That's a good question, I don't know, but she claims the latter.

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.

If she really was "a great fit for Google" then she'd have realized the obvious fact that her naive attempt to fulfill an NRLB regulatory requirement would be something that should be checked with Google's legal department so a lawyer specialized in labor regulation can confirm that doing what she planned would actually meet the regulatory requirement as well as confirm this requirement wasn't already met in another way.

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.

A little of the former and a little of the latter, most likely. However, that doesn't mean her judgment r.e. what is relevant is immune to review. And if it's sufficiently incorrect, consequences like what happened shouldn't be surprising.

These are stiff consequences for the violation in question for Google.

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.

Depending on what the cause is it might be different. If someone makes a reasonable mistake, like pushes something to production that they should not, then you could argue that there are not enough checks and it is not something you should get fired for. You should change the process.

If someone deliberately goes around those checks to push something anyway then it could be a fire-able offense.

I'd disagree. Another post shows stellar performance reviews, so if this is considered a mistake, it should be remedied and she should be reprimanded. Outright firing seems heavy handed

My take on this is that she was trying to ruffle feathers, and she succeeded. I suspect her firing took into account that intent. Putting myself in the shoes of whoever decided, I can only think that factor would have weighed heavily against her.

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.

This firing has created a small storm of bad PR for Google, and I'd be willing to bet it's created a large storm of bad feeling among Google employees. (Although a smaller matter, using "security violation" as a spurious reasoning for the firing probably also slightly downgrades the credibility of the company's internal security efforts.)

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.

The article quotes a law professor who says that it probably is protected activity, so I'm not sure "naive" is the correct word.

The analogy Prof. Dubal uses is not apt. They seem to believe that the extension was some kind of public notice board where anybody could post something, but that is not what it is. Since they did not have sufficient context, I would be disinclined to trust their judgment on this issue.

Also, FWIW, this may provide some interesting reading: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/are-employers-required-to-...

As a level 3 software engineer, the latter (with oversight, which it would appear was in place here. A change like this one doesn't hit the live codebase without at least one other engineer signing off on it).