| ▲ | xnx 11 hours ago |
| Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point. |
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| ▲ | gerdesj 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The real problem is that OP is or wants to be an old school disruptor working at what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker). OP crank out a pretty decent and well received, by the community, product and get absolutely canned because they are well out of touch of how Google now works. You don't do risk (without reward) at Google and you certainly don't show a bit of ankle or look exciting. Google are well out of the market for being interesting (outside of the balance sheet and P&L for those who fetishise in accountancy. Unfortunately: going viral isn't always a good thing as anyone who has experienced a nasty virus will attest. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > what used to be an exciting and disruptive employer (but isn't any more - its just a boring old money maker). I feel sorry for this person, but I would be surprised if this would have been okay at Google in the past 20 years. It wouldn't have been okay at any company I've ever worked at, big or small. I think there's a valid argument that this started as a simple DevRel script or trick, but due to the way you can write a lot of code very quickly with AI it expanded to something that resembled a full-blown product. Maybe uncharted territory as the previous assumption was that an individual DevRel person releasing scripts couldn't be mistaken for a supported product because one person couldn't produce that much code in the past. | | |
| ▲ | gerdesj 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I would encourage this sort of thing in my company. I'm not google. I'm not legally beholden to anyone except myself and my business partners ... and my own sense (which is worryingly odd!) Google can never be exciting or interesting evermore by design and intent. They dived on in and went "money" full on. They exist to generate revenue for their shareholders. They dumped the "Don't be evil" thing without blushing. | | |
| ▲ | Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think your encouragement is admirable but could be interpreted as naive. For one thing, the author of this tool used Google trademarks (the logo) to represent the project. If you are even slightly larger than a mom and pop small business you pretty much have to defend that trademark or else you risk losing it. But, okay, fine, you can just tell them not to use your trademark and have them say it's not an official thing. No big deal. The other thing I would say is that growing beyond even a relatively small number of employees fundamentally changes everything. Once you don't have that face to face with all your employees that trust level between you and them can't possibly be the same, no matter how good your intentions are. Even a modest company with 25-50 people...how well can you know those people, really? Even if you try your hardest to know them? Once you have a certain number of employees you run into probabilistic realities. Google has over 100,000 employees, which means statistically speaking a few of them have committed or will commit homicide. The idea of "we trust all our employees" can't exist from a mathematical perspective, even if the leadership happens to be the nicest people in the world who really want their employees to have freedom and autonomy. |
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| ▲ | frollogaston 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dunno about 20, but 7 years ago, they fired a security engineer for forcing in a CL for their internal Chrome extensions to put a disapproving banner on certain anti-union websites. Wasn't a very harmful change, but because she left a clear paper trail of circumvented code/release reviews, she couldn't be trusted anymore. | | |
| ▲ | nixon_why69 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That was a security engineer modifying internal security tooling without proper permissions/reviews. The union piece was probably extra motivation but still you just do not do that to security infra, it should always be a firing offense unless it was a truly exceptional circumstance. Conversely, this guy was in a DevRel role where it sounds like they released open source stuff all the time and the line was a lot more fuzzy (admittedly I've only heard one side of the story). |
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| ▲ | sanderjd 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah this is super weird to me, because the processes at Google for employees to release and attribute ownership of open source projects are extremely clear and well established. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine this happening in a way that confused or caught the author off guard. It's totally fair to question the wisdom of those processes and policies! But I'm pretty skeptical of the "I'm surprised I got in trouble for this" narrative. |
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| ▲ | QuantumGood 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Clueness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with perceived freedom. I think it's that cause and effect are not as often connected (consequences). I remember a Google employee updating a Google font that broke thousands of websites. Community members explained that Google recommended (at that time) letting Google host the font, and that they could fork it instead, or find a path that wouldn't break so many websites. The employee took the implication of consequences as being connected to ther actions as an aff(r)ont "They can just host it themselves"; "they can switch to another font/redesgin their site". When it was pointed out that the cause would not be known to most, and that budgets would have to be found to ferret out the cause and implement the solution, etc., etc., the Google employee stopped responding. | | |
| ▲ | bonsai_bar 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | We take annual training that warns us against doing what this engineer did. | | |
| ▲ | sleepybrett 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | yes we all pay attention to 'the training' | | |
| ▲ | sanderjd 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again, I'm pretty skeptical that this person completely missed this part of the training for seven years. |
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| ▲ | ktm5j 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah that's kind of the impression that I had.. should have ran it past his superiors. Hope he learns something from this instead of deflecting like he seems to be doing. |
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| ▲ | ingvay7 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Particularly for a company that possibly has to navigate high-volume, often frivolous litigation and brand attacks from trolls. I have been in similar situations having to partner with legal defending the most frivolous things on products released. You literally sign docs to not do such things when u onboard. Not sure what the point of broadcasting this is though. |
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| ▲ | justinwp 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You are assuming that it was "personally" releasing something and that the process wasn't followed. |
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| ▲ | cmeacham98 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You continue to dance around this question on this post - did you or did you not follow Google's open source approval process[1]? Did you have an approved Ariane/Launcher2 entry? 1: https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/... | | | |
| ▲ | free652 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did you have your launch approved? So did you follow the process? | |
| ▲ | fg137 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why isn't it under google's username on github? Why does the repo say "This is not an officially supported Google product."? Is it actually approved by Google or not? You need to actually answer these questions instead of dodging them. | | |
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| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | busterarm 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not only that but not clearing with your management that you're not working on something that is actually being worked on as a product. Definitely they put some manager and/or team in a very uncomfortable position releasing this. |
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| ▲ | jbm 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Your ships would have been sunk during the 2002 Millennial challenge and an entire bureaucracy would defend you for the next 20 years. |
