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Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• todd3834 7y ago
  > Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension > “We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.” The only times I’ve ever seen people fired quickly in Tech without a performance improvement plan or something similar is a security violation. Be sure you always take security seriously if you like your job.
  • vntok 7y ago
    What a title.
  • dominotw 7y ago
    one time i was fired for leaving my computer unlocked to go get some coffee. true story.
    • swebs 7y ago
      Military contractor?
    • javajosh 7y ago
      Which is pretty dumb. The most important threat to a typical office dev computer is not console access, it's wayward processes and network traffic. What's more secure, a locked console (that protects you from ~1 local people that you know) or something like Little Snitch, which protects you from ~10e6 people you don't know?
      • magduf 7y ago
        It depends on the industry and the company. In some types of government work, it's a very serious security violation.
        • javajosh 7y ago
          There is a difference between violating a security guideline and actually doing something that is insecure, and the difference is called "theater".
      • txcwpalpha 7y ago
        I've worked in security for years. This isn't really true. The majority of all security breaches are caused by internal threats, not by some hacker group breaching your firewall. Malicious actors tailgating someone into an office and stealing an unlocked laptop, or an unlocked laptop being stolen while at a coffee shop or airport, is also a very common occurrence I've seen at most of my clients.
        • javajosh 7y ago
          The thing is its easy to see that someone stole your machine and take action to revoke credentials. Further, the damage a person can do with a dev machine is rather limited - probably the worst that might happen is exfiltrating code. Yes, devops machines can do more damage, but presumably all their remote access is 2FA protected (at least). But a devs main influence is pushing to a git remote, and triggering a build. Maybe the build is a weak spot, but it seems unlikely that an attacker would find and exploit it faster than the defender would realize the box is gone and revoke keys. No, my main concern is ongoing, persistent, secret access to my machine, particularly delivered via a malicious package. Something like Little Snitch is going to make it much harder for such an attack to work. Locking your machine, 2FA, PKI, etc is not going to help with that threat at all. And I have reason to believe it's more common than people think.
          • txcwpalpha 7y ago
            >probably the worst that might happen is exfiltrating code This is far far from the worst that might (and does) happen. I think you severely underestimate the average dev's access to critical systems. >but presumably all their remote access is 2FA protected hahahahahaha You also severely overestimate the security of most companies. A lot of F500s don't even use 2FA at all, let alone on something like CI/CD. > unlikely that an attacker would find and exploit it faster than the defender would realize the box is gone and revoke keys I have firsthand seen many cases where this isn't true at all. OTOH, I've never once heard of anyone catching a breach by using Little Snitch or anything close to it (though I'm not opposed to it at all as a good practice). And in many cases, it has very little to do with "revoking keys" or any kind of remote access. Many people, whether they realize it or not, usually have some very valuable data just sitting in a csv file on their machine (I've encountered a large number of devs that have partial exports of customer databases stored locally on their machine that they were using for local testing). That type of stuff is easily lifted, no remote access required.
• downdown4eva 7y ago
  More like fired for pulling a stupid stunt that she's now trying to turn into a press release.
• cj 7y ago
  > Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” So basically, the Google employee added arbitrary javascript to an internal chrome extension used by Google employees that triggered a popup when employees visited a specific website. And Google fires her with the reasoning: > “We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.” I'm not at all opposed to Google employees organizing. But injecting javascript into an employer's internal chrome extension does seem like something that warrants some type of action by Google in response...
  • gbronner 7y ago
    Almost irrespective of the website that it was triggered on, it represents a huge waste of her time, as well as that of the hapless employees forced to click through her automatically-created popups. It also weaponizes the internal browser to advocate for political causes. It shows such stunningly bad judgement that they are entirely justified in firing her.
    • givinguflac 7y ago
      IMHO its absurd to think stating a law/fact is advocating a political cause, unless you consider the law a political cause? In which case, wow.
      • noirbot 7y ago
        I mean, I know I'd be highly annoyed if I got a "Don't post copyrighted material" popup every time I visited Stack Overflow. It's the law, but it doesn't mean I want an addon nagging me about my legal obligations. In the same way, I know I have a right to vote, but I definitely felt it was annoying when I had a coworker who would regularly spam us to remind us to vote. It's not necessarily Political, but it's advocacy. I only have so much mental bandwidth - hijacking it to have my read a message of your choosing is cause advocacy whether I agree with it or not. Advocating a certain level of involvement/mindfulness of specific issues is political - Most of the difference between folks in the same party/ideology is just in if they think about or prioritize certain issues over others. Do you care more about Union Rights or the Environment? International Wars or domestic policing? Pushing people towards one over the other is political even if they already agree with you on the underlying issue.
• kache_ 7y ago
  >Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” You should get fired five times over for abusing your privileged access to modify software that runs on every employee's computer. How stupid can you be? Start a healthy discussion, don't violate trust. This just puts up a bad reputation for workers who do want to organize
  • iwantagrinder 7y ago
    Did you not read the part where she did, where she followed the process by the book and it was approved? Or did you just have your mind made up to decide to side with Google instead?
    • Maxion 7y ago
      I'm honestly a little surprised (and worried) about all the commenters who argue Google is in the right here.
      • ixtli 7y ago
        People love to make excuses for their bosses because they believe their interests are aligned :(
        • bluntfang 7y ago
          one day they will be the boss and when they're the boss they aren't going to want their exploited employees to ruin their bottom line. Spoiler alert: they're never gonna be the boss. It's like that meme where people on the poverty line vote against their interests because one day they think they're going to be the billionaire.
          • 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
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• IshKebab 7y ago
  > I was doing nothing more than notifying my co-workers about Google's obligations under labor law > Kathryn Spiers updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” Yeah ok.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    This extension popping up messages on various sites was a completely normal thing for it to do, she simply added another message.
    • w0m 7y ago
      unrelated to actual purpose of the tool; she co-opted internal security tool for a personal soap box and pushed it to the entire company. That's a clear violation of trust in her job role.
• kop316 7y ago
  I think the relevant test is here: "Kathryn Spiers, who worked as a security engineer, updated an internal Chrome browser extension so that each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company — they would see a pop-up message that read: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”" It sounds like the person updated an internal extension on everyone's computer to do this. I am tending to side with Google on this, that is not the right way to go about notifying co-workers of right to organize.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• bag531 7y ago
  I don't know why anyone would choose to work at Google anymore.
  • shantly 7y ago
    Giant piles of money. Probably still gets you an easy CTO title at a startup after 2-4 years at Google.
    • decebalus1 7y ago
      > Giant piles of money. Not anymore, really. It was the case a couple of years ago but right now, for rank-and-file employees, Google downlevels heavily and targets around 80% of the market rate. For some reason, people are still flocking at their doors and because of high supply of candidates, they can afford to be both very selective and very cheap.
      • shantly 7y ago
        I have a suspicion given a bunch of things happening there (of which I have only outsider knowledge, mind you) that they're already well into a transition to a more boring bigco stance & structure, and are just letting their reputational momentum carry them until people notice rather than coming out and saying that. Starting to push comp downward would be in line with that.
      • raxxorrax 7y ago
        Probably still a net plus if you have Google on your resume and decide to look elsewhere.
        • decebalus1 7y ago
          that's what 'my' (as it's the same person pinging me for the past couple of years) recruiter keeps telling me. It's not a net plus considering that I can just look elsewhere in the first place. No point in taking a paycheck cut for a while to do some boring work for a company about which I have ethical concerns so that maybe when I want to change jobs I'll have a competitive edge.
• ct0 7y ago
  According to their linkedin, they graduated highschool in 2015.
  • dominotw 7y ago
    college is overrated.
  • krisroadruck 7y ago
    I just don't get the internet anymore. You're avoiding using gendered pronouns but needlessly displaying ageism?
    • the_narrator 7y ago
      Based on the Google engineer's LinkedIn profile, it is obvious that using any gendered pronoun will be a touchy subject.
    • ct0 7y ago
      You must be missing the point of the internet. I don't see a problem here; Only you made graduation year and age the proxy. Why would the engineer reveal their HS graduation year if they didn't want the world to know it? I considered that they must have had little experience considering their graduation year and the average or even above average experience of those graduating the same year.
  • SamuelAdams 7y ago
    The article mentions that the security engineer in this story is 21 years old.
• Touche 7y ago
  The article is confusing. She says she was fired for doing one thing. Google says she did something else (modified Chromium without permission). Does she deny their claims, or is her statement just spin? Given just her quotes you would think that she was fired for literally telling coworkers that they have a right to organize.
  • iwantagrinder 7y ago
    Did you not read the part where she did, where she followed the process by the book and it was approved? Or did you just have your mind made up to decide to side with Google instead?
    • Touche 7y ago
      Nope, I am not siding with Google, if you'll see my other comments in this thread. It's just not super clear to me that there's agreement on what actually happened here.
    • PunchTornado 7y ago
      Do you understand that you can follow the process by the book and still do something wrong and be rightfully fired? "The book" doesn't contain everything that an employee shouldn't or should do. Sending political messages thorugh a browser extension to other employees seems like a reason for being fired no matter how many reviews you've got.
  • kawfey 7y ago
    that's the problem with seeing one side of the story, and the other side being a megacorporation which will never explain the firing more than "abusing privileges."
• buboard 7y ago
  Google getting a taste of ad injection. Nice!
• deleted 7y ago
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• kawfey 7y ago
  Bad headline. It should read "Engineer fired her for abusing privileged access to modify an internal security tool." That's a pretty dumb way to notify co-workers of their right to organize, but I guess it's a really good way to get fired and draw up a big media stink about it.
  • iwantagrinder 7y ago
    Did you not read the part where she did, where she followed the process by the book and it was approved? Or did you just have your mind made up to decide to side with Google instead?
    • kawfey 7y ago
      If my company's handbook on privileged access is anything like Google's, it's completely against the rules to do something like this, even if it's for a noble or worthy cause for its employees, even if other employee's must sign off on the change. Our employee agreement comes with an NDA that tells us to not speak bad about the company, and insubordination of this has resulted in firings just from social media criticism. I'm not siding with Google, but I'm not siding with her either. The facts and evidence presented to me don't give me an impression that Google was in the wrong by firing her. My opinion will change if I see that the guiding principles or Employee handbook that led Google to this decision are not in agreement.
      • gnopgnip 7y ago
        Its also against the rules to go on strike, but it would be unlawful to fire someone for striking in many cases
    • georgefrick 7y ago
      Did you come to the comments to discuss this, or just spam your empty response at everyone?
    • tdfx 7y ago
      I love that a site full of engineers is pretending that getting a pull request approved by colleagues is the same thing as getting management's approval for a new, most likely controversial feature. Google is clearly trying to squash union organizing at the company but let's not pretend this employee was correct in her actions. Google being evil and this employee being in the wrong are not mutually exclusive.
• Maxion 7y ago
  Did no one read the article? > Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension. Another source at Google familiar with the update approval process confirmed to NBC news that those two approvals are standard practice for a browser extension update. She did it exactly according to internal policy. The extension she updated warns site visitors on many websites. I do not see what she did wrong.
  • mytailorisrich 7y ago
    That sounds like a code review, which is not the same as project/management approval for the 'feature' at all.
    • Cyph0n 7y ago
      The internal extension displays pop-ups when you visit particular sites. All she did was add a new pop-up and associated site to the list.
    • gautamdivgi 7y ago
      Not sure why you're downvoted. This does sound like a code review. News sites most often either willfully or through ignorance prefer not to investigate the entire story to truly get to what broke or what didn't break. It's typically just for shock value. I remember a story where cell tower signals were blamed for decline in the North American honey bee population.
      • kawfey 7y ago
        People agreeing with or rationalizing Google's response are not held in high regard on this thread.
        • mytailorisrich 7y ago
          I'm doing neither, just pointing out that the 'approval' may not be what is implied in the article...
• Miner49er 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but on the surface this seems clearly illegal on Google's part based on the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Does anyone know of any similar cases to this? EDIT: Found one in Purple Communications. It was ruled workers can use work email to organize. https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-mail-organize-and-complain-about-work-ten-key-implications https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m...
  • idlewords 7y ago
    It's significant that she did this on her own. You need multiple people for protected concerted activity.
    • CharlesColeman 7y ago
      It sounds like she went through a code review process for the change, would that count?
      • panpanna 7y ago
        While this does not mean higher-ups approved her messages, it does show that she did it by the book. If the higher ups felt this message was inappropriate and should be removed they could follow the same procedure instead of firing the engineer
        • CharlesColeman 7y ago
          Edit: I agree.
          • panpanna 7y ago
            I know, I am agreeing with you :) But alot of people in the comments claim that she more or less hacked the system.
            • 7y ago
• amachefe 7y ago
  The can has been opened, i doubt it will stop with this. Any opinion that is not the companies position will not be tolerated. I bet the people who encouraged Google to "act" of opposing views did not think it through
• whiddershins 7y ago
  I see contradictory impressions about what this article is even saying. My contribution is that it’s foolish to react too quickly to a story like this. If the headline were accurate, it would be such an obvious own-goal on the part of Google HR, it beggars belief. I think the wise course is to wait until more details are made public before getting worked up about it.
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    If the headline were accurate, it would be such an obvious own-goal on the part of Google HR, it beggars belief. I'm not sure about that. Outrage quickly passes and is forgotten.
  • dhimes 7y ago
    What am I supposed to do with all of these torches then?
  • throw_m239339 7y ago
    Of course we should wait for more facts to comment or try to think about the situation, but we don't live in a era of reason anymore. All I have to say is that it will be interesting to see a drastic change in culture in the coming years at Google. Google did foster an "open" culture for more than a decade and now that their own employees are coming after the higher ups, they are trying to squash the rebellion they encouraged? they were fine as long as other employees or other businesses were getting the short hand of the stick...
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  The method in which she tried to notify co-workers is the real headline to me. It tells me that they really struggle to be able to communicate broadly with co-workers.
  • seriesf 7y ago
    But that’s so untrue. Google internally has a number of different platforms with universal reach.
• ramraj07 7y ago
  I was initially tempted to side with Google, a code review process is not just rigorous enough for catching features being sneaked in. However, it looks like the sole purpose of the extension is to warn employees about security issues in websites, and this engineer coopted that to show a union forming message. The final paragraph suggests that there's legal precedence for doing this: “You’re allowed to put posters up on the wall to help organize your workers, and this can be seen as kind of a digital extension of that,” said Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. “Whether or not you’re in a union or there’s a union being formed, the law protects organizing activities by employees in the workplace organizing to improve their working conditions.”
  • makomk 7y ago
    I don't buy this analogy. If there's one thing news reporting has demonstrated over the last few years, it's that Google is not lacking in actual digital equivalents of noticeboards where people can put up the equivalent of posters. This seems like she decided that wasn't aggressive enough and implemented the political equivalent of slipping adware into a browser extension instead.
    • hannasanarion 7y ago
      Putting adware into a browser extension that is already just adware (pops up messages on sites the employer doesn't want you to visit) is not a security risk.
      • freyr 7y ago
        It's not about being a security risk. This person used their access as a developer to alter internal security tools to promote their own messaging. That shows a profound lack of judgement, and it's not surprising their access would be revoked.
    • foxyv 7y ago
      Apparently Google was already doing this with other sites. Why is this one different? It wasn't like she put up something that was illegal or could increase Google's liability. It's one thing to say: "Hey we don't like that one, change it." It's another to fire someone when they engage in a protected activity. If she had put it up and refused to take it down I could understand firing her. But this is suspect for sure.
• someonehere 7y ago
  Does anyone have the code approval process? The chrome extension was modified but approved by two other people? Were these two other people on her side? Regardless of policy or no policy, having an internal tool modified to say, “we have the right to organize,” clearly sets off some trust concerns with me. If this extension was approved by two people who were on her side, then those two need to be removed as well and there should be a rethinking of the approval process.
  • panpanna 7y ago
    I believe this is an internal toy updated very frequently. It's by no means a "product": > This kind of code change happens all the time. We frequently add things to make our jobs easier or even to just share hobbies or interests.
• felideon 7y ago
  Spiers' account of what happened: https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for-exercising-her-rights-and-protecting-coworkers-from-illegal-b86c41ef91b9 https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...
  • panpanna 7y ago
    Thanks for the link. This section caught my attention: > I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers Sounds more foxconn than Google to me...
    • leadingthenet 7y ago
      Personally, this is exactly what I assumed Google to be like when it comes to unionising.
    • whamlastxmas 7y ago
      I don't understand this "wouldn't let me" stuff. Pull out your phone and call someone. Some random person in a meeting room at Google isn't the police. You aren't in custody. If you're uncomfortable then walk out. If anyone at my employer was the least bit aggressive to me I would immediately walk away.
      • MiroF 7y ago
        Yes, but they are paying you. There's a power dynamic there, even if you aren't literally in custody.
    • sct202 7y ago
      Google seems to be using tactics used on factory floors to suppress organization. It doesn't seem like a good idea considering how individual googlers have a lot more resources at their disposable compared to a hourly factory line worker. Whoever these consultants are, they seem to be providing very bad advice for a white collar environment where the workers are pretty wealthy and have friends who are in the media.
• Kylekramer 7y ago
  Lot of people are confusing "following standard procedures" with "immune from consequences". To be honest, looks like the employee got a few sympathetic people to sign off on an inappropriate use of a tool. According to the Verge, there are two other people who are also being disciplined.
  • kawfey 7y ago
    I'm starting to assume the two others are the two peer reviewers that approved the change.
  • tantalor 7y ago
    That comment: "the company had fired someone last week for misusing the browser notification, and it had also disciplined two others as part of the incident" https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21024472/google-employee-fired-labor-rights-notification-tool https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21024472/google-employee...
• mariopt 7y ago
  > “You’re allowed to put posters up on the wall to help organize your workers, and this can be seen as kind of a digital extension of that,” Well, that digital extension belongs to Google. If she wanted to rally company developers she could have used email, created her own website, slack account, WhatsApp, telegram, etc. There are plenty of channels that don't belong to Google. I doubt anyone in upper management asked her to do this, maybe she took too much freedom and abused her privileged access? "Oh but someone else approved that PR", well probably they ganged up. She is a Security Engineer, not HR/Management. If this approved by HR/Management, there would be no problem at all but I think she/they did whatever they wanted without thinking about it.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • maxk42 7y ago
    As an employee, you have no right to put up posters anywhere in the workplace unless condoned by your employer. She must be conflating this concept with the requirement for your employer to put up posters informing employees of their rights to unionize when there's a unionization effort.
  • makomk 7y ago
    I don't think she'd even have to do that. Google apparently has internal communication channels for employees where this topic would actually be appropriate, there's probably legal precedent that they couldn't stop people using them, and if I remember correctly from previous news coverage their employees have in fact been using them in their attempts at union organizing.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  I'm glad not to be working with people like this. I think I really don't want to be working with people who want to push their pet topic on me via a security tool I consented to have installed on my work machine that's supposed to be helpful to me. It would feel like a violation. Not "siding with Google" here. It just definitely would feel like a violation of my trust in the platform engineering team. At that point, I want them to promise not to do it in future, or get their software off my machine. And to be honest, relations are going to be strained between us anyway. I'm not going to be thrilled about any further software. I don't even want reciprocal "I can push to you" powers. And I have no problem discussing these things where we agreed to discuss them. But letting you install software on my machine comes with an obligation - you don't get to use that as a backdoor soapbox. Feels so very icky. Like if a friend told me she would like to stay over and I gave her a key and she decided to plaster my home with posters. It doesn't matter if the posters are against the freaking Holocaust. I'm not pro-Holocaust and I'd want the friend to leave. Pronto.
• jijji 7y ago
  You can do all the things you want that are against the company, but it doesn't mean you have a right to continue to work there...
• deleted 7y ago
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• Zarath 7y ago
  Completely and utterly crazy. Literally off her rocker. She should be taken to an institution for doing something so insane.
• deleted 7y ago
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• rolltiide 7y ago
  So are you guys seeing unionization efforts picking up any steam? I've seen it reach the collective conscious more in the last two years in San Francisco, but I'm not at a FAANG to see if its really permeating. As in at a bar or courtyard it might not be the most outlandish topic of conversation, compared to an idea immediately scoffed at since all of us made conscious financial decisions to pursue high paying jobs without union dues. People are curious about the benefits. My only observation is that multiple of the largest publicly listed companies in the world are right here, and that the high compensation has nothing to do with what's possible. If compensation reached ratios with housing that haven't been seen since the 1980s, then the compensation would still be substantially higher on average than it is today. For reference, it means fully owning your house in 5 years. Not the 8-11 year situation that even highly compensated FAANG workers experience. But compensation may or may not improve with unionization, with the reality that higher comp outliers might disappear. The employees may have more say in other perks such as the company towns their employers have created in south bay. Overall at this point I am seeing net benefits, distinct from the public sector blue-collar work that unions have become associated with.
• deleted 7y ago
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• shantly 7y ago
  > IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company Anyone know the likely reasons your average Googler might have visited this consulting firm's site? Like, was Google sending employees to it for some reason (why?), or would it have just been by chance or because they read Google hired them in the news and wanted to see what they were up to?
• helen___keller 7y ago
  From the engineer's medium post: > For example, someone changed the default desktop wallpaper during the walkout last year so that the Linux penguin was holding a protest sign. The company has never reacted aggressively in response to a notification such as this in the past. It’s always been a celebrated part of the culture. I suppose this was her mistake: ""It's always been a celebrated part of the culture" Google clearly does not always operate in good faith with it's employees on labor relations issues. The correct approach for her to take would be to get written approval from her manager on the popup Her job was supposedly to "write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web", and this was supposedly a notification of one such company policy, but it was naive to think she could just approach her job in good faith and be treated in good faith. BigCorp follows the law of the jungle, and workers are not unionized at google so every engineer has to cover his or her ass before treading into contentious waters. For what it's worth, after reading both points of views I think her actions were highly reasonable. But I would never implement that kind of notification like she had done, not without written approval from my boss and maybe my bosses' boss to cover my ass.
  • debt 7y ago
    It’s sort of ridiculous to think any boss would approve this, which is why she did it the way she did it in the first place.
    • helen___keller 7y ago
      I don't really agree. The notice is required by law to be posted in workplaces. It's also required by law for Google to post it on their intranet. It's not a stretch to provide a link to that intranet info, in an add-on that provides links to company policy - assuming you are operating in good faith. But again, law of the jungle and all that. If I were her boss and she came to me for approval, I also would get approval from my boss and my bosses' boss.
  • settsu 7y ago
    > But I would never implement that kind of notification like she had done, not without written approval from my boss and maybe my bosses' boss to cover my ass. If this is something that goes through your mind, the organization you are at is broken and probably dangerously hostile.
• scarmig 7y ago
  I feel like, for consistency, if she committed a firable offense, so did her coworkers who LGTMed the CL, unless she intentionally deceived them about having gotten organizational approval. My gut is that if she had spammed a bunch of internal mailing lists, she'd not be being fired or even getting a formal reprimand. But the fact that she hijacked an internal security tool for an unintended purpose is alarming. I am fine granting Google rights to run arbitrary code on my browser, but only because I know it has strict processes (including disciplining of employees who subvert the process) to manage submission and deployment of that code. My preference here would have been for her to get a rebuke and an explanation of why this was bad behavior (unless these ad hoc non-security related messages are common), especially since she's young. But there is a core assumption and trust that is violated when someone abuses control of trusted client code to do something unapproved by organizational review processes. Most of my anger is directed at the approving coworkers, since they should know better, assuming they are more senior than her.
• kords 7y ago
  >“We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.” This doesn't sounds like privileged access, it sounds more like they have issues with their pipeline. If all what it takes for code to get in Production(even if it's internal), is at least two approvals, I think that's a bigger problem.
  • w0m 7y ago
    Partially true, her code reviewers should have said, 'hey - that popup isn't the point of the . tool' and nixed it there. She was a member of the group maintaining that toola and abused her authority for a personal crusade; hence terminated.
• jtx22 7y ago
  Google is beginning to implode.
• jmpman 7y ago
  I’d call this bold.... ideals aside, maybe she calculated how much she’d win in the lawsuit? Possibly a large net win?
• itronitron 7y ago
  It seems to me that Google fired Ms. Spiers specifically to discourage future labor organizing activities within Google. Because it was a process-approved insignificant revision by both functional change and reach means that the inevitable Streisand effect actually plays in Google's favor. They will be perfectly happy with any slap on the wrist as long as it moves the eventual union further down the road.
• DSingularity 7y ago
  These efforts will be broken up. No matter the cost. A google beholden to unionized employees is a threat to the establishment. Where google goes other companies go. A democratized tech space is the last thing power wants.
• andai 7y ago
  > Google’s response to this was to suspend me immediately and without warning. This was the week of Thanksgiving, the same day they fired the Thanksgiving Four. They also dragged me into three separate interrogations with very little warning each time. I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers I had talked to about exercising my rights at work.
• jmull 7y ago
  It sounds like she coopted a security tool to spam users with a political advocacy message. Hard to see why she shouldn't be fired for that. Of course she has the right to express that message, and it seems to be factually correct. But that doesn't mean she can use a security tool to spam people.
• overgard 7y ago
  I'm not anti-union, but come on, modifying an internal security tool to display a politically motivated message? That would get you in trouble anywhere. Also.. managers are humans. You can't provoke people in such a way and not expect a response. Speaking of provocation: I suspect she might have done this to intentionally get fired. It wouldn't be the dumbest play, she's super young (21), if she doesn't want to code anymore she could use the exposure to parlay this into a new career, and if she does want to still code, she probably made some new supporters and her detractors will factor in youthful indiscretion. Wild speculation sure, but, you just read a big press article about it... Where do you think the tip came from? This isn't the kind of move you make if you intend to stick around at a place.
  • TheFrizz 7y ago
    Also the people arguing for giving the employee a "talking to" instead of firing I think are not considering the game theory aspect to this. If the precedent is "a talking to" with future offenses resulting in a firing, then smart Google employees will realize that they can create an internal activist email list, get new hires to join it, and then when an opportunity for activism presents itself get an employee with a clean record to perform the activism, rinse repeat. Of course the message in this case wasn't terribly harmful, so I'm sympathetic to the argument of "it's not such a big deal". But the problem is, Google doesn't want to wait for the big deal (for example a chrome extension change to search exec's TextAreas for keywords a "whistleblower" might want to report on) to actually happen and then fire them. They want to prevent employees from thinking they should ever try doing that in the first place which means putting the foot down before the inevitable happens.
    • overgard 7y ago
      Yeah, in terms of what she did I would agree it wasn't terribly harmful; and I applaud her for taking a principled stand. I just don't really blame management for saying: that was a step too far, you're out. I mean, unionizing is a super sensitive topic at any company, and by adding the message to the tool it added extra weight to the message by making it look like it was endorsed by the higher ups, rather than being a message from a 21 year old. There's no way management is going to be happy that someone is essentially acting as their voice on a topic that is very sensitive.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• 40acres 7y ago
  I interviewed at Google last week and asked 3 of my interviewers if the constant churn of bad news from the outside gets to them. For the most part, no one seemed concerned and the biggest complaint was regarding leaks which make it harder to deal with issues internally and threaten transparency.
• yahyaheee 7y ago
  Had this been an isolated incident, I would maybe have been on googles side here, but this is happening in the context of many other anti-union efforts by management
• debt 7y ago
  “a poster in the cafeteria is not the best way of reaching the majority of Googlers.” I heard the food had gotten bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• KirinDave 7y ago
  The irony of this is that Google's increasingly abusive behavior towards people talking about organization is that they're actually building a case for engineers to unionize to stop Google from these questionably legal firings. If Google upper management had just shut up and kept the status quo and recognized that without impetus, comfortable workers almost certainly won't organize in America, then the unionization of Google would not be a national topic. But here we are, with holdout reactionary bro's who ate the Ellison/Jobs/Schmidt wage-fixing cartel line about how evil unions were (even as they organized to oppress workers) in positions of power opening up the company (and thus the company's stock) to huge liability.
• thu2111 7y ago
  I think a lot of people are missing the bigger picture here and are too zoomed in on the specific issue of unionisation. Google really had no choice here, and it's actually a problem for them that this is coming out now via a blog post by the fired employee and not by their own admission. Google is in a phenomenally trusted position in the world. Chrome is the most popular browser. It auto updates silently and continuously, as do installed extensions. Vast swathes of information and infrastructure is accessed via web apps. We tend to forget that browser makers have access to all our authentication tokens and can do whatever they like. Put simply, given the level of web dependence in our lives and infrastructure, those who can modify browsers are practically gods. The same goes for operating system developers of course. We don't think about this because our level of trust in those developers and the corporations they work for is extremely high and deservedly so: after decades of using operating systems and web browsers they've never violated that trust. In fact they've reinforced it by rolling out encryption to block rogue government departments who were exploiting the lack of it, they've invested heavily in security to lock out hackers and done many other great things. But trust is hard to build and easy to destroy. What if browser makers stopped being so trustworthy? What if they started to become convinced of their own superior morality, the correctness of their political judgements, the importance of their role in the world? What could they do? They could use SafeBrowsing to arbitrarily censor the web. They could edit out individual comments, rewrite news stories, insert their own views into the middle of documents purporting to be neutral. They could distort your view of the web at will. They could violate our privacy at will by linking our identities together and then publishing what we've written, they could publish browsing logs, they could take over any accounts we have and use them for whatever purposes they like, they could feed sensitive information to political enemies to give themselves plausible deniability, they could even frame us by posting illegal material under those accounts. It'd just look like someone phished the password. They could do many other things we never even considered. Google absolutely needed to go nuclear on this employee. The news has been filled over the past years with stories about Googler's increasingly hard-left political activism. As a consequence some users and even politicians have started to wonder if Google Search is trustworthy, but their trust in browser developers is so total, so blind, the world hasn't yet taken the next mental leap and started to wonder if Chrome is. Mozilla is hardly in a better position: it's funded by Google and literally just down the road from them. If the integrity of the Chrome devs start to be doubted, few will consider Mozilla devs to be radically different. Inserting political JavaScript via browser security mechanisms targeted at Googlers, even if it may seem fairly harmless in this case, is a very problematic situation and a slippery slope Google simply cannot afford to go near. It raises fundamental questions, like are Google's internal procedures robust? What else might have been slipped through code review already? Are Google employees only adjusting their own tools or did some already start to abuse their access to people's private data and systems? How many of them feel the ends justify the means when dealing with political causes they feel passionately about? How safe is Chrome, really?
• gvx 7y ago
  I'm constantly baffled by how anti-union many Americans are, how willing to give up their rights.
  • chance_state 7y ago
    My impression of these tech unionization efforts are that they're mostly about pushing a social/political agenda, with workers rights being an afterthought. Every single time I see these posts the involved employees are activist LGBT folks. Am I wrong here? Why do all these issues seem to stem from the same group of people?
    • bluntfang 7y ago
      That's a great question. Are you familiar with the historic treatment of LGBTQ+ folks?
      • antpol 7y ago
        Historically big tech companies are treating their LGBTQ+ folks the best in comparison with any other industry though I guess it’s not enough
        • bluntfang 7y ago
          Have any info to back that up? And just because an entity is the best at something doesn't mean they are good at it.
    • booboolayla 7y ago
      You should read about Marxism, and especially the Frankfurt School, so you could understand the modus operandi of Marxist activism better. LGBTQ are just the latest in line of "classes" of people that have been taken under the Marxist wing for supposed protection, with the real goal being having them used as political tool to gain political power. Marx started with "workers" as the protected class, but as majority of workers never really bought the ideology Marxists started looking for other victims that will help them ultimately defeat the Western Civilization. After workers it was women in general, but that wasn't too successful either. Today it's LGBT people, homeless people, non-white people - they are currently the top three "recipients" of Marxist "compassion" that are being used to further political goals.
• ainiriand 7y ago
  I think it is incredible that she is 21 and already fired by Google.
• throwaway17_17 7y ago
  I can not seem to find any energy to be against Google here, a 21 year old individual working at one of the most prominent and successful business in the world, making more money per year than a vast amount of the global (not to mention national population) does something that will certainly subject her to reprimand and I am expected to feel some negativity toward Google. I am stuck outside of SV, as a middle age person with many, many hundreds of commits to open source projects, a descent of non-professional experience in software engineering, but because I do not have a BS or Masters in computer science and am over the age of 35 there is no chance I can ever get hired at Google (or any other FAANG realistically). If some of these ardent unionization workers end up fighting loudly and publicly and Google decides they will not deal with some nascent Software Engineer’s Union, maybe I and people like me stuck outside the valley will be able to gladly make boat loads of money working long hours for these thankless corporate taskmasters, while just sitting down and doing our jobs on whatever the company decides it wants to spend its money on, I will gladly work on Maven or Dragonfly or dark as patterns, whatever, I just want to be relevant to the industry not stuck away doing the same job for peanuts until I can afford to retire. Rant over - but seriously, I don’t have a problem putting aside any personal feelings or beliefs to achieve my employers goal, that is what employment is. Spiers apparently decided that the security position allowed for this action and did it. Google did not want this type of behavior from an employee in that position. She knew Google management wasn’t going to approve, she assumed that risk.
• drakonka 7y ago
  It feels weird for me to read comments in this thread debating about and assuming a simple note about unionization or organization by an employee whose job it was to do exactly this kind of thing is "not in good faith" or a "violation". In my mind this kind of thing has the same sentiment as _any_ policy notice. The world in which notifying people that they have the right to organize is a "violation" is a really messed up one. It's simply distributing a fact, as the company is legally required to do, published by an employee who was responsible for distributing exactly these kinds of facts. It's sad when this type of information sparks this kind of a) termination by the company of an otherwise apparently very well performing employee and b) controversy in a forum.
  • s1artibartfast 7y ago
    >by an employee whose job it was to do exactly this kind of thing.. I think this is the crux of the issue and people are making up the facts they don't have to fit a narrative. There is a reasonable difference between security notifications and other corporate policies. Were any non-security notifications in scope for their job or the tool used? Is there precedent for google flagging specific external websites with HR policy notices?
  • sneak 7y ago
    Choosing which facts to be highlighted is an editorial decision. Google probably already complied with the letter of the law by publishing this fact internally at least once. Whether it is published once or 1000 times is editorial. It is not within scope of their job to notify >1 time if Google’s management wants employees to be nominally reminded of their rights against their employer exactly once. Note that I am not arguing for or against; I personally think it’s wrong she was fired and I hope the wage-thieves at Google get held to the flames over it. But let’s not pretend that she wasn’t editorializing because it can be described as “simply distributing a fact”. She was further distributing a fact which is in her former employer’s best interest to publicize the minimum amount required by law. That’s why retaliation like this is illegal. I’m surprised they’re surprised; Google has already conspired (and gotten caught) to illegally cheat employees out of billions of dollars of wages.
  • malvosenior 7y ago
• jpmcglone 7y ago
  I see no issue here. Business feels threatened and neutralizes threat. There's nothing wrong with Unions, but there is something wrong with government-backed unions. Let people collectivize if they'd like. Collective bargaining is fine, and you aren't living in a free country if you can't collectively bargain -- but collective bargaining shouldn't mean you automatically get government as an ally. The battle between Union and Company should be between Union and Company.
• papreclip 7y ago
  Eventually these political types will convince google it's not worth hiring them
• jesuschristy 7y ago
  The amount of cognitive dissonance on this is astounding. If the message was, instead, a direct quotation of the 2nd amendment, 99% of y’all would be freaking out and asking her to be fired.
• ggggtez 7y ago
  When I read this, and the other one, the only idea that I can come up with is that everyone is lying, at least a little bit. It seems pretty unlikely that it would be within your job description to create notifications like this on specific websites, and from reading the blog post and the content here, it seems like these notifications are not meant for "company policies" whatever that means, or at the very least it doesn't make sense why a "security engineer" would have a job that notified employees about this. So, the assumption therefore must be that this person knew they were going out of the norm, but assumed it was acceptable or protected speech. That raises a good question: Is it the same thing as a message board? My gut instinct is... no, it really isn't. This sounds like a tool that requires a specific level of authority to use (you need 2 approvals). Not just anyone can put notifications like this in the tool! So this isn't like a message board... this sounds like it was a person abusing their privileges. Now, for me the next question is: does that mean they should be fired? Personally, I'd say... no. It shows bad judgement, but firing seems disproportionate. In that regard, even if it was a misguided attempt at using their organizing rights, there is an argument to be made that they shouldn't be fired for it (maybe warned, but not fired). So I think even though it sounds pretty fishy, I think there is likely still a possible case here for workers rights issues (though I am not a lawyer).
• mcrad 7y ago
  Basically an intern. Zero engineering credentials despite the title. OMG.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    Please don't personally attack her; it's unproductive and irrelevant.
    • mcrad 7y ago
      Sorry you're probably right, but what's unproductive is people believing the lie that she is an engineer, or considering her role in the company as irrelevant.
      • IntelMiner 7y ago
        In what way is she not an engineer?
        • mcrad 7y ago
          A cursory search of her name reveals no evidence she participated in any engineering activities, and this whole story is considered substantiating evidence. Sad. Look, I'd much prefer to see her boss fired than her but obviously Google is not going down that route.
  • sam0x17 7y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that on average google interns have pretty good engineering credentials.
• miguelmota 7y ago
  The message in the popup was: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.” which seems pretty reasonable since her job is literally to place notifications of what employees legally can and can’t do when visiting websites.
• mtnGoat 7y ago
  This as a whole just doesn't look good for Google/Alphabet, but then again the optics of a lot of their choices lately have looked very poor from the outside looking in. Honest question for long term(4+ years) Google Engineers reading... has the change in culture and bad press lately had any effect on your feelings towards your employer? Do you think it is eroding their culture at G? Do you see any of this leading to a loss of talent?
• abj 7y ago
  > They also dragged me into three separate interrogations with very little warning each time. I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace. The interrogations were extremely aggressive and illegal. They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer, and relentlessly pressured me to incriminate myself and any coworkers I had talked to about exercising my rights at work. [1] Why was this necessary by management? Regardless of what Kathryn did, this is a bad faith move by management. [1] https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for-exercising-her-rights-and-protecting-coworkers-from-illegal-b86c41ef91b9 https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...
  • WhompingWindows 7y ago
    "They wouldn’t let me consult with anyone, including a lawyer" Yikes, that feels so dystopian to me...
• twobat 7y ago
  How does one get to update a Google extension (internal tool) at 21 without any other oversight?
• tomerico 7y ago
  It looks like Kathryn posted her side here - https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/google-has-fired-another-worker-activist/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/google-has-fired-another-w... A few interesting tidbits: 1. She received extraordinary performance ratings during her short time at google, and got promoted recently 2. Google has not acted this aggressively in the past, where someone deploy a change in people’s Linux wallpaper while the protest happened. 3. She limited the notification to just people visiting the union busting firm Given those, it does looks like an unusually aggressive response from Google, which would imply that Google has become very aggressive when it comes to unions. With that said, it is also mentioned in her post that it took several weeks of investigation from Google until they made the final call, which could imply that there is more of a back story here.
• FpUser 7y ago
  It is a right of a juror to say that the defendant is innocent even though the law says otherwise (jury nullification). But trying to inform jurors about that jury nullification right can get one into a very hot water.
• Arete314159 7y ago
  She should have just put up flyers in the women's bathroom stalls. If Google is anything like my old workplace, there's no chance any management would've seen it...
• sjg007 7y ago
  This will be a great lawsuit and exploration of the right to organize in the digital age.
• WhompingWindows 7y ago
  In the end, how much would unionizing hurt Google's shareholders/executives? Surely they have enough riches already, why not allow the employees to improve their lot as well?
• belissimojsdf 7y ago
  Befuck you google
• belissimojsdf 7y ago
  Shit company privacy violator
• shaneprrlt 7y ago
  Moral of the story: don't use internal security tools at your work as a platform for your political activism. Totally agree with the spirit of what she did and applaud her efforts to organize, but there's no way she didn't know what she did could get her fired. What did you think would happen when you made unauthorized changes to software that promote actions against the company's interests? Not saying the company is a blameless party (especially after the news today of their expiring cloud business, this is clearly a shady company), honestly, I'm not even commenting on the substance of what she wrote. This just seems like something that anyone with half a brain would realize could get them fired before they deployed those changes. I still feel bad when anyone loses their job and source of income, and maybe a reprimand would have been more balanced given her high performance reviews before, I just can't see any context where this is seen as neutral or ok.
• Animats 7y ago
  This is an old labor issue, but it used to revolve around handing out union flyers at work and posting on company physical bulletin boards.[1] That's generally allowed by law for labor activity, even if the employer doesn't like it. How this translates to online activity isn't entirely clear yet. But courts will make that analogy. An employer who tried to pull this in 1970 would have had a picket like outside the door the next day. Union truckers wouldn't deliver to their loading dock. [1] https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/employers-discriminatory-and-overbroad-restrictions-union-activity-violate-nlra-court-rules https://www.jacksonlewis.com/resources-publication/employers...
• Vervious 7y ago
  How come this is so low on the front page? It was posted 4 hours ago and has accumulated 607 points...
• nothal 7y ago
  One thing this thread has made me realize is that the work culture (at least of Googlers on HN) seems to kowtow to the company over the employees. Really affects my view of the company.
  • uwuhn 7y ago
    Is there a major company, tech or otherwise, that breaks this convention?
• NoGravitas 7y ago
  There are some amazing connoisseurs of boot leather in this thread.
• Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Bring your whole* self to work. * but please leave some tiiiiny little bits home
• axython 7y ago
  Kinda stupid question, but why are people that want to unionize in Google dont? Is there a certain limit, requirements?
• someonehere 7y ago
  I’ve decided that if I’m at work, please keep me out of your protest. Let me decide how I want to react to a company policy my way. Don’t violate the trust given to your team of managing my work tools to inject your political/social objections. Organize outside of work.
• yahwrong 7y ago
  Let the freemarket decide! If people don't like this then they can stop working for Google or using their products.
• nswest23 7y ago
  arguing about the minutiae of whether google acted in accord with their own policies is exactly what google wants to happen here. She was fired for organizing. Google found a valid excuse to fire her but make no mistake, she was fired for organizing.