Depending on your definition of code, that's probably not the case. She added an entry to a config file that contained a mapping of urls to messages. Such as:

   dropbox.com/upload -> Friendly reminder: please don't upload internal documents to dropbox

So in my opinion arguments that others have made (not you) that: "this was a unauthorized code change therefore obviously she should be fired on security grounds and charged with violating the CFAA too, it doesn't matter what the message was" don't really hold water. There's also an argument that she used some sort of "emergency" deployment mechanism, but that doesn't really hold water either. Honestly it's not that unusual to see people deploy some package when they need it rather than wait for a scheduled job to deploy it.

I think the grey area she was operating in boils down to: She had a platform to distribute certain types of messages internally and she put a message in there that probably wasn't the normal type of message distributed. If I were her manager I probably would have taken some action but it wouldn't have been firing.

I disagree. The emergency process was highly unusual, in that it had never been done before for this extension, and was very rarely done in general. Triggering a deploy is normal, triggering a deploy that goes immediately to 100% is not.

> essentially it was her job to work on and deploy this extension

The extension wasn't something she had previously worked on.

> I believe that had the message been an April fools day joke she wouldn't have been fired.

I agree, and don't think she should have been fired for this either.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

The magical access to add stuff and just have fun was what made google a fun place to work at.

In this case adding stuff for your own corporate employees didn’t hurt the company’s customers and users. It shouldn’t have resulted in a termination. Had the person put a hate message they would have been terminated or penalized for hate but not for adding insecure code.

Similarly if someone made anti union messages pop up when you visit union sites I am 100% sure they would get fired as well, for the same reasons. You can talk about almost anything internally, (People like Damore aren't uncommon at all, the outside world just got hung up on him for some reason), just take your job and company code seriously.

funny name to give to something on the grounds of an engineer in the team pushing for unionization

I'd prefer you don't get fired for doing dumb shit like that because whatever, it's not going to kill someone, but I'm not going to use that team's adware shit anymore.

Sorry, I misunderstood this to allude to "Bonze" a German/French derogatory translating to "fat cat".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bonze

That's inappropriate.

My understanding from articles I've read is that it wasn't her job to maintain the product. It was her first time interacting with that code base, and she intentionally altered the defaults of the code review tool so that the team responsible for the extension wouldn't be informed of her changes.

Not to mention, the comment the plugin displayed wasn't saying anything against illegal actions, but rather stating that concerted activities are protected. I don't see how that has any bearing on the use of a law firm's website.

Arguments of the form, "Person did X. Imagine if they had done Y! (Where Y is some obviously unethical thing.)" are fallacious and they lead the discussion to useless dead ends. The point is that the person did do X, and NOT Y.

I have policies at my workplace that disallow something because it's impractical to judge every single situation and then have to deal with the gray area.

At Google, someone once disruptively modified the root permissions for the entire company-wide monorepo to show off that the permissions scheme was fallible. They were left off with a verbal warning, even though on paper they massively abused their position, and could have made the point without actually doing it.

The engineer in the OP took a much smaller action, that was closer to the scope of her actual duties, but was punished more severely.

It's exactly applicable. If you violate say, finance reporting laws (KYC) then you've violated finance reporting laws. If you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool, well, you've added unauthorized code to an internal tool.

And had it been part of a security disclosure, well, that might be different (did they try other disclosure avenues?), but pushing a political viewpoint isn't. Imagine instead if the employee had added the message "Trump 2020" - how would you feel about that?

Would it have been fine if she added a message to say "Affirmative Action is racist" when people browsed information about Proposition 16 on the 2020 California ballot? Sure, she definitely has the right to spread that message on her own time. But adding this message is definitely breaching expectations of professionalism, and abusing her developer role to spread a personal political message. And given that Google/Alphabet is widely suspected of political bias, I it's fair to let go of employees who cannot refrain from modify software to advance their political views.

Sucks but seems logical to me.

That's unrelated to the claims of spying and illegal procedures of course, that the new article claims. Very curious to see what they did that was illegal / what kind of spying they would have done. But right now its just claims.