[tlogan]

I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing.

In general, when a talented employee (like OP) does something like this, the response is usually something like:

“We appreciate and love your initiative, and we want to encourage you to keep doing this kind of work. However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.”

Usually, these things are not career-ending moves. Actually it might be even opposite. Sure one might get labeled as a “cowboy”, but there is always some executive who will support “cowboys” because they shake things up. So one can actually get a promotion.

So I think there is something more here.

Either Google handled this very badly (and organization is broken) or the OP did not act in the company’s best interest and intentionally refused to follow certain instructions.

[zipy124]

Given their manager was the one who announced their project I'm leaning closer to Google handling this badly? Which is understandable in an organisation so large tbh. Sometimes things are done badly, no one is perfect, especially not large organisations.

[saghm]

It's amazing how quickly so much of this thread is people vehemently arguing that this person deserved to be fired for not following proper procedures, but when it's the company not following proper procedures for literally firing someone (which is a way more egregious thing to screw up than publishing some code that can easily be deleted, not that Google apparently has bothered to do that yet), there's so much room for patience and understanding because "nobody's perfect".

We're in a pretty messed up place in society if we hold individual people to this much of higher bar than a multi-trillion dollar company

[frollogaston]

What procedure did the company not follow here?

[saghm]

> However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.

It's still up now, so it seems like they do not actually think it needs to be taken down

[tlogan]

That part is odd, especially the fact that his boss tweeted about it.

So there is probably much more to the story. My guess is that this is more of an internal fight, possibly with unwise executive involvement (meaning there were no grown-ups in the room).

His team was supposed to develop GWS API samples. And very good samples can become quite sophisticated and start looking almost like an official product.

[frollogaston]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654394 claims his boss is leaving too

[IshKebab]

My guess is he didn't say "ok sorry I'll double check in future" but got into an argument with them about how he was right.