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cdata 7 hours ago [-]
I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
qmarchi 6 hours ago [-]
Former Googler here, and one that has open-sourced projects while working in Cloud.
This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.
The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.
cdata 6 hours ago [-]
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.
loki49152 12 minutes ago [-]
"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.
argee 5 hours ago [-]
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?
bonsai_bar 7 hours ago [-]
Is it so extreme?
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
jedc 1 hours ago [-]
It looks like the account where this repo was published was the one used by Google Workspace DevRel? (And that’s the team this guy worked on.)
That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
ashdksnndck 2 hours ago [-]
It seems like the guy believed he was just doing his job for Google, not moonlighting? He released the project on Google’s own GitHub. It seems more like he misunderstood the necessary steps before making that release.
lokar 4 hours ago [-]
Even setting the legal process aside, I would ask the team before releasing a tool for their product.
Seems kind of rude.
5 hours ago [-]
DANmode 3 hours ago [-]
Being an employee of Google doesn’t give them any sway over my board position at an animal rescue,
or anywhere else,
unless my contract and pay reflects that.
sib 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that the agreement that Google employees sign (a "contract") when hired reflects exactly that. At least at did when I joined (I left > 3 years ago, speaking here only for myself...)
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Is it legal (or moral) for an employer to keep you from being a board member of a dog rescue or a glove repair company without review?
radishingr 23 minutes ago [-]
The answer is not that it matters, but as a matter of financial and legal controls they need to know and approve. Do they care? They probably are delighted, but also want to get all the paperwork set up to avoid problems.
The space this comes from is the legal undue influence side where they need to give notice to shareholders about potential conflicts of interest, and it needs to be in the form of having a clear positive audit trail that they have told people to follow a clear policy with no grey area so that any deviation is an accident not willful failure to get people to tell them.
usea 2 hours ago [-]
Another way to frame that question is: Should we remove the right for people to enter into such contracts?
altmanaltman 49 minutes ago [-]
Legally, yes. I mean it still depends on a lot of things but mostly at will employment contracts will have clauses about such things. You will have to get approval from legal before you can get on a board of even a dog rescue or a glove repair company. A practical consideration is simple like if you are a google exec and you are on board of a dog rescue company and that company gets hit with allgeations that you are just shooting all the dogs and selling their meat to some foreign nation. News will cover it as "Google Exec on Board of Evil Dog Rescue Company" so you extend that repuation risk to Google as well since you are actively employed there. Obviously an extereme example but that's the kind of logic they think of.
Morals imo often have nothing to do with law, but fairness does.
nl 2 hours ago [-]
The obvious answer is that "obvious lines" aren't at all obvious at the scale of Google.
Googlers are well paid, and that pay reflects this.
financltravsty 6 hours ago [-]
This ethos doesn't gel with the old ethos and that's where the disconnect comes from.
At one point Google was there to build cool shit and enable people to do it; not extract maximal amount of value and "being Evil" by the values of its time.
davidgay 5 hours ago [-]
The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.
Grombobulous 4 hours ago [-]
And it's not just about open source, it's about the author of this tool using trademarks and effectively impersonating Google.
Judging by the screenshot of the repo, I think most people who download this would think that it's official Google software.
michaellee8 3 hours ago [-]
tbh i assumed that is an official product too
Arainach 6 hours ago [-]
Build cool shit and follow the proper release procedures for it. There is a huge difference between something unrelated to your employer on a personal repo, youremployerrepo/api-samples, and calling something "Employer Majorproduct CLI" on an official employer repo which is bound to be confused for an official release.
I would have been fired from every employer I've ever worked for of any size for doing something like that - including Google circa 2018.
DANmode 3 hours ago [-]
> follow the proper release procedures for it
What happens when your thing
or nothing close to your thing
will ever see the light of day?
no-name-here 2 hours ago [-]
1. If google said ok but don't release under google’s name/in google’s repo, do that.
2. If google said no this goes against our goals for the product, don't release it if you want to keep working for google?
sib 2 hours ago [-]
Is that relevant here,
given that Google was creating an official thing
quite close to his thing
at the same time?
(And why are we writing like this?)
gedy 35 minutes ago [-]
Would you like them
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?
seanhunter 1 hours ago [-]
Fair to point out,
the official google thing,
was quite a lot worse
than his thing.
(I’m quite into the whole “Posting in free verse” idea)
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
> Google was creating an official thing
quite close to his thing
Just link to it.
Arainach 2 hours ago [-]
It's mentioned in the original link for this post.
Arainach 2 hours ago [-]
None of that is relevant. You're working on things for their employer, they control when and if anything is released. Most of us have worked on projects that were cancelled - even when that happens you don't just release it anyway.
financltravsty 6 hours ago [-]
Just a very sad departure from more humanistic values towards "well technically their legal rights take precedence over common good."
Especially that he's an "engineer" not a "Googler" or "a person."
God what a fall from grace.
mh2266 5 hours ago [-]
I'd much rather be an "engineer" than a "Googler" (I don't work at Google) or any other corporate cutesy name. No thanks...
debo_ 5 hours ago [-]
I was there in 2005 and we were basically told point-blank that we couldn't open source _anything_ without running it by a manager first. This was at a time where all engineers were basically housed in the main 4 buildings on the north campus, so not yet all that big. Not sure what grace they fell from, but I found it to be a nauseating sanctimonious place even then.
DangitBobby 2 hours ago [-]
According to the Twitter thread his manager is the one who announced it.
vachina 5 hours ago [-]
Ya we all can build cool shit all day if the world isn’t a litigious bitch.
“Actions have consequences”
WheelsAtLarge 5 hours ago [-]
Bottom line, he did something that affected the company without any authority. His action implied the product was Google blessed without the company fully knowing about it. Google has spent billions to protect its reputation and then you have a random guy put out a self create product without the company even knowing. They had a case for suing him for millions. Of Course, they wouldn't have been able to collect but it would have been hell for him. They also had a case for criminal fraud. All in all he's lucky he only got fired.
matheusmoreira 4 hours ago [-]
> and then you have a random guy put out a self create product
Random guy? He was a Google employee. Looks like he was just doing his job.
> Google has spent billions to protect its reputation
Not sure billions are enough here, since Google's reputation is terrible in spite of it, and this episode certainly isn't helping.
teitoklien 14 minutes ago [-]
You made a typo, it should be "Google spent billions eroding its reputation" [0]
The director that did the announcement tweet may have provided some authority. He seems to have left Google voluntarily recently after 14 years.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
It’s a CLI for Google Workspace. Google Workspace is a genuine Google Product.
Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):
> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.
Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.
WheelsAtLarge 4 hours ago [-]
Google Workspace is but the CLI is not. These are 2 related but different products. Had he just released it under his name then that wouldn't have been such a big issue, maybe, but he used the Google logo which implied it was Google blessed. If I did the same thing, they would have a case for suing me. Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name. Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible. And support it on any issues that are found along the way. All companies protect their logo to a high degree simply because of the implications it has when people see it.
whstl 4 hours ago [-]
It was not released under his name. It is in Google's own googleworkspace Github Organization, alongside 57 other similar projects that consume from the same API.
> Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible
That's 100% not true for those kinds of projects. There's plenty of "not officially supported" projects in Google's Github.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
Not complaining about the downvoting but everything in this comment is verifiable from the links you provided.
3 hours ago [-]
magicalist 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, the GP is being overdramatic but releasing a vibe coded cli frontend for an official product in a google github org and that uses your google account credentials is a big deal no matter how unofficial you claim it is in the readme.
NikolaNovak 4 hours ago [-]
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 :-/
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
So is it normally allowed to publish a non-Google-affiliated repo under Google's brand? This seems weird to me, and I can't understand why he didn't just do it under his own name.
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
cdata 7 hours ago [-]
Simply put: all work published to Google repos is implicitly affiliated with Google.
In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product.
As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
But there's an approval process to create such a repo under the Google name, right? I'm not seeing that he followed that.
cdata 6 hours ago [-]
When I was there, there was no universal process; different teams had different processes based on their focus. There was a launch process for Google products and there was the open source office for approving open source code (which amounted to a rubber stamp in my experience; they mainly checked for boilerplate issues). As I said above, my team and others were allowed to publish at our discretion.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
magicalist 4 hours ago [-]
Releasing vibe coded handling of google account credentials seems like the biggest problem with this.
Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.
whstl 4 hours ago [-]
The repo is still online and is official [1], so Google doesn't really seem to care about its existence.
It's a fair point that it's still up, though looking just now for two minutes there are at least some issues with auth[1] which would make me really not trust it.
It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.
> and is official [1]
FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.
This project is in an organization that has 57 other public repos with code by several other Google employees, is linked to by Google own documentation, and the only public member of the organization is (hopefully still) a Google employee.
Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.
This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.
jameslk 6 hours ago [-]
Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
reactordev 7 hours ago [-]
Used to be part of Google’s culture until the AI wars and walled garden present we find ourselves in.
khazhoux 6 hours ago [-]
> I'm noticing a few commenters who work (worked?) at Google (inferred from comment history) who are critical of this person's actions.
Tangent: did you really go through people’s histories far back enough to find out they were googlers/ex-googlers? Did you use an agent to do that?
tlogan 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point.
gerdesj 8 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
> 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 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Grombobulous 3 hours ago [-]
I think your encouragement is admirable but could be interpreted as naive.
For one thing, the author of this tool used Google trademarks (the logo) to represent the project.
If you are even slightly larger than a mom and pop small business you pretty much have to defend that trademark or else you risk losing it.
But, okay, fine, you can just tell them not to use your trademark and have them say it's not an official thing. No big deal.
The other thing I would say is that growing beyond even a relatively small number of employees fundamentally changes everything. Once you don't have that face to face with all your employees that trust level between you and them can't possibly be the same, no matter how good your intentions are. Even a modest company with 25-50 people...how well can you know those people, really? Even if you try your hardest to know them?
Once you have a certain number of employees you run into probabilistic realities.
Google has over 100,000 employees, which means statistically speaking a few of them have committed or will commit homicide. The idea of "we trust all our employees" can't exist from a mathematical perspective, even if the leadership happens to be the nicest people in the world who really want their employees to have freedom and autonomy.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
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).
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard.
It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies!
But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in trouble for this" narrative.
QuantumGood 7 hours ago [-]
Clueness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with perceived freedom. I think it's that cause and effect are not as often connected (consequences). I remember a Google employee updating a Google font that broke thousands of websites. Community members explained that Google recommended (at that time) letting Google host the font, and that they could fork it instead, or find a path that wouldn't break so many websites. The employee took the implication of consequences as being connected to ther actions as an aff(r)ont "They can just host it themselves"; "they can switch to another font/redesgin their site". When it was pointed out that the cause would not be known to most, and that budgets would have to be found to ferret out the cause and implement the solution, etc., etc., the Google employee stopped responding.
bonsai_bar 7 hours ago [-]
We take annual training that warns us against doing what this engineer did.
sleepybrett 6 hours ago [-]
yes we all pay attention to 'the training'
sanderjd 5 hours ago [-]
Again, I'm pretty skeptical that this person completely missed this part of the training for seven years.
ktm5j 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing.
10 hours ago [-]
ingvay7 10 hours ago [-]
Particularly for a company that possibly has to navigate high-volume, often frivolous litigation and brand attacks from trolls. I have been in similar situations having to partner with legal defending the most frivolous things on products released. You literally sign docs to not do such things when u onboard. Not sure what the point of broadcasting this is though.
justinwp 8 hours ago [-]
You are assuming that it was "personally" releasing something and that the process wasn't followed.
cmeacham98 8 hours ago [-]
You continue to dance around this question on this post - did you or did you not follow Google's open source approval process[1]? Did you have an approved Ariane/Launcher2 entry?
Did you have your launch approved? So did you follow the process?
fg137 7 hours ago [-]
Why isn't it under google's username on github?
Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
Is it actually approved by Google or not?
You need to actually answer these questions instead of dodging them.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
Are you the "serious consequences for ____" guy?
7 hours ago [-]
busterarm 10 hours ago [-]
Not only that but not clearing with your management that you're not working on something that is actually being worked on as a product.
Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.
DangitBobby 2 hours ago [-]
Management literally announced it for him.
jbm 11 hours ago [-]
Your ships would have been sunk during the 2002 Millennial challenge and an entire bureaucracy would defend you for the next 20 years.
echoangle 11 hours ago [-]
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?
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
AFAICT his manager and one of the champions for the tool was Addy Osmani, who is one of the top front end Devrel people globally and who has also left Google recently.
nmfisher 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Not really, no. I'd expect a stern reprimand, but getting fired is extreme.
I'm not sure if Google is still an attractive place to work, but this incident certainly isn't helping tip the scales.
NewsaHackO 4 hours ago [-]
I guess it may be semantics, but I agree that I would have the same expectation. However, I also I think getting fired would be a justified punishment in the situation.
It’d like playing a computer game during free library time at the school when I was a kid; I would expect to be reprimanded, however just outright barring use from the computer during free time would probably be justified.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
Releasing open source tools showing off what you can do with your company’s APIs is part of the job description for a devrel (signed: a devrel).
djeastm 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jxyxfinite 2 minutes ago [-]
I suspect he ported over/heavily referenced how the official cli worked and got into massive legal trouble by open sourcing it.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
Stevvo 8 hours ago [-]
He doesn't recognize it. He claims in the post he was fired because certain leaders were afraid of being disrupted.
pydry 7 hours ago [-]
This seems pretty plausible. This tool probably did threaten some product line or other with cannibalisation.
IncreasePosts 6 hours ago [-]
Is it plausible?
Imagine any leader that is not sundar trying to get this person fired. At some point, that leader would need to justify to either their leader, or a similarly leveled peer why they budgeted x SWE-years(where x is probably > 25) for a project that took this person far less than 1 SWE-year.
wiseowise 3 hours ago [-]
You’d be surprised how petty some people are.
sleepybrett 6 hours ago [-]
it makes them look lazy for not doing it already, this tool was sorely needed.
jofzar 4 hours ago [-]
My bet is that he was reprimanded for this and then didn't back down, hes even in the comments here now arguing about it
teraflop 8 hours ago [-]
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?
AOsborn 7 hours ago [-]
He's being intentionally vague and combative in his statements. I think it's fair to assume there was a process issue when even as he admits he was "grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories".
Clearing up the issue would take a single comment that all the correct processes were followed. The fact he hasn't said as much is the elephant in the room here.
justinwp 23 minutes ago [-]
There is a two "calendar" launch process for OSS at Google, one "calendar" is org specific, the other OSS. I followed the process and each of the bits were flipped in the same way I had always done it.
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
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...
rcbdev 36 minutes ago [-]
He worked for devrel under Osmani. These guidelines and processes do not apply to them, last I checked.
jauntywundrkind 7 hours ago [-]
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.
okdood64 3 hours ago [-]
I don't understand. If a public github project's CLI was being used to access workspace, then clearly they had the APIs for it open? How can they restrict how people do that?
jrochkind1 7 hours ago [-]
It doesn't look like anything has been taken down.
chaostheory 10 hours ago [-]
Ofcourse. This is HN and not LinkedIn.
We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.
echoangle 8 hours ago [-]
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.
chaostheory 3 hours ago [-]
My point is a good portion of HN is composed of pirates who don’t like rules and have a higher tolerance for risk. You can dislike that all you want for any given reason both valid and petty. However, what you’re seeing are core values from the people who created this community and the same type of people still run it today so you’re going to keep seeing this kind of thinking moving forward
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
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".
throwaway23597 10 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
refulgentis 7 hours ago [-]
Love Better Call Saul :) The comparison is not even wrong (in the Pauli sense). Required knowledge seems to be DevRels role within Google culture. The absolute last thing this was was “mutiny” from a “product roadmap”. They’re sort of just around to build things to help devs and evangelize. They’re not tied to roadmaps or recruited to work on them.
lukewarm707 9 hours ago [-]
haha "liquidity in human capital" am i right?
cs702 11 hours ago [-]
Looks like a textbook example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[a]
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
EDIT #2: Former Googlers here say that for a long time it was common at Google to let employees publish code with Google branding on github, in which case the firing was not justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652851 Yes, I changed my mind again. I have no qualms about changing my mind if the facts justify it :-)
djmips 7 hours ago [-]
I think your first take still stands.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Google is worth $4+ TRILLION. There is natural and needed bureaucracy in preserving that. This type of probably well-meaning, but cowboy activity is not worth the risk to Google.
BLKNSLVR 8 hours ago [-]
Sounds like exactly why they're now a lumbering ineffectual beast, rather than the center for innovation that they used to be.
uejfiweun 7 hours ago [-]
It depends on what you consider ineffectual to mean. Ineffectual at making new products and innovating? Yes, definitely. Ineffectual at preserving business momentum and continuing to grow profits? Well, the latest numbers speak for themselves.
BLKNSLVR 1 hours ago [-]
Can't argue with that. You'll never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator.
jauco 10 hours ago [-]
You’re not disagreeing with gp.
I like the law because you can quite easily formulate it without bias.
Large enough orgs will indeed get people whose job is more closely aligned with the goal vs people whose job is more closely aligned with the existence of the org. _Because_ you need to keep investing energy to keep the org in existence. You can’t just do the goal only.
But being responsible for keeping the org in existence is not the same as responsible for the goals that the org was created for in the first place.
_and_ I can see how the people whose job it is to ensure the org keeps existing will gain the majority vote.
It’s like a law of nature: the way things fall out if you’re not consciously working to have them fall out differently.
(So it can be good for google to fire them from a “let’s keep existing standpoint” even though it might be contrary to having the easiest/optimal to use product. And if that is so, the keep existing vote will have the power) I don’t use google products really that much so I can’t speak to the merits of this example.
judge2020 11 hours ago [-]
Unlikely that the bureaucracy is what will keep them valuable in the long-term.
worik 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, very true
But in the long term, we are all dead
josefritzishere 10 hours ago [-]
How long is has a different answer for everyone.
overfeed 8 hours ago [-]
Google will likely outlast everyone walking the earth at this moment.
BrenBarn 11 hours ago [-]
Actually it means less than nothing, it's a negative, because it shows that working outside the system can be popular and potentially woo away users, which challenges the supremacy of the organization.
sleepybrett 6 hours ago [-]
i think your edit is asinine. google could have requested the removal of the trademark and made everything kosher, but they didn't. They decided to make an example of a guy who built something useful that people liked and now every other engineer at google will think twice before adding any not previously approved value to the business.
You were right above the edit.
logicchains 11 hours ago [-]
People ask why Google's Gemini is falling behind the competition in spite of Google's immense resources, this kind of thing is an example why.
FuriouslyAdrift 11 hours ago [-]
the Antigravity AI suite is hugely popular among non-developers
kamikazechaser 16 minutes ago [-]
Every other AI suite provider claims the same.
int_19h 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's because non-developers are not exposed to Codex and Claude Code? I try to use Antigravity every now and then, and each time I drop it because of the sheer number of bugs and general brokenness.
amanharshx 4 hours ago [-]
antigravity is one of the worst tools i have ever encountered with
stogot 11 hours ago [-]
So is every other AI tool
throwaway23597 11 hours ago [-]
Who is in charge of naming things at Google? Like a five syllable word followed by "AI", I couldn't think of a worse name for a product competing for mind share.
quuxplusone 7 hours ago [-]
The other day I learned that the command line interface (or whatever) to Antigravity goes by the abbreviated name "agy", which is awfully close to "agi" as in "artificial general intelligence." I strongly suspect they did that on purpose.
> Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
Yeah, that absolutely looks like an official product announcement from Google. Surely it was obvious they'd get in trouble for that.
eranation 21 minutes ago [-]
Put aside whether this was justified or not, or the potential Streisand effect or PR damage (or vice versa). What signal is this sending to the young Google engineer who wants to build the next Gmail? Even if this violated every internal policy, firing someone who created something that people actually want is sending a very disturbing message (internally and externally).
Also, is this somehow relate to Addy Osmani’s recent departure from Google? (Was it in sympathy, was it a retaliation as this was “the tweet that got OP fired”?)
nickv 12 hours ago [-]
Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story.
Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.
There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?
danudey 9 hours ago [-]
It sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company.
In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it look extremely official and blindsided everyone when suddenly there's a viral Google Workspace tool released by a Googler with Google branding that wasn't released by Google.
I'm not saying he should have been fired, necessarily, but he demonstrated _extremely_ poor judgement in doing this the way he did and put his manager and everyone else in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable position.
dwroberts 8 hours ago [-]
The branding and logo on the embed comes from the org it is attached to, which is an official GitHub organisation owned by Google and contains many other open source repositories.
I think there is probably way more to this story - maybe he was told about the upcoming official use/variant and was asked to not preempt it before the cloud
next conference with his one?
pydry 7 hours ago [-]
Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
As a customer and dev, it's confusing to me when I look at Google's stuff and see official-looking unofficial CLIs.
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
* when it's also alongside an official CLI for the same product
jrochkind1 7 hours ago [-]
> but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?
dmazzoni 10 hours ago [-]
When has 20% projects ever been about bypassing every launch process and just posting your product publicly?
Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.
MeetingsBrowser 6 hours ago [-]
There are literally hundreds of projects on googles github with the standard “this is not an official Google project” in the readme.
notfromhere 11 hours ago [-]
its what happens when a company runs out of ideas and is mostly run by people with MBAs.
Good ideas are now risky because it steps on the toes of someone's fiefdom
lokar 11 hours ago [-]
There have always been lots of ideas. The issue is the management consultants and finance took over.
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
They’ve been GE’d.
ex-aws-dude 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe the policy is that you can’t just release 20% time projects publically?
nomel 11 hours ago [-]
I've never worked for an employer, from pizza delivery, to corporate intern, to multiple startup, to FAANG, that didn't have this VERY CLEARLY worded in the employment agreement, right up top:
1. Any work you do during company time/resources/equipment, is company property.
2. Anything public related to work, or that could be considered as competing or providing the service in the same space as work, needs to be vetted by the company.
Along with public communication, etc.
In my experience, this isn't some "what happens when MBA's run company" or "they run out of ideas", it's literally every company I've ever worked for.
Was google previously an exception here, or are people just unfamiliar with the details of the 20% policy? Surely they didn't allow you to work on, for example, something for a competitor? There had to be some limitations, rather than a pure free for all, as seems to be suggested in the comments.
dekhn 8 hours ago [-]
The policy was always crystal clear, but at the same time, tons of people found it confusing. "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal" came up a lot. People would get into huge fights with OSPO over this.
userbinator 11 minutes ago [-]
Keeping a very strict "firewall" between your personal and corporate life is the best way to avoid such situations, but then again, these are Google employees we're talking about...
socalgal2 4 hours ago [-]
Writing at home is irrelevant if what you're doing is related to the company's business. You can't be working for Google and making a browser, a document editor, a spreadsheet, a mapping site, etc... It doesn't matter if you do it on your own time. Yea, you can grow coffee and sell it at retail stores on your own time. No you can't complete directly with your employer. If it's some gray area then you either get permission first or wait for the courts if you get sued.
This isn't unique to Google. It's basic common law. No contract needs to be signed. Competing with your employer is immoral. If you want to compete then quit and be a competitor. If you're taking their money as an employee then you have a "duty of loyalty"
2 hours ago [-]
fg137 7 hours ago [-]
> "I wrote this at home on my personal computer in my free time? Why does google own it? how can that be legal"
Interesting. Did they read their contract before signing it?
dekhn 6 hours ago [-]
yes, many engineers (especially at google) are armchair lawyers and have all sorts of opinions about contracts and licenses.
woadwarrior01 8 hours ago [-]
You're absolutely allowed to release 20% time projects publicly. As in any large bureaucracy, there's a process for that which is taught during onboarding. What you're not allowed to do is skip the process. There's nothing Google specific about it and I've seen similar firings at other companies too. Skipping legal and corp comms review on any external public communication is grounds for termination.
danudey 8 hours ago [-]
He released the product with Google branding making it look extremely like an official Google project, and then it went viral and blindsided everyone who would have been involved in creating or approving this kind of tool internally.
If I released a tool personally that I hadn't told anyone at work about and put my company's logos all over it and it went insanely viral then I would expect an extremely uncomfortable conversation with my manager, his manager, HR, and at least one lawyer.
AJRF 11 minutes ago [-]
Former Googler here...nah just kidding, I just felt left out.
justinwp 12 hours ago [-]
I am not going to share much more than what I already have, but I think this speaks to the experience of working in big tech and the disruption caused by AI both at the level of teams/roadmaps/incentives and changing user behavior.
anon84873628 11 hours ago [-]
It would help if you clarify whether you followed the OSS release process guidelines, which are very clearly documented.
"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".
Something in the explanation is missing here. It's still not clear to me from any of the provided context whether you got approval to release this. At least from my understanding of your role, if you had approval and used an official google repository, you would not get fired for merely publishing code that accesses a documented API through documented endpoints.
Hence many people are wondering if you released this without approval (that's my guess), if you used a Google repo to do it (from what I can tell you did use a google repo, but not an officially supported one, and other teams at google use this repo to publish code), and whether there were other extenuating circumstances, or if it was "the workspace SVP called my division's VP and told him to fire me" (just a guess for another firing mechanism).
justinwp 21 minutes ago [-]
There was a Ariane/Launch with bits flipped including the eng bit from my manager.
computerdork 10 hours ago [-]
...By the way, on a different subject, 4 days ago, had read your comments on a different post dealing with Alzheimer's. Just now, asked you a follow up question, and it's easy for them to get buried in your hackernews comments threads, so thought I'd just mention it. Thanks!
anon84873628 10 hours ago [-]
Straight from that page:
>This includes side projects that have not gone through IARC, even for DevRel engineers.
So did you do this "Launcher2" or "Ariane" thing and get the approvals? If so, it seems your ass would be covered. If not...
I can sympathize that the process seems convoluted and could particularly bite a DevRel accustomed to more autonomy. One would hope Google would do the whole blame free retrospective thing and improve the systems.
justinwp 20 minutes ago [-]
Yes there was a launch with eng bit flipped by manager.
pinkmuffinere 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it really sounds like you knew the policy in depth, and even contributed to the design of the policy, but when it came to your pet project you ignored it by skipping the release process? Am I missing something?
justinwp 19 minutes ago [-]
Wasn't ignored or skipped.
Ferret7446 10 hours ago [-]
The OSS release process has always stated that you can't use Google branding for a unilateral launch. You aren't making yourself look better
fg137 7 hours ago [-]
How do you explain "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
I wouldn't read too much into it, since it can mean virtually anything.
10 hours ago [-]
freedomben 11 hours ago [-]
Really sorry to hear about this. It's so ironic because your tool is something that made G workspace so much more useful to me personally and was a deciding factor in which calendar project I used. Getting fired for making a product more useful to customers is quite ironic.
Thank you for your work on the tool! Paired with a claude skill I wrote around it, it saves me a ton of time creating a logseq meeting note page for important meetings.
I wish you the best of luck landing somewhere that appreciates you a lot more than G did.
alberth 11 hours ago [-]
Sorry to hear your story.
Since I’ve never work at FAANG, does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product? And if so, did this go through that process?
jkaplowitz 11 hours ago [-]
> does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product?
I worked at Google in the past, most recently ending in early 2015, and can confirm that the answer to this question was yes when I was there - presumably still the case today with different details.
I have no idea whether the procedures were followed in this case, nor do I have any other inside information on this story, nor am I speaking for Google or Alphabet here.
trollbridge 10 hours ago [-]
It was certainly the case for me back circa... I can barely remember, 2008/2009?
Everyone just launched tools internally, although it was pretty easy to get approval to launch something externally, although most people didn't bother. The environment back then had tons of internal tools all over the place.
jkaplowitz 4 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, I'm referring to external launches, not to internal launches.
Tomte 11 hours ago [-]
Their process is a well-known template other organizations look at when creating their own:
I’ve been gone a few years, but there was a process for contributing OSS code outside the company, and another for releasing company code externally, etc
It seemed to mostly work. Some people complained it was too slow, others seemed to manage fine.
I think Chris DiBonas’ team ran all of that.
khazhoux 7 hours ago [-]
DiBona definitely started the OSS group and process, and ran it for many years.
fragmede 11 hours ago [-]
I haven't been following along with your story closely so forgive me for asking you to repeat things that you've probably already said, but did they just fire you out of the blue or did they talk to you and it didn't go well?
danielodievich 10 hours ago [-]
5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.
squidi 9 hours ago [-]
Justin’s blog is the consistently the best resource for Google Apps Script content and he genuinely seemed to connect with the platform. He always stood out, as Googlers don’t typically seem to connect with anyone/anything.
10 hours ago [-]
arjie 11 hours ago [-]
The concerns seem to be primarily around trademark and logos? Unless there's more to it, those seem trivial to remedy by requiring removal of logos and renaming in the style of Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw. Google is well-known to be pretty sparing with firing people even for performance, so either this is a change in stance (entirely possible) or there's more to it.
cynicalkane 11 hours ago [-]
For over the last >1 year, Google has been dismissing people without warning or cause. The days where it was nearly impossible to be fired are over; now you might be severed by surprise for no given reason at all.
frollogaston 7 hours ago [-]
It's both. They're usually more lenient than other companies when it comes to performance, but then there are random waves of layoffs that have more to do with what org you're in than anything else.
collabs 11 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally speaking, I have seen a change in behavior even from early 2024.
I was in a meeting (online) with a few people from Google shortly before Google IO about something fairly small. The technical engineer actually spoke(!) and he talked about revenue and stuff. I was dumbfounded that technical engineers at Google would ever care about "moving the needle".
stogot 11 hours ago [-]
Are you sure it wasn’t a “customer engineer” role?
collabs 7 hours ago [-]
No, it was not a sales call.
lern_too_spel 11 hours ago [-]
I know many people at Google who have been waiting to get laid off to get better terms than they would from just quitting. Now they know what to do.
tonfa 11 hours ago [-]
People don't typically get a nice severance package if they're fired for violating company policy.
(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)
trollbridge 10 hours ago [-]
Firings like this often include a technically voluntary separation agreement that gives you a few extra weeks' pay or some additional months of health benefits etc. precisely to avoid that problem. (Also gets them out of paying unemployment, and means they can get a fresh set of NDAs/nondisparagement etc. signed with the employee.)
I would never fire an employee unilaterally, especially over something like this, when there's valuable IP at stake and you can just talk the person into agreeing to sign over whatever it is you need.
manwithopinions 11 hours ago [-]
I think that’s a good instinct but this line…
“I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.”
Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Google’s internal processes (which is forgivable) and then demanding to work unilaterally (unforgivable). The amount of positive feedback may have given the author too much confidence that he could dictate to leadership what comes next.
A Google Workspace CLI is a useful project idea but it isn’t groundbreaking, it’s something that the Google Workspace team should be involved in. I suspect he just wanted go steamroll over them. Shipping stuff in a team is never about just producing the code.
zerobees 7 hours ago [-]
It'd be a fairly major faux pas to release a "non-product" open-source project in a way that smells like a product, but I don't think it's an automatic firing offense in most of big tech, especially if you're just releasing some technical (CLI) tool. It's more of a "stern talking-to" situation.
I'm guessing something more happened here. Maybe someone was displeased with how the author initially responded, or some powerful exec really wanted to make an example out of him (sounds like another group was working on an identically-named official product with the same name?), or they were just looking for an excuse to cut this particular role.
827a 10 hours ago [-]
IMO: If the project leverages Google branding or authority improperly, then it shouldn't be on github and should not be under active development by Google employees; yet it is. If Google is suddenly alright with the way the project leveraged Google branding and authority, then the cause for firing the original developer, especially given Google's famously lax stance toward 20% projects and internal open source, is a lot weaker. In other words: Healthy companies do not fire individuals simply for breaching branding guidelines in a way that is ultimately beneficial and looked favorably upon by the company. That's literally just not a thing that happens; at worst you get a reprimand, and in many healthy companies you'd actually get a promotion.
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
dekhn 8 hours ago [-]
There are more than a few plausible scenarios here. I've been inside google and I've seen other "i was fired" posts before. almost always, there is some additional context which gets left out. For example, I could see a path where the author wrote the code, got approval, published it, and then another part of the company (workspace) found out and wanted to use the same space/place or another place to publish their "competing but official" system, and the author refused (programmers are notorious for this) to take down his code when asked, at which point any number of different paths could lead to the employee being fired for not complying.
However, google is filled with personalities and egos and sometimes engineers are the collateral damage.
Thanks for at least making a CLI in Rust instead of Python. Their gcloud CLI is so annoying (and slow) to use.
CyLith 7 hours ago [-]
Former Google employee here. This is exactly the kind of shit-for-brains action I'd expect from Google executives. Bravo on further dragging your image through the mud.
fg137 7 hours ago [-]
The repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product."
So what is this thing?
Can anyone rely on it with confidence?
Does Google even acknowledge its existence?
If it's not officially supported, why is your name, a (former) Google employee, on it?
sumanthvepa 7 hours ago [-]
Yes. While they may have been justified in firing him for not following policy, they also lost a talented engineer. (I'm sure they don't care) I would have done the intelligent thing here and looked at how the project could have been made official. But that decision would have had to been made at a very high level, maybe even the CEO, because anyone lower down would have made a narrow and parochial decision in favour of the org they were protecting, rather than in the best interests of the company.
0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago [-]
On the plus side, this is the best marketing ever for a new job. "I'm the guy Google fired for making a workspace CLI". Keep on getting rid of your talented dedicated people, Google, we'd love to hire them.
matznerd 5 hours ago [-]
Great that it was available, but compared to Peter's version this one is inferior. It didn't have draft email as a default and asking it to write a draft would just send the email, oops lol. And doesn't have mutli-account support or a number of other features. I think one thing it could do better was inline commenting (maybe), but neither CLI can initiate their own comments...
You would think the devrel would be more familiar with OSS policies than anyone else.
Something about their LinkedIn job title at Google ("Developer Relations (Mostly SWE)" also reads odd.
speak_plainly 11 hours ago [-]
Google seems to be filled with really talented people, technology, and every resource anyone would ever need, but their execution and management seems to be severely lacking. This account is a pretty damning indictment of Google.
Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.
The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.
thatsadude 2 hours ago [-]
Funny to think about this when he got fired releasing a well-received product. On the other hand, Google released a subpar antigravity 2.0, full of bugs, almost unusable. The tech lead of Antigravity went on X to claim users don't know what they want.
MatmaRex 2 hours ago [-]
Testing the keyboard.
tasting the rainbow
qsxfthnkp2322 9 hours ago [-]
At big tech you do what your piece of shit manager wants you to do (assuming you have one of the typical big tech managers). That’s all you are allowed to do.
Thats my experience at Apple. I even tried to ask for alternatives, mentors, etc. all denied by my one manager because I was reorged into their team and a new manager had something to prove. Directors who I talked to just shrugged their shoulders.
Leadership at these companies is pretty much shit. It’s not surprising something this happens at Google.
Companies could give zero f’s about you, how long you have been there, or what you have done or accomplished there.
Seriously. If you know you have a bad manager (you’ll definitely know) then you need to get the hell out asap. Don’t think if you tough it out it’ll work out. I lasted 5 years total and the last two years with this unnecessary insane stress caused by him. They will let you go after your dog suddenly gets cancer and they dont care you have a mortgage or need health insurance.
I’m sure there are good management out there, but not my experience and clearly not the experience of who posted this on x.
Management and leadership at these companies needs to fucking treat people that work for them like they care. At all.
dekhn 9 hours ago [-]
A long long time ago, Google management cared more about its employees. I saw folks with cancer who were not fired (even though they couldn't work) to keep them access to healthcare. And a coworker whose parachute did not deploy and was brain damaged- my manager spent hours on the phone calling his parents in Iran, arranging special health care, etc. Intrinsic motivation- making a new product out of nothing- was incentivzed, not punished (unless you leaked code intentionally).
But also, the worst managers I've ever had were at Google.
qsxfthnkp2322 8 hours ago [-]
The good days of tech are over due to people like this who have a stronghold in management.
These people. Man.
This manager I had would also be hard to contact, he would schedule meetings on my calendar just to cancel them or change them last minute, all the time. He told me I would never be a software engineer even though I have 15 years experience. He denied me a mentor when I wasn’t too busy or on a pip or anything.
He started this stuff 3 months after be was promoted to management by his best friend. Who I learned from some other people that they have been friends since high school. He is protected by this guy and he controls his narrative better than anyone else.
But ultimately he’s a piece of shit. When I was reorged to this team with the product I worked on it was just me. My first manager told me on our last 1:1 that he fucking hated those people. So I dealt with that for more than 2 years.
I wanted nothing more in my career to work at Apple. And then after two different managers this guy gets promoted and immediately starts this and emailing me about things i didn’t do.
I had good to great performance reviews before him.
Now I have no job for more than half a year and am about to be on the edge of selling my house without somewhere to live.
And I’ve applied at soooo many places and I have a great resume.
I enjoy tech but the job market is worse than ive experienced ever. And my beagle of 13 years passed. So it’s been a great year.
whstl 4 hours ago [-]
Big companies just wake up the worst instincts in everyone involved.
I've seen people getting thrown under the bus even for voluntarily quitting due to burnout. Like legitimately doing illegal stuff such as withholding documentation or writing recommendation letters in secret code.
I know of a company that I worked that is currently under fire currently for not following the law and lying to employees by advising them incorrectly about their rights. They can't even fucking fire people properly without breaking laws and treating them like shit.
No company deserves anyone's loyalty or concern.
firefax 11 hours ago [-]
So... they fired him for doing a 20% time project? I'm glad I don't have any of their stock to sell, what terrible management.
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
Not for doing it, for releasing it publicly, presumably without permission. (If he did have permission, he probably has a pretty good case to bring.)
outside1234 11 hours ago [-]
20% time project != able to just launch it YOLO style
I suspect the core issue here is that he launched it with Google logos without following any sort of process
sourdecor 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, endorsement matters. It can represent the whole. You have to be careful with it.
ex-aws-dude 11 hours ago [-]
That would be dumb but I don’t think it should result in firing still
free652 11 hours ago [-]
2 months later, I think we can assume some kind of process behind that didnt go well for our friend here.
ex-aws-dude 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah there is always more to these stories
dolmen 10 hours ago [-]
It looks like he wants his former manager to be fired too. This only gives bad signals to hiring teams.
free652 9 hours ago [-]
His manager would the first line manager, and really not a decision maker at G. it possible that his manager would put him under a bus after getting called out by legal. Dunno.
But regardless once escalated by legal there have been a process to mitigate this, so either the director fired the OP or someone higher. The direct manger would be not really in the decision making here. There is a clear path to release open source at G, and it seems it wasnt followed. The OP claimed that its confusing, but it isn't - usual the launch tool to get the approval and you covered your bases. If the OP didnt have all launch approvals after 7 years at G, wow thats on him. If the OP actually had all the launch approvals then he has an actually big case against G.
Launch approvals are for all product - internal and external, it usually requires L8+ (Director) levels approvals.
sanderjd 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe it should not, but when I worked there, I certainly knew something like this probably would. At least, if it blew up and drew a lot of eyeballs.
Ferret7446 10 hours ago [-]
I'd guess he was fired for refusing to comply after legal talked with him
8 hours ago [-]
donatj 7 hours ago [-]
How do the permissions work on Googles GitHub orgs where this guy could somehow create an unapproved public repo. I work for a MUCH smaller org and creating a repo at all requires review, creating a public repo many times more so.
waterTanuki 6 hours ago [-]
In the README
> This is not an officially supported Google product.
Why was this project published under an account named "Google Workspace"? Google seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, same with the cli creator.
If you want to publish a project under open source and you are the sole creator/owner -> do it in your own time, under your OWN individual github account. Nothing good has ever come from ceeding control of these things to giant corporations who only care how much it will increase their profit next quarter.
OrvalWintermute 7 hours ago [-]
I remember when Google was a bit rogue, full of brilliant people developing awesome things.
OJFord 11 hours ago [-]
I don't get it – you called the GitHub org 'googleworkspace' and used the Google logo? Presumably without permission? Don't Googlers regularly open-source side projects under the official org(s)? Did you really think this was going to be fine, or was it 'growth hacking' with tougher consequences than expected?
dekhn 11 hours ago [-]
I believe it's an official or semi-official Google github org. Typically at Google there is some process you are supposed to follow when opensourcing your code, and a repo like this exists specifically to get more people to use the API. The CLI still exists at the repo and the repo still has the Google branding, so it's 99% certain this is a Google repo.
If you do an end-run around the normal open source publishing you can get in trouble- up to and including termination- but my guess is there is more context around the firing than just "posted open source code to work with standard Google APIs". For example, you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.
fg137 7 hours ago [-]
How come it's not under "google" organization, which is where almost every other Google open source project lives (with the exception of a few notable ones)? That's just weird.
And if you look at the history, the main maintainer for the project was really just one person.
Even today, the repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product." So what is this?
If you told me the "googleworkspace" account is owned and controlled by this individual, not Google, I would have believed it.
dekhn 5 hours ago [-]
Google has multiple orgs on github: google, google-cloud-platform, chromium, android, flutter, angular, tensorflow all have their own top-level orgs because google ships its org chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law). Some orgs have been created by google and then released to the wild (kubernetes).
I think but I'm not sure that this is a "semi-official" org run by Google DevRel. Perhaps it has looser rules and ownership than the more official orgs? If I'm using the Wayback Machine properly, https://web.archive.org/web/20201130062102/https://github.co... shows that the site already used the Google logo way back in 2020 (earliest snapshot).
cloche 5 hours ago [-]
Also, the one person listed in the Organization Members works at Google as a Developer Advocate.
OJFord 10 hours ago [-]
Ah ok, that makes a lot more sense. Makes it a lot less clear why he was fired, but his side as told makes more sense at least!
fragmede 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, berating a coworker for being a fucking moron is unacceptable in corporate America.
hilariously 11 hours ago [-]
The truth is that in decent workplaces we've figured out attacking people doesn't generally get what you want, unless what you want is to have a tantrum.
Calling an idea nonsense is fine, calling it not profitable is great, and saying its a waste of time is a Monday. Attacking someone as a fucking moron is pointless, just fire them, deprioritize them, or move on.
whstl 4 hours ago [-]
Google has quite a few of those. It's hard to figure out if they're really official.
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
jongjong 7 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of how the founders of the so-called 'open source' cryptocurrency project I joined suppressed my work in the community.
They monopolize opportunities, suppressing natural-born entrepreneurs; force us into very narrow roles and fire us if we step out of line ever to slightly. Even when it is beneficial to them.
IMO, we should get rid of trademark laws. They didn't mind their LLMs ripping off people's copyrights. Why should anyone uphold trademarks?
If I work at Google and want to represent myself as Google, I should be able to.
I feel like, even if I don't work at Google, I should be able to use the logo. It's the consumer's mistake for inferring a relationship. I'm just showing a logo of a well known company and letting their dumbass jump to a conclusion.
khazhoux 6 hours ago [-]
I see justinwp is commenting here… Justin, people are asking questions that you’re not replying to. Sorry, but it’s pretty disingenuous to tweet your story and post it here, but then refuse to answer requests for more info.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
Seems to me your management chain was thinking “Why the hell is someone on our team releasing a vibe-coded CLI that’s branded to look like an official API, when we’re 2 weeks from announcing the actual CLI??” If you didn’t know there was an official CLI in the works, that’s one thing, but if you did know then that’s pretty shitty to your teammates in Workspace and bad for users who would adopt one CLI (thinking it’s official) just to then see another one 2 weeks later.
Still, I would expect a talking-to and not an actual firing… but who knows what actually happened since you’re not responding to anyone. :shrug:
cute_boi 4 hours ago [-]
The read me clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product.". I am not getting what you want to imply here and what you expect him to reply here.
khazhoux 2 hours ago [-]
It's other people on this thread that had questions, more than me.
I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
justinwp 13 minutes ago [-]
> they were about to announce in 2 weeks
Market validation can change roadmaps. As I stated on Twitter/X interest in CLIs for AI was not a very interesting thing outside a small group earlier in 2026.
randomuser558 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomsop 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
elzbardico 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
_doctor_love 11 hours ago [-]
Wow...one of the comments on there says "now I know you were fired for being a pussy."
Some days I think it would be nice to be able to punch someone in the face through the screen.
dang 11 hours ago [-]
Can we please focus on thoughtful conversation instead of importing the worst comments from other forums*?
Not to judge the feeling you express - I'm sure we can all relate. But as an HN comment it's pretty well guaranteed to turn the thread away from good places.
Agreed. You've probably noticed this too, but I think 90% of the very dumb, mean spirited, and inflammatory things I see are from someone purporting to dunk on it, or refute it, or tell us how it made them mad. Its probably the main mechanism by which is spreads. I think a lot of people do it organically, but I also think coordinated marketing campaigns will intentionally post things as if they're in opposition because its such an effective mechanism of spreading it. TLDR rage bait is bad don't fall for it!
dang 7 hours ago [-]
It's the way the human psyche works, which is why the second-order versions from marketers, media, etc., exist in the first place.
Trying to change that globally would amount to modifying human evolution. That kind of task you can't even call biting off more than you can chew; it's more the kind that bites you off, and then chews you in your entirety.
But that doesn't mean we can't do something at an individual level, and even a group level.
7 hours ago [-]
solid_fuel 11 hours ago [-]
I think the full text of that is even worse:
> You had my sympathy until you mentioned your healing. Now I know you were fired for being a pussy.
I was expecting some more substantial motivation for that but it's not even motivated by some weird disagreement about acceptable behavior at work, it's just this weird insanely toxic belief that taking care of yourself is "pussy behavior".
dlahoda 42 minutes ago [-]
I reported it to Twitter as violation of it terms with relevant category.
Twitter said naming people Pussy is fine.
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
It's twitter right? Ever since a billionaire bought it it went downhill.
konart 11 hours ago [-]
This is host most of the internet is in general.
testfrequency 11 hours ago [-]
HN is slowly starting to feel this way also, sadly
verdverm 11 hours ago [-]
HN still has the best mods (official and community)
Also, see the last rule in the Guidelines
testfrequency 11 hours ago [-]
The one that says don’t compare HN to Reddit?
Said the HN community has become over time (sadly) more toxic like Twitter/X.
The moderation here is fine, though it can be questionable at times why there’s some post suppression on certain topics.
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
jasonlotito 11 hours ago [-]
> But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google.
Nah. Fuck Google. Reasonable humans would talk to him, fix it, and move on. They don't need you carrying an ounce of water.
trollbridge 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the reasonable thing here is a stern talking-to about company policies, and then leveraging this thing to get more goodwill in the community about AI, which is an area Google is currently lacking in.
Ferret7446 10 hours ago [-]
He probably got that talking to, and continued to be stubborn and unapologetic. Getting fired is quite difficult, as there will be multiple attempts at resolving any issue.
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
Google is sorely lacking in goodwill, period. I don't know why this guy got fired, and I don't expect we ever will know the whole truth. But even so this seems like a very foolish PR move for Google. Rightly or wrongly people are going to take his side, and they can't really afford to burn goodwill with their customers.
bonsai_bar 7 hours ago [-]
Doesn't seem like many are taking his side based on this thread.
websap 11 hours ago [-]
This is what happens when companies are run by boomers who care more about building their orgs, instead of doing hard cutting edge engineering work.
Sucks for the author. Hope they land a good gig at a frontier lab.
11 hours ago [-]
xendo 11 hours ago [-]
Around that time I built a CLI to access and manage monitoring cameras that my company is selling. After giving a demo to my leadership I strongly adviced against releasing it to public. Giving agents access to some stuff is bad for customers.
First: you ought to disclose that information when commenting on a topic that relates in some way to your financial incentives.
Second: when I worked at Google under Chrome it was very common for individuals and teams to publish projects to open source repositories under Google-managed Github orgs. In fact, for most of my tenure ('15-'21) my team had license to publish to Github unilaterally (no approval from the open source office required). Great power comes with great responsibility, but also I would put to you that publishing an open source project like this one is part of Google's culture.
Firing seems an extreme consequence for the perceived damage of a long-tenured employee's behavior in this case.
This is certainly not the case in other product areas and for specifically for something that uses the Google name.
If I was expected to go through a full IARC committee in order to get my little Discord bot open sourced under my own account, something that uses the Google name would likely have to get IARC + Legal approvals, along with a proper launch/privacy review.
The OP also notes that they had a competing product in the process of development when they "launched" theirs, likely leading to significant internal confusion, and is something that would've been caught during a review.
I'm gunna be real, this whole thing smells of "I'm purposely bit telling the whole truth" and looks like clout chasing.
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.
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.
This did the opposite, didn’t it?
If you work at Google, there's a very clear policy for doing any outside "work" (volunteering, an open source side project, a business, being on a board, etc.): if it's related to your day-to-day work and/or related to Google's business (which virtually anything software is), you need to fill out a disclosure form and get a go-ahead from legal.
Obviously a Google Workspace CLI is related to Google. Why would you release this without getting a go-ahead?
I'm sad that a clearly talented engineer who cares about users was fired. I wish more engineers cared enough to make things like this. But it seems like poor judgment from the engineer's side :(
(Note: I do work at Google. This is my personal writing, though. Nothing to do with my employer)
That makes this quite a bit different situation than publishing the repo on a personal account.
Seems kind of rude.
or anywhere else,
unless my contract and pay reflects that.
The space this comes from is the legal undue influence side where they need to give notice to shareholders about potential conflicts of interest, and it needs to be in the form of having a clear positive audit trail that they have told people to follow a clear policy with no grey area so that any deviation is an accident not willful failure to get people to tell them.
Morals imo often have nothing to do with law, but fairness does.
Googlers are well paid, and that pay reflects this.
At one point Google was there to build cool shit and enable people to do it; not extract maximal amount of value and "being Evil" by the values of its time.
Judging by the screenshot of the repo, I think most people who download this would think that it's official Google software.
I would have been fired from every employer I've ever worked for of any size for doing something like that - including Google circa 2018.
What happens when your thing
or nothing close to your thing
will ever see the light of day?
2. If google said no this goes against our goals for the product, don't release it if you want to keep working for google?
given that Google was creating an official thing
quite close to his thing
at the same time?
(And why are we writing like this?)
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?
the official google thing,
was quite a lot worse
than his thing.
(I’m quite into the whole “Posting in free verse” idea)
Just link to it.
Especially that he's an "engineer" not a "Googler" or "a person."
God what a fall from grace.
“Actions have consequences”
Random guy? He was a Google employee. Looks like he was just doing his job.
> Google has spent billions to protect its reputation
Not sure billions are enough here, since Google's reputation is terrible in spite of it, and this episode certainly isn't helping.
[0](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
Edit reply to person below (sorry, rate limit):
> Just because you work for Google does not mean you can release products under their name.
Releasing open source projects that use company APIs is about 50% of the work of devrel staff. The rest is making content about what you and your customers did/could build.
The organization hosts repos shown here: https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples
> Google spends countless of man-hours to make sure whatever product they put out is as good as possible
That's 100% not true for those kinds of projects. There's plenty of "not officially supported" projects in Google's Github.
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 :-/
I did work at Google until a year ago, when I quit and sold my stock, but not in a team that remotely deals with open source so idk how this works.
In my team's case we would include expectation-setting language in the README.md so that it was clear that the project was not an officially-supported Google product.
As far as I know, no-one ever lost their job for failing to set that expectation. A gentle correction from legal was sufficient to set the world right.
Even if this person violated that process, it is an extreme consequence to fire them for that infraction.
Agreed it's gross if the big problem with execs was that it got social media buzz and it embarrassed official products or something.
[1] https://developers.google.com/workspace/drive/api/samples
It was just speculation about what could be bad enough if they really did have permission to release it, but the OP is being so cagey below now I'm just wondering if they got release permission but misrepresented what they would be releasing or something.
> and is official [1]
FWIW no idea what you're trying to point out on that page unless you mean the one link to a different project in the same github org indicates the org is official, but that never seemed in doubt in this thread of comments.
[1] https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/issues/780
Google has multiple Github Organizations that have all degrees of oficial-ness to it.
This is not someone releasing something in their private account and plastering Google logos over it.
This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though
See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't
Tangent: did you really go through people’s histories far back enough to find out they were googlers/ex-googlers? Did you use an agent to do that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For one thing, the author of this tool used Google trademarks (the logo) to represent the project.
If you are even slightly larger than a mom and pop small business you pretty much have to defend that trademark or else you risk losing it.
But, okay, fine, you can just tell them not to use your trademark and have them say it's not an official thing. No big deal.
The other thing I would say is that growing beyond even a relatively small number of employees fundamentally changes everything. Once you don't have that face to face with all your employees that trust level between you and them can't possibly be the same, no matter how good your intentions are. Even a modest company with 25-50 people...how well can you know those people, really? Even if you try your hardest to know them?
Once you have a certain number of employees you run into probabilistic realities.
Google has over 100,000 employees, which means statistically speaking a few of them have committed or will commit homicide. The idea of "we trust all our employees" can't exist from a mathematical perspective, even if the leadership happens to be the nicest people in the world who really want their employees to have freedom and autonomy.
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).
It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies!
But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in trouble for this" narrative.
1: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/...
Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."?
Is it actually approved by Google or not?
You need to actually answer these questions instead of dodging them.
Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this.
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.
Not really, no. I'd expect a stern reprimand, but getting fired is extreme.
I'm not sure if Google is still an attractive place to work, but this incident certainly isn't helping tip the scales.
It’d like playing a computer game during free library time at the school when I was a kid; I would expect to be reprimanded, however just outright barring use from the computer during free time would probably be justified.
It’s hard to grok that someone would go to extensive length to get him fired without seriously violating company policy
Imagine any leader that is not sundar trying to get this person fired. At some point, that leader would need to justify to either their leader, or a similarly leveled peer why they budgeted x SWE-years(where x is probably > 25) for a project that took this person far less than 1 SWE-year.
Clearing up the issue would take a single comment that all the correct processes were followed. The fact he hasn't said as much is the elephant in the room here.
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...
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.
We have a lot more people here who like bending rules as opposed to following them.
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
--
EDIT: Others here are saying that Justin released his code with Google's branding without asking for approval. If that's true, it wasn't right of him, and his firing was justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650310 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650192
---
[a] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
I like the law because you can quite easily formulate it without bias.
Large enough orgs will indeed get people whose job is more closely aligned with the goal vs people whose job is more closely aligned with the existence of the org. _Because_ you need to keep investing energy to keep the org in existence. You can’t just do the goal only.
But being responsible for keeping the org in existence is not the same as responsible for the goals that the org was created for in the first place.
_and_ I can see how the people whose job it is to ensure the org keeps existing will gain the majority vote.
It’s like a law of nature: the way things fall out if you’re not consciously working to have them fall out differently.
(So it can be good for google to fire them from a “let’s keep existing standpoint” even though it might be contrary to having the easiest/optimal to use product. And if that is so, the keep existing vote will have the power) I don’t use google products really that much so I can’t speak to the merits of this example.
But in the long term, we are all dead
You were right above the edit.
> Introducing the Google Workspace CLI: https://github.com/googleworkspac e/cli - built for humans and agents.
> Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
Yeah, that absolutely looks like an official product announcement from Google. Surely it was obvious they'd get in trouble for that.
Also, is this somehow relate to Addy Osmani’s recent departure from Google? (Was it in sympathy, was it a retaliation as this was “the tweet that got OP fired”?)
Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.
There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?
In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it look extremely official and blindsided everyone when suddenly there's a viral Google Workspace tool released by a Googler with Google branding that wasn't released by Google.
I'm not saying he should have been fired, necessarily, but he demonstrated _extremely_ poor judgement in doing this the way he did and put his manager and everyone else in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable position.
I think there is probably way more to this story - maybe he was told about the upcoming official use/variant and was asked to not preempt it before the cloud next conference with his one?
I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.
How do you know that's true? Do you have information the rest of us don't?
Google may be a big bureaucracy now, but launch approvals and processes are there for a reason.
Good ideas are now risky because it steps on the toes of someone's fiefdom
1. Any work you do during company time/resources/equipment, is company property.
2. Anything public related to work, or that could be considered as competing or providing the service in the same space as work, needs to be vetted by the company.
Along with public communication, etc.
In my experience, this isn't some "what happens when MBA's run company" or "they run out of ideas", it's literally every company I've ever worked for.
Was google previously an exception here, or are people just unfamiliar with the details of the 20% policy? Surely they didn't allow you to work on, for example, something for a competitor? There had to be some limitations, rather than a pure free for all, as seems to be suggested in the comments.
This isn't unique to Google. It's basic common law. No contract needs to be signed. Competing with your employer is immoral. If you want to compete then quit and be a competitor. If you're taking their money as an employee then you have a "duty of loyalty"
Interesting. Did they read their contract before signing it?
If I released a tool personally that I hadn't told anyone at work about and put my company's logos all over it and it went insanely viral then I would expect an extremely uncomfortable conversation with my manager, his manager, HR, and at least one lawyer.
"Fired for making a thing" is different from "fired for not following the rules".
Hence many people are wondering if you released this without approval (that's my guess), if you used a Google repo to do it (from what I can tell you did use a google repo, but not an officially supported one, and other teams at google use this repo to publish code), and whether there were other extenuating circumstances, or if it was "the workspace SVP called my division's VP and told him to fire me" (just a guess for another firing mechanism).
>This includes side projects that have not gone through IARC, even for DevRel engineers.
So did you do this "Launcher2" or "Ariane" thing and get the approvals? If so, it seems your ass would be covered. If not...
I can sympathize that the process seems convoluted and could particularly bite a DevRel accustomed to more autonomy. One would hope Google would do the whole blame free retrospective thing and improve the systems.
https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli
https://github.com/google/python-fire / https://github.com/google/pytype/blob/main/docs/index.md / https://github.com/google/dopamine / https://github.com/google/go-tika
Also plenty of official Google organizations that are not /google/ , but have official projects.
https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / you can find plenty more
I wouldn't read too much into it, since it can mean virtually anything.
Thank you for your work on the tool! Paired with a claude skill I wrote around it, it saves me a ton of time creating a logseq meeting note page for important meetings.
I wish you the best of luck landing somewhere that appreciates you a lot more than G did.
Since I’ve never work at FAANG, does Google have strict procedures (and approvals) before launching a product? And if so, did this go through that process?
I worked at Google in the past, most recently ending in early 2015, and can confirm that the answer to this question was yes when I was there - presumably still the case today with different details.
I have no idea whether the procedures were followed in this case, nor do I have any other inside information on this story, nor am I speaking for Google or Alphabet here.
Everyone just launched tools internally, although it was pretty easy to get approval to launch something externally, although most people didn't bother. The environment back then had tons of internal tools all over the place.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing
It seemed to mostly work. Some people complained it was too slow, others seemed to manage fine.
I think Chris DiBonas’ team ran all of that.
(edit: not saying that was the case here, working on devrel usually makes it part of your job to publish code)
I would never fire an employee unilaterally, especially over something like this, when there's valuable IP at stake and you can just talk the person into agreeing to sign over whatever it is you need.
“I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.”
Suggests that there is much more to it. I suspect it’s actually about disregarding Google’s internal processes (which is forgivable) and then demanding to work unilaterally (unforgivable). The amount of positive feedback may have given the author too much confidence that he could dictate to leadership what comes next.
A Google Workspace CLI is a useful project idea but it isn’t groundbreaking, it’s something that the Google Workspace team should be involved in. I suspect he just wanted go steamroll over them. Shipping stuff in a team is never about just producing the code.
I'm guessing something more happened here. Maybe someone was displeased with how the author initially responded, or some powerful exec really wanted to make an example out of him (sounds like another group was working on an identically-named official product with the same name?), or they were just looking for an excuse to cut this particular role.
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
However, google is filled with personalities and egos and sometimes engineers are the collateral damage.
So what is this thing?
Can anyone rely on it with confidence?
Does Google even acknowledge its existence?
If it's not officially supported, why is your name, a (former) Google employee, on it?
Gog cli - https://github.com/openclaw/gogcli
Something about their LinkedIn job title at Google ("Developer Relations (Mostly SWE)" also reads odd.
Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.
The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.
tasting the rainbow
Thats my experience at Apple. I even tried to ask for alternatives, mentors, etc. all denied by my one manager because I was reorged into their team and a new manager had something to prove. Directors who I talked to just shrugged their shoulders.
Leadership at these companies is pretty much shit. It’s not surprising something this happens at Google.
Companies could give zero f’s about you, how long you have been there, or what you have done or accomplished there.
Seriously. If you know you have a bad manager (you’ll definitely know) then you need to get the hell out asap. Don’t think if you tough it out it’ll work out. I lasted 5 years total and the last two years with this unnecessary insane stress caused by him. They will let you go after your dog suddenly gets cancer and they dont care you have a mortgage or need health insurance.
I’m sure there are good management out there, but not my experience and clearly not the experience of who posted this on x.
Management and leadership at these companies needs to fucking treat people that work for them like they care. At all.
But also, the worst managers I've ever had were at Google.
These people. Man.
This manager I had would also be hard to contact, he would schedule meetings on my calendar just to cancel them or change them last minute, all the time. He told me I would never be a software engineer even though I have 15 years experience. He denied me a mentor when I wasn’t too busy or on a pip or anything.
He started this stuff 3 months after be was promoted to management by his best friend. Who I learned from some other people that they have been friends since high school. He is protected by this guy and he controls his narrative better than anyone else.
But ultimately he’s a piece of shit. When I was reorged to this team with the product I worked on it was just me. My first manager told me on our last 1:1 that he fucking hated those people. So I dealt with that for more than 2 years.
I wanted nothing more in my career to work at Apple. And then after two different managers this guy gets promoted and immediately starts this and emailing me about things i didn’t do.
I had good to great performance reviews before him.
Now I have no job for more than half a year and am about to be on the edge of selling my house without somewhere to live. And I’ve applied at soooo many places and I have a great resume.
I enjoy tech but the job market is worse than ive experienced ever. And my beagle of 13 years passed. So it’s been a great year.
I've seen people getting thrown under the bus even for voluntarily quitting due to burnout. Like legitimately doing illegal stuff such as withholding documentation or writing recommendation letters in secret code.
I know of a company that I worked that is currently under fire currently for not following the law and lying to employees by advising them incorrectly about their rights. They can't even fucking fire people properly without breaking laws and treating them like shit.
No company deserves anyone's loyalty or concern.
I suspect the core issue here is that he launched it with Google logos without following any sort of process
But regardless once escalated by legal there have been a process to mitigate this, so either the director fired the OP or someone higher. The direct manger would be not really in the decision making here. There is a clear path to release open source at G, and it seems it wasnt followed. The OP claimed that its confusing, but it isn't - usual the launch tool to get the approval and you covered your bases. If the OP didnt have all launch approvals after 7 years at G, wow thats on him. If the OP actually had all the launch approvals then he has an actually big case against G.
Launch approvals are for all product - internal and external, it usually requires L8+ (Director) levels approvals.
> This is not an officially supported Google product.
Why was this project published under an account named "Google Workspace"? Google seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, same with the cli creator.
If you want to publish a project under open source and you are the sole creator/owner -> do it in your own time, under your OWN individual github account. Nothing good has ever come from ceeding control of these things to giant corporations who only care how much it will increase their profit next quarter.
If you do an end-run around the normal open source publishing you can get in trouble- up to and including termination- but my guess is there is more context around the firing than just "posted open source code to work with standard Google APIs". For example, you can get punished at google (up to and including termination) for raising your voice in a meeting.
And if you look at the history, the main maintainer for the project was really just one person.
Even today, the repo clearly says "This is not an officially supported Google product." So what is this?
If you told me the "googleworkspace" account is owned and controlled by this individual, not Google, I would have believed it.
I think but I'm not sure that this is a "semi-official" org run by Google DevRel. Perhaps it has looser rules and ownership than the more official orgs? If I'm using the Wayback Machine properly, https://web.archive.org/web/20201130062102/https://github.co... shows that the site already used the Google logo way back in 2020 (earliest snapshot).
Calling an idea nonsense is fine, calling it not profitable is great, and saying its a waste of time is a Monday. Attacking someone as a fucking moron is pointless, just fire them, deprioritize them, or move on.
https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/discussions/865 / https://github.com/google-research/big_vision / https://github.com/googleapis
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
They monopolize opportunities, suppressing natural-born entrepreneurs; force us into very narrow roles and fire us if we step out of line ever to slightly. Even when it is beneficial to them.
IMO, we should get rid of trademark laws. They didn't mind their LLMs ripping off people's copyrights. Why should anyone uphold trademarks?
If I work at Google and want to represent myself as Google, I should be able to.
I feel like, even if I don't work at Google, I should be able to use the logo. It's the consumer's mistake for inferring a relationship. I'm just showing a logo of a well known company and letting their dumbass jump to a conclusion.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
Seems to me your management chain was thinking “Why the hell is someone on our team releasing a vibe-coded CLI that’s branded to look like an official API, when we’re 2 weeks from announcing the actual CLI??” If you didn’t know there was an official CLI in the works, that’s one thing, but if you did know then that’s pretty shitty to your teammates in Workspace and bad for users who would adopt one CLI (thinking it’s official) just to then see another one 2 weeks later.
Still, I would expect a talking-to and not an actual firing… but who knows what actually happened since you’re not responding to anyone. :shrug:
I'm not really implying -- I'm stating that I don't think his management chain was "afraid of being disrupted", but that they were pissed that one of their own team members released a product with Google branding that was the same thing they were about to announce in 2 weeks. It was poor judgement. Not worth a firing, though, in my opinion.
Market validation can change roadmaps. As I stated on Twitter/X interest in CLIs for AI was not a very interesting thing outside a small group earlier in 2026.
Some days I think it would be nice to be able to punch someone in the face through the screen.
Not to judge the feeling you express - I'm sure we can all relate. But as an HN comment it's pretty well guaranteed to turn the thread away from good places.
(* I suppose I'm more sensitive about this since the episode I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427800 ("in one case I saw"))
Trying to change that globally would amount to modifying human evolution. That kind of task you can't even call biting off more than you can chew; it's more the kind that bites you off, and then chews you in your entirety.
But that doesn't mean we can't do something at an individual level, and even a group level.
> You had my sympathy until you mentioned your healing. Now I know you were fired for being a pussy.
I was expecting some more substantial motivation for that but it's not even motivated by some weird disagreement about acceptable behavior at work, it's just this weird insanely toxic belief that taking care of yourself is "pussy behavior".
Twitter said naming people Pussy is fine.
Also, see the last rule in the Guidelines
Said the HN community has become over time (sadly) more toxic like Twitter/X.
The moderation here is fine, though it can be questionable at times why there’s some post suppression on certain topics.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
Nah. Fuck Google. Reasonable humans would talk to him, fix it, and move on. They don't need you carrying an ounce of water.
Sucks for the author. Hope they land a good gig at a frontier lab.