Holding an opinion isn't a firing offense. The firing offense is violating the agreements he signed as an employee (the most obvious poor decision here being the choice to post his manifesto on corporate services using corporate equipment).

>the most obvious poor decision here being the choice to post his manifesto on corporate services using corporate equipment

Why is this a violation? Not trying to be argumentative, actually just curious. Seems like putting personal thoughts on company Google Docs would be a questionable decision for privacy concerns, but not a violation.

In this context, the fact that the manifesto also violates the code of conduct makes it more likely that they feel obligated to act. If it were in a private chat or on his personal blog it would be much less of a big deal. Similarly, people posted stuff like that in g+ and memegen comments frequently without getting fired. I think the scale and visibility is part of why he got a bigger response in general. Sending around a less controversial manifesto inside the company probably would've been fine - I think he could have easily just focused on the diversity programs and elaborated why he thinks they aren't working well, and that wouldn't have gotten him fired or caused such a controversy.

For whatever reason, he decided to go in deep and lay out his entire worldview on biology and gender traits, ensuring as much disagreement and conflict as possible. Whether this means he intended to cause problems or he just didn't understand how to complain constructively is a big question...

Considering he was just fired, why would anyone speak up in support of it?

I meant on the internal thread this memo was released to and discussed on.

I heard from a indirect source that it blew up partially because others agreed with the sentiment. Just wondering if there could be confirmation on that.

People definitely agreed on Blind (you can find screenshots of those posts in news articles), and Google employees made comments of this sort on memegen and g+ all the time. He was foolish enough to post a manifesto using company equipment, violating all sorts of different parts of the agreement he signed when he joined the company.

There are lots of conservatives at Google (and other SV tech companies) who agree with the author, and most of them aren't going to lose their jobs because they have the common sense not to get themselves fired for no reason.