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".
That's inappropriate.
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:
Also, Google generally trusts engineers and it's not that unusual to have an engineer writing and deploying code. So essentially it was her job to work on and deploy this extension. I believe that had the message been an April fools day joke she wouldn't have been fired.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.