Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

Re:Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers o... by jefftk on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @10:40AM (#21814562)

Reviewers are supposed to review holistically, and in cases where something raises larger questions (do we actually have approval for this change?) they shouldn't approve until those questions are resolved.

In this case I suspect the reviewers were supportive of the protest, and so approved it even though their authority didn't cover this kind of change.

I don't think any of these people should have been fired, but "by the book" is not a good way of characterizing this process. That would have been proposing the feature to management, getting their sign-off, and then making the code changes.

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Re:Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers o... by javajosh on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @11:13AM (#21814967)

>Reviewers are supposed to review holistically

That sounds about right. So why doesn't Google fire the reviewers? If they don't, then they are inconsistently applying the standard. If they do, then they are punishing a coordinated employee action.

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Re:Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers o... by singron on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:41PM (#21816168)

If Google just doesn't want unionized engineers, it could just fire all engineers. Obviously they need to balance their various objectives and firing productive people is costly to the business. I think they are hoping more to send a strong message to the whole company with as small a disturbance to the business as possible.

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Re:Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers o... by pathseeker on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @12:40PM (#21816137)

Because reviewers aren't held to the same level of responsibility for the content of the change as the author. Making them responsible for back-door vulnerabilities slipped in by employees compromised by a nation-state would grind the company to a halt.

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Re:Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers o... by ummonk on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @01:32PM (#21816891)

My understanding is that Google is a rather bottoms-up culture regarding internal tooling, and that you don't normally need sign-off from management to take initiative and make changes to tooling like this. They're only mad that the particular change here involved labor organizing, which is obvious retaliation.

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