.

That being said, for what little may be worth, No company I worked for would be ok for me releasing unauthorized code to official public report with official logo and company name without some approval / discussion / disclosure, at whatever appropriate level that may be m. I'm curious, On your previous team, did your manager know and approve of open source publications? Team mates? Did they have names like "Google Hangouts X" and accompanying logos etc?

I guess what strikes me negatively and mutes my empathy is the "zero lessons learned" part of the tweet:

>>"I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted"

I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically, and certainly not self-unaware enough to proclaim that as the one and only reason for my misfortunes. I hope they and any family they have are ok. I feel if they had actual grievance with the firing, they should've gone through appropriate legal remedy. Twitter drama is just a zero-win game to me :-/

[mewpmewp2]

So if this is a case where they weren't legally in the right, but were morally in the right, which is far more subjective, it makes sense to go the Twitter route since if they were morally in the right people would support them while legal discourse not. So morally they had a cool idea, put a lot of imagination and effort into it, it's an idea that was valuable to people, and maybe a big corp was blocking them for egotistical or whatever reasons, to me it makes sense what they did. I don't know if that was the case, but if a corporation is forcing you to with legal means not do what is perhaps your life work and good value for the society, there must be way beyond legal to do it. But clearly the pettiness of the company is showing here, who cares if this confuses people a bit, there's many other good ways to solve the situation by Google.

[frollogaston]

He's saying he went through the proper approvals. Google apparently doesn't think so. Not getting the full story here, but IF he really didn't get approval, I don't buy the whole "doing the right thing" argument. Could've done that without Google branding. If he got approval, Google is hurting itself in its confusion.

[mewpmewp2]

In any case, all I see, is that he built a cool thing, and Google failed to make it work whatever the process was. This is failure on Google's part in my view.

Even if he didn't do the proper process, this is just a CLI wrapper, and they should have made it proper after, not fired the person. And they should have thought long and hard why a person felt this had to be done. Or alternatively why was the person able to publish something as a new repository in their devrel github org if the release process is so vital for whatever reason.

Even if you have or had the legal right or whatever, it doesn't mean that you have to actually act on it. It speaks to some other sort of motivation to me.

[frollogaston]

It'll probably be both, they look on the inside but the employee is still fired. Doesn't matter if they decide later that the unofficial CLI is better than the real one, it's not justification to publicly break process.

[frollogaston]

> I'm not quite silicon valley enough to use the word disrupted unironically,

Same. Especially next to Google, all I can think of is "serious consequences for disruptive behavior" which meant breaking into an exec's office to protest