Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

Re:Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US ... by JeremyBanks on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @01:52PM (#25279889)

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.

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Re:Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US ... by vorpalhex on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @02:15PM (#25280212)

> 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?

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