If they really fired her for just this bagatelle, it speaks more against Google.

I don't know why there is this pervasive desire to strangle developers. This is a pretty recent phenomena in my opinion and certainly nothing close to a requirement to develop great software.

If I were an employee at Google, actions such as this would let me seriously consider to look for other work. The requirement for the code review for internal tools already seems awefully restrictive.

Google needs to choose between two evils here:

Give employees power / freedom and fire fast if you do stupid things.

Stricter regulations/ checks so they cannot mess up hard in the first place. At the cost of slower pace and less risks taken.

Google has historically been the former. And it comes with people doing stupid things and getting fired. Just the world is not used for huge companies to keep operating in such mode.

I applaud Google for keeping being open and not enforcing processes. The rest of the world will grow up eventually.

True that the former strategy requires more responsibility from employees. In larger companies you have more opportunity for your behavior not being penalized, so many companies increase strictness of processes.

But I fail to see how the employee in question did something that justifies firing her. Maybe there are other factors involved, but I certainly think that people opting for getting rid of her only on the basis of publicly available information shouldn't have any form of responsibility for staff to be honest.

Google's open culture wasn't designed to be robust against internal activists trying to leak, spam political messages, and incite dissatisfaction everywhere. Google's open culture assumed good faith, and that's gone now.

>The requirement for the code review for internal tools already seems awefully restrictive.

How on earth is that restrictive? Having code review for any important code should be normal at any company. Just because the tool is internal doesn't mean it's trivial and any engineer (especially a 21-year-old: how is she even an employee and not an intern at that age?) should be able to merge anything in willy-nilly.

Why wouldn't she be an employee at 21? 21 is three years into legal adulthood. The idea of being an intern at 21 is degrading. They're adults. Treat them like adults, not children.

Maybe this is news to you, but engineers typically have to go to college and get a degree before they can work as a software engineer. That typically takes 4 years, starting at age 18, which is when most people graduate high school. A 21-year-old working as an "engineer" at a company is typically an intern.

So to answer your inane question, she wouldn't be an employee because she's not old enough to have graduated college yet. And that's just to get a BS degree; lots of engineers these days (esp. at top-tier companies like Google) get an MS degree before they enter the workforce full-time.

I'm rather appalled that I have to spell this out here on this forum.

Getting a degree is largely unnecessary in the present time, and a substantial volume of people skip that step, especially in large companies like Google that are constantly buying others.