Not sure why you are being downvoted. You've (correctly) pointed out that the parent comment has constructed a strawman to punch at, rather than the actual events.

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.

vorpalhex is stating action X was wrong in the first place, and describing a situation Y as an example to show why action X is wrong.

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.

That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. The punishment isn't because of how much she violated the policies, it's to send a message.

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.

> That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here.

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?

But X is also unethical. Not sure why you're seemingly ignoring that.

I'm not. I'm explicitly saying you should discuss X. Adding Y just muddies the discussion.

Abusing your position as a developer and turning your software into a political soapbox is not much better. People are trying to spin this as some sort of union busting move. I don't see it, this behavior is unacceptable regardless of what message is being spread.

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.

A better way to think of it in my eyes is, employer pays you to write an app that shows cats. You start and you're like, yeah, no fuck that, and you write an app that shows dogs instead. Employer comes back to you and says "we pay you to show cats, since you don't wanna do it we'll find someone else".

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.