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>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 C
by 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 agoDid 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 agoI'm honestly a little surprised (and worried) about all the commenters who argue Google is in the right here.
- ixtli 7y agoPeople love to make excuses for their bosses because they believe their interests are aligned :(
- bluntfang 7y agoone 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.
- ixtli 7y agoI agree. There's a scene from Futurama that is useful here :) https://i.redd.it/gy1a8j3rqhx21.jpg https://i.redd.it/gy1a8j3rqhx21.jpg Also for a less tongue-in-cheek response this is related to the notion of "false consciousness" first written about by Friedrich Engels in the 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
- scarface74 7y agoOf course Google is right. She happened to get two coworkers to approve what she was doing. If I got a manager who I was friends with to approve my purchase of a fully decked out $53K Mac Pro so I could finally use Slack at a decent speed when I am working from home, wouldn’t you think there was something fishy?
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoI think then the responsibility is on the manager?
- throwawaysea 7y agoOr maybe all of them. These are highly paid employees. They bear a personal responsibility and can’t shove all consequences onto a manager.
- ixtli 7y agoSince you can’t spend 53000 dollars on a Mac laptop last I checked, yes! However the whole purpose of a managerial hierarchy is to establish a responsibility chain so at very least I would expect the manager to also get fired. Google doesn’t care about these antics. They, like all employers, don’t want their employees to have meaningful bargaining power.
- jacquesm 7y agoThey did say Mac Pro: https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tech-news-fully-spec-apple-mac-pro-price-singapore https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/tech-news-fully-spec-apple-m... Taking into account the exchange rate that works out to about 55K USD.
- ixtli 7y agoWhoops you're right. I misread.
- scarface74 7y ago
- deegles 7y agoThe paranoid part of me thinks it might be PR firms they’ve hired.
- umanwizard 7y agoPeople can disagree with you in good faith without being shills. I am totally against people pushing their political messages on me while at work, and dislike working with the sort of person depicted in this article. I think they're bad for morale and a distraction from the business. You can quite easily convince yourself by reading through my comment history that I'm not part of any PR firm, just a guy who wastes too much time commenting on HN.
- FussyZeus 7y agoAll these 10x developers terrified they'd have to make a reasonable wage like the rest of us serfs. *By the way, that's very much sarcasm since a well organized union doesn't need to cap wages at any level. It's just the argument that keeps getting put forward and I get sick of it.
- SamuelAdams 7y agoWhy is that? You can't just get code review / deployment approval. You need to have approval that a certain feature or process is wanted / needed for the system. My guess is the sec engineer in this story did not get approval for this feature in the first place, she just went ahead and changed the code. What if this change allowed passwords to be captured in plain text? Browsing history? Surely those are fire-able offenses? So how is this situation any different?
- danso 7y agoSo if she escalated her privileges and bypassed the approval process, yes, of course that should merit severe punishment. But that's not what happened, according to Spiers. Giving her the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument, you'd agree there's a huge difference between adding malicious phishing code to a company tool, versus displaying a text notification that doesn't fit the tool's original intent? The text in question read, “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”, which is arguably different than the usual privacy/security warnings that the tool was intended for. But is it a fireable offense, versus an offense that warrants reprimand? To put it another way, I think very few people would be bothered by Spiers being fired if the text notification she added were "Heil Hitler!". But that kind of content is fireable for a number of reasons. Whereas Spiers note about union rights, while inappropriate for the given plugin, is not patently against Google policy, and (again, assuming it's just a text notification) did not endanger the company. If an employee tries to set fire to company equipment, they should be fired. If they draw a swastika on a bathroom stall, they should be fired. If they post up a pro-labor pamphlet in a bathroom stall, where it's against company policy to post any materials (regardless of content), should they be fired or reprimanded?
- mywittyname 7y agoThis isn't a cut-and-dry issue. The internal tool was purportedly used to alert about privacy and security issues on external websites. But the message sent to users was not privacy or security related.
- workthrowaway 7y ago> I'm honestly a little surprised (and worried) about all the commenters who argue Google is in the right here. i, honestly, want to know why you think otherwise. what she did is wrong. but assuming she didn't know and that's what the "by the book" process at Google truly is... that's even more concerning
- scarface74 7y agoFrom the article, it doesn’t appear to be the case. She said she was allowed to inject JS code as a “digital extension” to putting a poster up.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kop316 7y agoThis was the process: "the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes" In my company, I could put in travel orders to let me go to and from Hawaii on the company dime, have a vacation, and have my supervisor approve (which is following the standard process), but doing that should get me in a lot of trouble and/or fired.
- FussyZeus 7y agoBecause adding harmless code and stealing plane tickets, hotel fare, and maybe a rental car are the same thing. How do you think old-school labor organizing went down? Do you think the bosses stood there smiling as employees handed out flyers at lunch? Google shouldn't have a say in how employees unionize. They have every reason, literally EVERY SINGLE REASON to sabotage it at every stage to make it as ineffective as possible.
- omegabravo 7y agoThey are merely pointing out that despite the action following one standard procedure, it is still possible to be against the rules.
- FussyZeus 7y agoAnd a fox has every reason to make a "rule" that dogs can't go in the henhouse. That's why we don't let foxes guard henhouses.
- danso 7y agoSorry, but could you clarify what you would be fired for in your hypothetical situation? Presumably, it's not automatically against company policy to expense a trip to Hawaii.
- kop316 7y agoI was implying I took the trip to vacation, not to do work. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
- PunchTornado 7y agoEven if she followed the rules that doesn't mean she should be absolved of guilt. You can follow the rules and submit a PR, have 2 code reviews and plenty of tests, if you brake production then you can still be fired for incompentency. The fact that 2 reviewers approved her change doesn't mean that she has the right to send notifications like this through a browser extension.
- some346 7y agoDo you only know copy and paste the same comment?
- tjansen 7y agoIf it was a code review, it would judge code quality and similar things. Not whether that change is in Google's interest. I guess if she was a product owner and added this feature, she would have been fired as well, despite following the process. She just acted against the company's interest.
- kache_ 7y agoIn this case, the people who approved it should be fired as co-conspirators. The sanctity of the software that runs on employee's hardware should never be violated.
- freyr 7y agoThey got a code review. That doesn't mean the message they inserted was approved, it just means they got two engineers to sign off on the code. Obviously, inserting pro-unionization messaging into a security tool isn't "by the book", or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
- save_ferris 7y agoThe article says that she went through the standard approval process.
- jpmontez 7y ago"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 alleges it was done by the book.
- discordance 7y agoThat sounds suspiciously like a continuous delivery approval process (like needing two approvers for a PR).
- scarface74 7y agoDoes what she did even pass the sniff test? What if she got permission from her supervisor to inject $political_message_you_dont_agree_with in your browser. Would you be okay with that?
- pr0zac 7y agoWell no, but considering that she seems to have followed the correct processes if she had done that I'd have expected the response to be rolling back the commit and a follow up postmortem to document what was missing from the process that allowed it to happen and changes made to the process to prevent it from happening in the future. Not firing the employee. You shouldn't blame workers for system failures.
- scarface74 7y agoWhat if your manager told you it was okay to post “Make America Great Again” or “Hope” (Obama’s slogan) slogans on everyone’s desk because he was staunch Republican/Democrat - would you just shrug and say “my manager said it was okay”?
- danso 7y agoAgain, labor/union messaging has protections that political campaigning does not. If you were a manager and you told your employee to throw away the pro-union pamphlet that you taped to your cubicle wall, your manager would be putting the company in legal trouble.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- acollins1331 7y agoYou either can't read or you're a shill. Sucks you can't delete HN comments huh.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ixtli 7y agoShocking the speed with which individual people will jump to the defense of billion dollar companies.
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 0x445442 7y agoAs noted later in the article, she got two thumbs up; doesn't this justify her actions </s>.
- danso 7y agoAgreed, but the engineer's claim is that she followed the standard approval process "which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes". The article says another Googler confirmed that this is the process. But the article doesn't say that Spiers' assertion (that she went through the process, and had two colleagues sign off) has been specifically confirmed. Presumably, audit logs would make this an easy thing to set straight.
- PunchTornado 7y agoYou can follow the rules and submit a PR, have 2 code reviews and plenty of tests, if you brake production then you can still be fired for incompentency. The fact that 2 reviewers approved her change doesn't mean that she has the right to send notifications like this through a browser extension.
- felideon 7y agoAccording to Spiers[1], modifying software that runs on every employee's computer was her -job-. [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...
- thinkingemote 7y agoThe spyware was designed to pop up notifications on visiting URLs to users, she just added another message for a url. "Part of my job was to write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the web. " I'd be curious to know what URLs employees get alerts about? Perhaps services which do not take kindly to seeing IPs from Google offices?
- scarlac 7y agoThe notice was added to a relevant page (a work organisation consultant webpage), from what it looks: 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...