To say that it wasn't the union overtones that got her fired is naive.
Should she have done it? No, absolutely not. Not like that anyway. Should she have been reprimanded? Yes definitely. Should she have been fired? I don’t think so personally, not for a first time mistake at least (we don’t know if she did other things previously or not, of course)
On Google.com if you present a Vivaldi user agent and arrive via a redirect, the search text box will be misaligned
On Google Docs if you present a Vivaldi user agent you will receive a warning
You could tell them to stop instead of firing them after the first offense.
Security tools, and especially extensions that run with full browser access, are in an exceptionally trusted position. Employees who can inject code into arbitrary websites can in effect get administrator access to anything in the company, as Google is run almost entirely off of web apps of various kinds. It's actually hard to get more trusted than that: without a doubt this woman effectively had a greater level of access than Sundar Pichai or other senior executives.
If there's one thing you don't screw around with in any firm, its mis-using administrator access. Mis-use here means doing things that aren't related to your job description. You just don't do it! What she did would be like a logs engineer deleting internal access logs to cover up activity by political allies, or a GMail engineer spying on conversations between executives. It's complete madness to think you can abuse such a high level of trust in such a direct way and get away with it!
I used to have a certain type of Google account system administrator access. The way I used it was watched very closely, and deservedly so. Eventually it was removed because Google built better security systems that could restrict employee access more, and in my team were happy about this (for one, it meant we were less likely to be hacking targets). The idea of anyone abusing this sort of access for political reasons was unthinkable.
I honestly can't believe people here are defending this kind of behaviour. If Googlers feel it's OK to abuse root@chrome for unionisation related purposes, what else might they start doing? What about people perceived as 'bad'? Google needs to explain what happened here pronto, because apparently she was able to get this change through code review? So she had internal allies who approved her abuse of access? That is tremendously worrying.
Google is very rapidly burning the trust it requires for its business models to function. How can anyone trust the firm when 21 year old activists are able to manipulate Chrome for political causes and Google's own security procedures are unable to stop them?
I would not characterize this as evidence that this person is a security risk. It takes existing culture of google, including past incidents like changing the default desktop wallpaper for a protest that was happening, etc.
Also if this is true it is totally insane. Sounds like intimidation tactics to stop exactly what the pop-up warned against.
> They also dragged me into three separate interrogations with very little warning each time. I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers I had talked to about exercising my rights at work.
Modifying the behaviour of people's web browsers isn't a channel intended for employees to push personal messages to each other and this should have been really obvious to her. She and her colleagues were trusted with a tremendous amount of power which could be readily abused (see my other comment on this thread), and the expectation was clear that it'd be used only within the bounds of what her management asked her to do, namely corporate security.
When she went outside those bounds and started using her immense technical privileges in ad-hoc ways, and (worse) making arguments like "I got a colleague to approve a code review so it was OK" she gave an extremely clear demonstration that management simply couldn't trust her. It's not about unionisation. It's about someone with the power to steal cookies from her own colleagues going rogue and deciding her own personal political priorities matter more than company policies she had agreed to follow.
All they received was a small rebuke. In fact, management praised the team for the end result of decimating IE6 usage, as intended.
Then one of the architects of the scheme blogged about it in retrospect years later.
> If this went at all wrong, a number of us would surely be fired.
This was absolutely off limits.
What? Granted, I've only worked for large businesses but that would be grounds for immediate termination at any company I've ever worked at.
> As a security engineer who worked on the Chrome browser’s use within Google, Spiers wrote browser notifications so that employees could be automatically notified of the company’s policies and guidelines as they browse the internet. Spiers said that engineers regularly implement such code changes to make their jobs easier and share personal interests.
But programming a popup to appear over a union busting law firm website with a message that such and such law exists was not.
> Spiers wrote a few lines of code that created a pop-up message asserting Google employees’ labor rights whenever her co-workers visited the consulting firm’s website or Google’s community guidelines. The message reads: "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." The pop-up would have been visible to anyone at Google. > https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgexe8/google-fired-an-en...
The standard for whether a company is legally allowed to fire an employee for organizing isn't whether their action is in "good faith", but whether their action is concerted. The fact that it passed code review is therefore critical evidence.
The law already covers situations like this, in terms of whether or not employees are allowed to use the internal technology tools of their employers in order to organize.
Prefixing this by saying I'm not making an assumption about who you're siding with, but offering my opinion on the argument you're using.
> The standard approval process sounds like most merge review processes on any engineering team. There's a sort of assumed good-faith for this process. The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith and was within the bounds of normal types of changes.
Other people have already argued about whether what she added to the extension is in line with the purpose of the extension and whether it was within her purview.
Regardless of that, I would like to point out that we're not hearing that these two coworkers -- or anyone else involved in the process -- have been fired. Only Spiers. If the concern is really about the security and the trust, why is one person singled out?
With that said, the organization and orchestration problem for movements is a very real problem (finding the correct people and disseminating information). This is something businesses are well aware of and they use that to their advantage.
Change the words in the message, and I can't imagine it being anything but a reprimand, at worst. This is a message to other employees that organizing gets you fired.
I don't understand why two people sign off changes if they assume the person making the changes isn't going to make errors or be "malicious". And I'm not sure why two people sign off changes instead of just one. There's a well understood problem when you have more than one person inspecting product - they both assume the other person is competent and will catch anything they've missed, and they each do a lighter inspection.
Because more eyes catch more bugs. I work in a time like this where we have 2 or even 3 people review stuff; it's extremely common for one engineer to miss stuff that another one catches. It's particularly notable I think with junior vs. senior engineers: I think you really need at least one senior engineer reviewing everything before a merge, but you don't want to keep junior engineers out of the process because then they'll never learn. With trivial tickets, however, you can relax this rule and just have one person review before a merge.
But for product inspection we have pretty good evidence, from millions of human hours of factory work, that it's a bit more complicated.
X makes a widget, and sends it for inspection by Y and Z. Y has a look, but assumes Z will catch anything that Y misses. But Z also assumes that Y will catch anything that Z misses.
You end up with two people doing a superficial inspection and missing problems.
Of course, that's only if they're doing the same inspection twice. If they have different and clearly defined inspection roles the two inspector problem doesn't apply.
In my experience, you more often get the other phenomena where all reviewers (and some other people who get automatically CC'd) dogpile the review and you potentially have too many comments. Or someone ignores the review and it never gets approved. Cursory reviews were basically never a problem.
I've seen some pretty glaring stuff get through a review process, particularly with junior engineers.
A change like this, which was linking to an official policy document, wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
Any engineer with the freedom to make changes without manager approval knows that adding features or making major changes isn't not the sort of thing you just do on your own. You'd go through another process for that.
So I don't buy this argument at all. This was a knowing violation. That does not, however, mean that they punishment was warranted, I don't think that it was.