Yes, it's company policy, but this is more like running into a meeting and then interrupting it so you can start reciting NLRB policy than it is posting a flyer. Worse, it misappropriates a security tool in order to do that. And when it comes to intentional actions that violate or undermine security, Google, like most companies, takes a pretty hard line.
Disclosing that I'm a Googler, and speaking only on my own behalf, with no connection to anyone involved except the fact that the extension is running on my browser.
True, but it seems kind of shady to come down harder on an employee based on the content of the interruption, and that content notifying of the right to organize.
Like, imagine there's a documentation page for http cookies. Consider two scenarios:
A) Rogue employee adds to the bottom of the page: "Cookies are also delicious treats given as a reward on the internet."
B) Rogue employee adds to the bottom of the page: "Employees reading this are reminded of their right to organize under NLRA."
Let's say that in scenario A, an employee would typically get a written warning, and in B, you always got fired. In that case, I think it would be fair for B to say -- at least in common speech -- "I got fired for notifying employees of their right to organize."
This is true, even though there is a general policy of not adding non-topical messages to doc pages, because the punishment never escalates to firing unless it's something like scenario B. (In a legal context rather than common speech I don't know enough to say whether it would be legal.)
A) Rogue employee messages a bunch of internal email lists about having the right to organize
B) Rogue employee configures a security extension to issue a popup saying "Happy Birthday Sundar!" every time an employee visits google.com on June 10.
I am confident that A) wouldn't result in any formal adverse action (they'd mostly get a pile of nasty responses about spamming internal lists), and I am confident that B) would at the least earn the employee a reprimand and plausibly get them fired.
Yikes! That sounds like a dangerous place to work. If an employee with legitimate, assigned access to such a tool makes a change through normal procedures (not bypassing required code review or anything) and it's still a fireable mistake - well, I'm glad I don't work there.
Data is simultaneously Google's greatest strength and its biggest liability. If an employee uploads data to a not-known-to-be-secure third party, it can literally cost Google billions of dollars depending on the data locality. Or, it could plausibly cause a severe security breach (if e.g. an employee uploads a security token into a third party decoder).
And so the security team builds an extension in order to very loudly alert employees when they're on one of these known-to-be dangerous domains. And, as it happens, the implementation of the loud popups could make it a general browser notification platform whenever an employee visits a particular domain.
Is it a good idea for teams to start using it as a general notification platform?
No, not on any level. On top of being annoying for employees, it breaks the security UX. When someone sees one of these popups, they know they're important and that they should be very wary of whatever they're doing. But if it starts being a popup that can be triggered by anyone in the company who can convince themselves that they're providing value by sending out the popup, people start ignoring it. And there's no going back at that point, because employees have been trained to ignore the popup because of it staying stupid shit like "Happy Birthday Sundar!" and "Read these NLRB rights!" and "You can go grab a burger at the cafe today!" Everyone's been made worse off, and the original security problem has come back.
If you could concisely and cogently explain why this change is a bad idea in an HN comment, surely someone can do that in response to the change, revert it, and move on. If it's SOP for Google to fire people who make well-intentioned changes that have the side effect of alert fatigue, then one, I don't want to work there, and two, I would expect to see a lot more firings.
And surely they could explain the problem, revert it, and move on without calling her into a conference room and grilling her about who else she's organizing with. That makes it seem like it's about the content of the notification, not the alert fatigue.
Don't misunderstand, it's not that I'm really trying to defend google. This is to serve as a reality check and warning to those who don't understand the rules of employment. And I'm guessing the Engineer in question understood the risk full well.
I don't disagree with that either. I'm just saying that, if this is the company's choice of fireable offense if the company actually considers it normal to exercise the right to dismiss an employee (which they legally do have) for this sort of mistake, I'm glad I don't work there.
As I mentioned in another comment, I recently did something at work that you could spin in an equally sinister way, if you want. My company would be within its rights to fire me for it. My employer would be within its rights to fire me for sneezing at the wrong time, or even for no reason at all. I choose to continue working at this company because I trust that, despite their legal ability, they have no intention of actually doing so. If I ever lost that trust, I would leave.
(In fact, my employer and Google's also have very similar employment agreements about ownership of outside IP / personal open source, but I had reasons to trust my employer to act more reasonably than Google, which was part of why I chose my current employer when deciding about it and Google. In practice that trust has turned out to be well-placed, and there's now a thread on the front page about how Google loves to follow the letter of the employment agreement and arbitrarily deny IARC requests.)
"This kind of code change happens all the time. We frequently add things to make our jobs easier or even to just share hobbies or interests. For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture."
The fact that other employees have participated in pro-employee activism and not been disciplined speaks to that. Some things are fine, some things are not. Abusing security software is not.
Do you activism in your personal time. Don't use important company resources used to protect employees from harm to push your slogans. Regardless if those slogans are legally legitimate statements in a normal context, like handing out a leaflet on the edge of the property.
Correction: an internal message display tool.
> for your own pet activism
> push your slogans
Correction: a warning not to break federal labor law, which Google is actually required to provide.
https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*1BTVYLTvuHiJVvp_.jpg
> Do you activism in your personal time.
This is about Google. Apparently their company culture has been the opposite, and they have commonly had lots of political discussions on company time using company resources.
For the millionth time, it was not a general message display tool. It is a security tool to flag domains that run the risk of data leakage and malware. Trying to hijack a security extension to turn it into a general messaging platform is both stupid and bad for security.
Labor law requires that those notices be posted somewhere in a prominent place employees are likely to see. They definitely don't require them to be posted in arbitrary places at any employee's choice.
(Furthermore, the laws about protected concerted activity specifically permit you to do your activism at work, not just on your own time.)
Jeez, politics really does make people go funny in the head. As long as it's "their guy" everything is on the table to sidestep logic.
(I don't know enough of the history of Google's firings and this kind of violation to know either way.)
You can't fire a worker for organizing, or on the basis of sex, race, etc. But you CAN fire whoever you want for breaking even the most minor rules or even just poor performance. And the choice can be as politically motivated as google likes, doesn't change a thing.
Furthermore, google has a really easy time with "selective enforcement" They can show that people violating security rules and abusing administrative rights are always fired. Now, she can argue she didn't do this, but because of the nature of our legal system, it will be extremely hard to explain. I main, disgruntled employee abusing security? Whoever heard of such a thing. The civil judge will probably help google refer her to the FBI!
>They can show that people violating security rules and abusing administrative rights are always fired.
Yes, that agrees with what I was saying: if every message thusly inserted resulted in a firing, then it would not be fair to say she got fired "for notifying employees of their right to organize".
If you hijack the company's PR to inject your own personal opinion I'm pretty sure you'd be fired from any company.
I totally support googlers' right to unionize but it seems that some employees are in an all-out war with the company and think that all is fair in that war. I can't say I support that.
> For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture.
Is this accurate? If it's culturally acceptable to change everyone's desktop wallpaper (including of those who were anti-protest) to a pro-protest image, it seems reasonable that this falls in the lines of culturally acceptable too.
How is this like "running into a meeting"?? Do Googlers visit the IRI website every day? Is this pop-up really a distraction to core work for engineering?
Your party line here makes the change sound like Nest shutting down the house [1] but according to the evidence it looks more like that recruiting thing that gives you a pop-up for google.com/foobar when you enter certain search queries.
That was my question, her job literally to make extensions to inform employees on policies but I was doubting that it was to make any and all notifications but only a specific set of policies like, limit personal browsing activities, or that the computer is the property of google and you consent to blah blah by it’s use.
It’s clear to me that this employee knew this was more of a political notification and took matters into their own hands.
So if I hire you to email out my monthly company statement it’s reasonable that you add some of your own thoughts to said email.
It's was her personal judgment that it should be posted in a chrome add-on rather than only by poster like is typical in most workplaces. But assuming her job was to maintain an add-on that informs employees of company policy, and assuming her job typically lets her act with personal judgment, yeah I think that's perfectly reasonable
In fact, you can find further support of her action from the NLRB FAQ:
https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/faq/elections/are-there-any-c...
"The employer is also required to distribute the notice electronically to unit employees if it customarily communicates with employees in the unit electronically, either by email, by posting on an employer intranet site, or both"
Again, it's her judgment to add the notification (which links to the Google intranet posting of the NLRB poster), but considering that Google customarily informs employees of policy via notifications in this add-on, and she is in charge of maintaining said add-on, it doesn't seem like an unreasonable judgment to add this notification
Those are well defined roles. Specially in a company of that size.
She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.
She claims she's in a role to make judgment calls on adding content - and that this was reinforced by her previous stellar performance reviews, which made her confident in her judgment - but I don't personally have enough info to know if that's the truth. She very well could be stretching the truth that maybe every other addition she's made was under the direction of HR or product, in which case she is definitely out of line here - it would take the input of a Googler on her team to know for sure.
That having been said, this would still be considered an unusual call to have made. But had I been on the receiving end of this message, I suspect I'd have found it annoying unless she remembered to suppress it after first display---if she had, I wouldn't have been bothered by it.
That's not so much a matter of opinion as of what her role is, exactly. I don't know. Do you?
While they're at it, they should stop bending (and probably breaking) export controls regarding China, and stop doing immoral DoD and ICE projects.
And heck, why not implement a process by which all private contracts are approved by a company-wide vote? Including the guy that sweeps the floor. Oh, afraid that employees will leak the details of the project? There's always NDAs, but if you are so concerned about leaks, maybe that's not a project you should be doing then.
Now understandably the janitor has provided a lot less capital than deeply invested shareholder, so their votes are uniformly weighted according to their share of ownership.
I'm guessing the engineer might own about 1/10,000,000th or so of the company if she has a healthy 401K. So as long as she can convince 10,000 or so other employees and 49.91% of the rest of shareholders to go along...
Wait, what? How would this work? Who would take a Google bid seriously if, after awarding them the contract, they turn around and have to ask the employee population for permission to proceed?
The big issue I see with a lot of discussion around this issue is not a lot of thought is put into the practicality of running a large business concern. Stuff that works when it's two guys and a server does not (can not) fly when you have a large group of people to manage.
Whether or not it was her job has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it was protected activity.
Unless she was asked to do it by management, it was her thoughts. As much as the title makes this seem like David v Goliath this is really just employer v disgruntled former employee.
No matter your thoughts on "its required by law... Blah blah blah" it's not up to her to enforce the law on behalf of an employer. Google has the right to post or not, statements of its choosing. In fact it's absolutely within Google's right to ignore this law, doesn't mean there won't be consequences but it they can do it.
This is so cut and dry I'm surprised she found a lawyer willing to take the case. It's staggering there's even a discussion ok HN about this.
FTA, your personal assertion is quite wrong. Her line of work was security and at most she was tasked with posting content regarding privacy and security concerns regarding non-Google tools and services.
Her personal political views and opinions don't pass off as InfoSec topics.
She's an engineer, not someone working a type pool.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-spiers-1b3048a1/
By any measure she's not an engineer.
Tbh it sounds like other ulterior motives are clouding your judgement here. She seems like exactly the sort of engineer who would benefit from unionization and while I might need it less, I fully support her and I'm disappointed in Google for firing her.
As I've said elsewhere, these sham reasons for firing folks adjacent to union activity are opening up the company to massive liability and imo the board and shareholders should hold more people accountable.
The board and shareholders will have to decide whether this action was, or was not, in their best interests. But history has shown that Wall Street would generally agree with this one. It's certainly not a "massive" liability. Should the employee prevail, years from now, in a wrongful termination suit the cost to google will be trivial compared to the employee.
That's why other companies often flagrantly intentionally ignore NLRB protections. It's a very limited civil liability with a very high burden of proof on the employee.
As opposed to... what? Do college degrees promise engineering discipline? Surely not. Many successful engineers have nothing more than a high school diploma and industry experience.
This has clearly gone into sexist territory now. She's a she, and therefore her experience and education is going to be audited by arbitrary and increasingly vague standards to make sure she's considered valueless.
> It certainly isn't evidence of any engineering discipline.
There is literally no credential that does this. It's a ridiculous standard to offer forward. Engineering discipline is a property of teams and organizations. On an individual level there is no distinct standard of it.
You are moving the goalposts outside the stadium.
> It's certainly not a "massive" liability. Should the employee prevail, years from now, in a wrongful termination suit the cost to google will be trivial compared to the employee.
I disagree. With the rash of these firings, we may start to see a collective lawsuit. Should systemic problems be found, Google is in genuine danger of both large fines (both the left and right in the US and other countries are eager to give Google a black eye for perceived wrongs) and of severe reputational damage putting it at a competitive hiring disadvantage.
> It's a very limited civil liability with a very high burden of proof on the employee.
Right up until you get enough claimants for various collective actions, I agree this is the sad case for American enforcement.
How insane to claim that simple negativity toward a member of a protected group is an -ism. I'm not saying she isn't an engineer because of ANYTHING related to her sex.
She's getting raked over the coals because what she did was stupid and shows incredibly bad judgement. To imply that this is less bad, or maybe we shouldn't discuss it, or maybe we'd have a different opinion if she was not female is itself far more sexist.
I fully support non-degreed engineers. Yes, I agree there is no litmus test for "Engineer".
I'm clearly stating that a CompTIA+ is not sufficient to call someone an engineer. Regurgitating questionable facts does not make you an engineer. I didn't move the goalpost. But I can recognize something that isn't one.
She screwed up bad, because if there is ever any collective action, her case won't be in on it. She gave google an ironclad excuse to be fired. I'm not even arguing right vs. wrong but the way employment lawsuits work, she has zero chance.
If the only way we can distinguish your actions from sexism is via your internal state, you have a problem larger than this conversation and you should expect pushback.
> I'm clearly stating that a CompTIA+ is not sufficient to call someone an engineer. Regurgitating questionable facts does not make you an engineer. I didn't move the goalpost. But I can recognize something that isn't one.
But just before this you said there isn't a clear test. So really, it's just your feelings.
> Yes, I agree there is no litmus test for "Engineer".
This is more arbitrary goal setting to gatekeep a word. The debate is not if she is somehow an amazing engineer or a mediocre engineer, a well trained engineer or a rushed training job, well paid or not. No, that's not the debate.
The debate is, "was she given an engineering position in which she had autonomy to make changes and when she made changes a union buster didn't like, she was fired in retaliation.
If her job was strictly to type things that were handed to her in a field, this might technically evade the law. But that's obviously not her job.
You're obviously eager to categorize her as a not-engineer because (despite protestations) you're obviously eager to shut down any pro-unionization messages, even legally protected ones.
> She screwed up bad, because if there is ever any collective action, her case won't be in on it. She gave google an ironclad excuse to be fired.
I don't think this is true. She acted within her job capacity. She wrote a true and (importantly) legally protected statement. It was in a system that was specifically mean to advise workers about rights, options and obligations.
And unless she was already being evaluated for poor performance, even a single infraction is an extremely rare circumstance for dismissal in modern corporate America.
If we want to make it harder for unions to organize, then she was rightly fired. But ff she was fired for union organizing and we want to protect that activity, then she was wrongfully fired.
The right and wrong I was talking about was with respect to the existing rules, policies, and ethics. And if you do believe these rules are morally wrong, then you change them from within the system.
The upside is there are multiple opportunities to do this without also getting fired. There are also opportunities to do as much union organizing as you like without getting fired. The Thanksgiving four played a very dangerous game, as did this individual, and they got the expected result.
Unfortunately, the other result is that if you want to find examples of blatantly illegal union busting, I'm sure they are out there but these are not them. This smacks of agitation and activism for it's own sake.
Why is that? Please give an example of what I said that is sexist or any other -ist.
> So really, it's just your feelings.
No, it's perfectly reasonable to object to points that were made that don't support the argument. I'm only stating that CompTIA+ does not provide evidence that you are an engineer because of the nature of the certification.
> You're obviously eager to categorize her as a not-engineer
I didn't categorize here as either way. Someone else did, I just object to assuming that a job title or a cert makes you one. It doesn't. I don't think it even matters to the argument at hand either.
> you're obviously eager to shut down any pro-unionization messages, even legally protected ones
I'm not. I'm neutral to whether googler's want a union or not since I don't have to work there and have no interest at all in google's future direction. I'm eager to inject some reality into some very dangerous idealism before more people think they will stand up to the man without understanding the not-so-nice realities.
It's well and good, from the safety of the narrative of her supporters to say things like "she had autonomy to make changes". But engineer or not, she doesn't have that kind of autonomy. No employee really does, including directors. And it's up to her to prove she did. For example: can she show her manager approved this specific action in writing? Who asked her to do this? It looks a lot different when google shows up to a hearing with logs, rules, job descriptions, and her manager's manager having not approved the labor message, corporate security policies, and on and on. Then she shows up with, "but I thought it was OK because I did other stuff similar before, but it didn't involve labor notices. Yes, I had no actual authorization, but I was trusted as an engineer". People need to think adversarially, not just "Oh the NLRB will magically protect me". Because it can't if they don't follow the rules to the letter, and even then only partially.
A company in google's position is just waiting for people to do what she did: combine legal organizing with breaking a verifiable rule. Something with proof, like security logs. Great! now they have plausible reason to make someone an example. Now - do you see why I think it was stoopid?
Because you are specifically supporting a narrative that declines to grant an arbitrary status to a woman even as you argue that there is no clear delineation of that status. You "know it when you see it" is a hell of a thing to say as you make a pronouncement about someone's termination from a job.
What's more, looking over the history of this thread, you've substantially changed your message depending on how forcefully people reply to you. You've gone from saying that she cannot be an engineer because she has no credentials (which you first try to claim is required, "That IS why (engineers are credentialed and regulated)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21822286); and eventually move to saying you're a fiat arbiter of: "[I] can recognize something that isn't one." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21832089)
It's crystal clear you're not having a discussion. You're trying to push a narrative. You're writing anything you think you can get away with, and trusting the thread depth cutoffs of HN to hide that part of the thread.
> No, it's perfectly reasonable to object to points that were made that don't support the argument. I'm only stating that CompTIA+ does not provide evidence that you are an engineer because of the nature of the certification.
The assertion earlier was that she was untrained. She is clearly not.
> I'm not. I'm neutral to whether googler's want a union or not since I don't have to work there and have no interest at all in google's future direction.
This isn't really the question and I don't know why you think this statement is relevant. The question is "should people be fired for talking about unionization." Clearly, you now that some Googlers are friendly to unionization in at least some aspects of the workplace. You're reading a story about one right now.
> I'm eager to inject some reality into some very dangerous idealism before more people think they will stand up to the man without understanding the not-so-nice realities.
Oh? And those not-so-nice realities seem to be that you'll cheerfully throw in with discrediting a woman.
> But engineer or not, she doesn't have that kind of autonomy. No employee really does, including directors.
No technical organization I've ever encountered has to go and get every action stamped and filed by their manager to avoid being fired. That's so far beyond the norm I'm wondering if you've ever been a manager or run your own company.
Quite the contrary, Management has to constantly document directives in writing and carefully apply messages to employees because there is substantial legal risk in just letting managers do whatever they feel like.
> and her manager's manager having not approved the labor message, corporate security policies, and on and on. Then she shows up with, "but I thought it was OK because I did other stuff similar before, but it didn't involve labor notices. Yes, I had no actual authorization, but I was trusted as an engineer". People need to think adversarially, not just "Oh the NLRB will magically protect me". Because it can't if they don't follow the rules to the letter, and even then only partially.
"Thinking adversarially" is at this point collective action. As I've said, Google is making a stronger and stronger case for all its employees that they need to consider a defensive unionization strategy.
> A company in google's position is just waiting for people to do what she did: combine legal organizing with breaking a verifiable rule
If she goes to court, they're going to have to prove there was a rule in place and that it was communicated to her. We'll see then.
I'm supporting a narrative that declines to grant an arbitrary status to a PERSON based on a tech certification.
It is NOT sexist to say that CompTIA+ is insufficient evidence to be called an engineer. Not even CompTIA+ would say that. And I'm not pushing a narrative - you are pushing the narrative that if someone starts questioning a position, they must be sexist.
I don't think I'm changing my message - it's based on replying to the conversation. I'm not even saying she's not an engineer, just that people need to stop conflating tech certs with engineering. In many of these comments I'm still referring to her as an engineer, so now I'm not a sexist right? Good. Got it.
> technical organization I've ever encountered has to go and get every action stamped and filed by their manager to avoid being fired.
Yep, no engineer can or will get every action stamped and approved by management. They are expected to work independently. However, if you ABUSE that independence to bite the hand of your employer, you have absolutely no expectation of top cover. So if you are planning to do something dangerous like this, you better make sure you have it in writing that it was authorized. Because the burden of proof is now on you to show it was. Furthermore, if you go into a legal setting with your argument that engineers always act autonomously, you just sound like a bunch of cowboys to the bureaucrats that get to decide this.
If and when this goes to court, I agree we will see. But it won't. Of course that will be months and years from now either way.
Until then, if the goal was to inform her co-workers that it was safe to discuss union organizing without fear of reprisal, how's she doing at that?
You're definitely still saying and have been saying you believe she's not an engineer.
> However, if you ABUSE that independence to bite the hand of your employer, you have absolutely no expectation of top cover.
Again, your bias shows. If your employer is treating you well, why would talking about unionization be threatening? These conversations are happening precisely because people claim to be seeing abusive parts of the system and are looking for recourse.
Is that biting the hand of your employer? You clearly think so. Would that folks like you were more active in demanding action the collective action by corporate CEOs to illegally fix wages. Sadly, folks seem content to shrug and smile and pretend that's the right of their minders.
> Furthermore, if you go into a legal setting with your argument that engineers always act autonomously, you just sound like a bunch of cowboys to the bureaucrats that get to decide this.
No, but the idea that summary dismissal is normal for a simple message not approved by management on a legally protected subject is hogwash. I think you know this, but you'd prefer it's not so.
Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.
I never said that, nor do I necessarily believe that. I replied to someone else in a one-liner which was to put forward a possible reason other people were questioning it.
> Again, your bias shows. If your employer is treating you well, why would talking about unionization be threatening?
Talking about unionizing is not threatening to me, or my company (which has a union), but it's pretty clearly very threatening to your company. You should be cognizant and careful about that.
> Is that biting the hand of your employer? You clearly think so.
What I think is that google and every other sufficiently large company will think so. It would be naive to think because your company has some zippy slogan like "don't be evil" (now retired) that they are somehow different.
It's interesting, btw., how you believe to know what I think based on not at all what I say. Novel way to run an argument.
> Would that folks like you were more active in demanding action the collective action by corporate CEOs to illegally fix wages. Sadly, folks seem content to shrug and smile and pretend that's the right of their minders.
There's a right and a wrong way to take action. Getting youself fired doesn't seem smart, but it could be a nice martyr move if you don't need the income.
If you are engineers, then you are not just wage slaves. You are independent people and can take - or leave - your employment at will. If you don't like company X, I'd suggest it's far better to simply leave.
Your problem is a bad employer, so you add a union, now you have two problems: a still bad employer and a union full of politicians.
So, I've enjoyed your interesting thought processes, and I leave you with this advice:
- read, carefully, the rights granted by the NLRB. Stick strictly and safely within them.
https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
- for example, do you notice that it gives you the right to talk and distribute literature outside working areas (such as breakrooms or parking lots)? Do you notice how modifying a browser security extension isn't on that list? Nor is doxing your co-workers?
- don't use company time or resources to do it! A) it could easily be construed as not-protected and B) obvious opsec reasons
- martyrs for the cause might energize the base but they scare off those with mortgages.
- be mindful of who has your back:
January 2019, google pushes to overturn Purple Communications - https://onlabor.org/google-to-nlrb-shut-down-employee-email-...
December 2019, NLRB overturns Purple Communications - https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-restores...
Tootles!
Please explain why she's not an engineer; and please take care to include discussion of why anyone is an arbiter of the "engineer" title in a field which is largely unregulated and not credentialed.
Otherwise the most charitable reading of your comment is something like "ticmasta thinks security engineers are not real engineers," and the less charitable reading is something like "ticmasta claims this person is not an engineer because she is a woman," which is incredibly juvenile and misogynistic. It has no place on this forum.
That IS why (engineers are credentialed and regulated).
And where you got misogynistic is a mystery - simply using someones pronoun of choice in conjunction with something negative isn't implying anything.
The misogyny comes from the fact that this tends to only come up whenever a woman engineer is in the news. Nobody comments on HN threads saying “but he isn’t even an engineer”.
Doing this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
Or was she hired to add things she considered relevant?
In her Medium post she claims that "Part of what makes me a great fit for Google is that the company is always telling us to take initiative to deliver high impact work." and also that she received stellar (4/5, 4/5, 5/5, where 5/5 is apparently top 2%) performance reviews, which reinforced her view that she should act on her judgment.
For example, did her design record sufficient analytics for regulatory compliance reporting? If a regulated company can't verify they did it correctly, it didn't happen. Did it distinguish between contractors, part-time and full-time employees? How did it handle employees outside the U.S.? By IP address or did it look up their country of residence in HR records? What about interns? Did it count these different populations correctly or was it at risk of over-reporting and getting the company fined? Did her design meet the requirements for Spanish-speaking ESL employees based in the U.S. Did her design read-out the text for blind and vision-impaired employees or did it initiate notification via an alternate channel?
In my opinion, she's being extremely disingenuous with her claims.
Individual employees publicly embarrassing the company (https://mobile.twitter.com/jweise/status/491788092710199297?...) or accidentally disrupting the network fabric and costing the company $X in missed revenue don't get fired for first offense. The way this was handled seems unusual, suggesting either there's a piece of the puzzle we internet pundits aren't holding or Google has changed its tolerance policy for honest mistakes.
If someone deliberately goes around those checks to push something anyway then it could be a fire-able offense.
She might be naive enough to believe that this was actually protected concerted activity, but I don't think so. I'm not sure I think firing her was the right play, but I also don't have all the information. I will say that I don't think this outcome should surprise her. It should definitely been one of the likely outcomes she modeled when deciding to submit that code.
So if her goal was to cause disruption at Google, it sounds like management just gave her a major assist. Like a Falcon Heavy's worth of assist.
Also, FWIW, this may provide some interesting reading: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/are-employers-required-to-...
If, indeed, this was not in the company policy, and it is indeed the employee's opinion, then yes, termination is apt.
Part of the right of free speech is correctness of attribution. Trying to speak as someone else, using someone else's communication channels isn't speech, it's fraud.
And I say that as (at least within the spectrum of folks on this site) a full on pinko commie unionizer. If this is the truth of the story, this just wasn't OK, and was a very reasonable firing offense.
Like most of the general public, I have no desire to associate with criminals. If you build your union on a foundation of illegal acts, there's no reason for anyone to believe you'll stop once it gets fully established. Existing unions in the United States provide ample proof of that.
(Oh, and by the way, the Teamsters, whose site you linked to, figure prominently in quite a number of those news stories. There really isn't a better example I can think of of why "Workers need to be willing to break the law in order to win victories against the people that make the laws..." goes down a bad path than them. The Wikipedia article for them contains the word "corrupt" 31 times.)
That's the cleverest counterargument you could manage?
I choose to interpret that, as most readers will, as conceding to my arguments.
Not if they want to win, they don't. Anarchism won nothing at the turn of the century. Organized (note the adjective!) Labor broke through when it became a political movement with representation in government.
Look, the point here is that if you want to win a unionization fight (which is a legal victory, it will happen in courts and with contracts) you have to fight using legal tools. Pulling anarchist tricks like this just makes you feel better, it does nothing but make management's position stronger.
If we leave rhetoric aside, what she's done is the equivalent of sending a leaflet or putting up a poster on company property. That's not strictly 'proper', but life does not happen in courtrooms. You actually have talk to people, let them know what's happening, organise, etc. Courtroom is where the fight is settled in it's last stages.
I disagree that only rights granted by courts are effective in winning labor struggles. Strikes, legal or not, are required for advancing labor's cause.
This worker was attempting to organize her colleagues in an extremely tame way. There was no property damage. We should show our unadulterated support to embolden the working class.
But in this case it appears to be a link to an internal notice.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-17/another-g...
This was purely a Moral decision on her part and not reasonable in my opinion to tag it as part of her job. She was not happy with how google was retaliating against her co-workers (right or wrong) and she took action using her own judgement. She did this not because this was part of her job but because she wanted to get back at google for their behavior (again right or wrong, thats not the point here).
Some may think a union drive is a company function. From what I remember about my experience with unions is you are allowed to put up notices in the employee breakroom that is done by the union rep who is voted in within each shop.
I would say what she did was more along the lines of blasting the union notice over speakers to everyone who entered the cafe.
Requiring Google to post a list at hq doesn't cover other locations and/or browser notification when visiting certain sites.
> did she add a company policy or guideline by adding what she added? I wouldn't classify a union drive as a company policy.
The answer is that it's a policy that must be posted (just not necesarily there). It wasn't a union drive.
I think there is a reasonable difference between security notifications and other corporate policies.
Were non-security notifications in scope for their job or the tool used?
Google has provided places for people to discuss things. When she didn't think that was good enough she chose to make unapproved code changes that went against corporate direction.
Personally, I'm against unionizing any software company, especially google. Unions were created to prevent systemic abuse of people that were seen as easily replaceable. If you think a recent college graduate making 120k+ that has been provided almost ridiculous perks and freedom unheard of in most of the industry is being abused when they could easily leave Google and expect to receive a similarly paid position virtually anywhere purely because they used to work at Google, then there's no helping you.
Google employees have more rights than at most companies, they can even spend up to 20% of their day working on personal projects and Google won't claim ownership. If they think they need a union when dealing with such a reasonable employer,then those fresh out of college lottery winners need a serious reality check. Let's talk about unionizing Amazon fulfillment centers where they frequently let people go because taking a bathroom break means missing your quota. Let's talk about unionizing virtually any company before we demand labor unions for the most highly privileged group of people in the world.
> This kind of code change happens all the time.
we have all been there.
i think she knew she wasn't following proper procedure. even if it's done "all the time".
Who assigned the jury that duty? And when did that happen?
Per http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/nullifi... and other sources that I have seen, the understanding of the law when the Constitution was written was that juries should judge both the law and the facts. The view that they should not judge the law only arose decades later in the late 1800s. The fact that the legal profession today sees jurors as having a duty to NOT judge the law I see as undermining the intent of having jury trials in the first place.
The understanding of jury trials when the Constitution was written was that juries had a right and obligation to judge both the law and the facts. The first laws
She’s not a victim. She made a choice (which I personally agree with and find admirable) but the firing seems justifiable.
She needs to understand this power isn't her own to wield.
And the risk of people abusing power to advance their personal agenda is NOT something that would get passed easily once discovered.
> And the risk of people abusing power to advance their personal agenda is NOT something that would get passed easily once discovered.
Yes, it is. It get discovered all the time and no one gives a sh*t about it.
Conversely, an employee's agenda can be left at home, please, if they agree to be employed. The "Engineer" is lucky she isn't brought up on misuse of computing system charges.
I don't like companies that invade employees and customers outside-of-work freedoms. Just as I don't like employees that abuse and undermine the relationship that they freely entered with their employers. If you don't like it - quit and go work somewhere else. Then become activist.
about stuff that will breach company security, not to alert people of dangerous opinions. The latter is not hers to decide.
"Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web."
-With regard to what exactly? Context matters, if the browser notifications she was creating were only supposed to pertain to surfing the web then I think we can safely say she overstepped her bounds.
"So when I heard that Google had hired a union busting firm and started illegally retaliating against my coworkers, I decided to make sure that my coworkers knew about the posting."
-Again, it depends on what exactly her job was, but this seems to suggest she had motivation outside the bounds of her job description for doing what she did.
I don’t disagree with what she did. In fact, I think it’s kind of great. However, that doesn’t mean Google didn’t have a right to fire her for it.
"Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web"
If this is true and her job is literally to create javascript notifications of company policy, then I think it's entirely reasonable what she did considering it IS company policy (well, law really) that you have a right to organize.
Link to the popup: https://miro.medium.com/max/2000/0*1BTVYLTvuHiJVvp_.jpg