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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 upd

• 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...
      • catalogia 7y ago
        The problem with approaching conversations like team sports is you inevitably end up pigeon holing people like this.
  • Cyph0n 7y ago
    But it was not a "feature". It was a change to an extension that did exactly the same thing on other sites, so a code review makes absolute sense.
• scarface74 7y ago
  I doubt thats the spirit of the rule. I would no more want that injected into my browser than any other political message.
  • Maxion 7y ago
    It's quite a stretch to call this a political issue.
    • baud147258 7y ago
      I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me. Personally I think that modifying a work tool to achieve political goals is wrong.
      • CharlesColeman 7y ago
        > I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me. It's about as political as informing someone they have a right to be paid the minimum wage.
        • scarface74 7y ago
          Sure you have the right to say it. But you can’t follow me to the bathroom stall and keep telling me. She didn’t post it to a common area. She took it upon herself to plaster it on everyone’s computer screen.
          • MrLeap 7y ago
            "But you can’t follow me to the bathroom stall and keep telling me." "plaster it on everyone's screen" did you read the same article I did? The alert was triggered off a single consultancy's site. I really doubt it was a common hang out spot.
• ninly 7y ago
  And the popup message is one Google is required by law to make available to its employees.
  • BoorishBears 7y ago
    Wait a second, are you saying the browser popup when you visit that specific page is required by law... ... or are you saying the content of the message in the popup is one Google has to make available in some form. Because I'm fairly certain it's the latter, but this feels like an attempt to obfuscate the real issue with tricky language.
    • CharlesColeman 7y ago
      IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a cafeteria or break room. Trying to fulfill the requirement by putting the posters up in a broom closet of the CEO's office would be forbidden. I think the employee has a point with the pop-up. Wall posters aren't a good way to reach technology workers. Some kind of digital notification like a pop-up or regular reminder email would be more sensible. Remote employees can't see a poster at the office, for instance.
      • BoorishBears 7y ago
        The idea of the popup isn't the issue I have with this. It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from. It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work. Sure the notice is required, but putting it so it shows up solely on the website for the legal firm hired by your employer is a political message before it is a helpful message.
        • CharlesColeman 7y ago
          > It's coopting an internal tool for political messages then implying "it passed PR" means you had permission from where it should come from. No one's saying it "passed PR", it passed the review process that was in place for similar changes. > IIRC, an employer has to make the content available in some form in a place where employees will see it, not just anywhere. Traditionally it's a wall display of posters in a cafeteria or break room. Trying to fulfill the requirement by putting the posters up in a broom closet of the CEO's office would be forbidden. > It's not even the message itself, I don't want politics, even those I agree with, living in the codebase I use at work. A lot of this thread feels like unusual sudden concern for the aesthetics of the cafeteria wall.
• claudeganon 7y ago
  If you think Google’s anti-union tactics are limited to onsite propaganda, I’ve got some bad news for you...
• jefftk 7y ago
  > She did it exactly according to internal policy. I don't think this person or the other organizers should have been fired, but code review is not the same as organizational approval. (Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
  • javajosh 7y ago
    What is the purview of a code review? Is it only about making sure the code meets technical standards, or are reviewers expected to comment holistically?
    • pysxul 7y ago
      It kind of depends, not every task are the same. you won't review a trivial change the same way as a brand new feature. Let's take for instance the fictional case of adding a list of website to a whitelist.txt. Maybe the source file had thousands of websites to be added. Anyone could add or remove some in the middle and no one would ever know It looks good when you review it. but there is no way to check the data integrity (at review time), you can only rely on the good faith of your coworkers. I am not saying that's what happened but this is a good example of how anyone could sneak-in arbitrary code that pass the code review.
    • jefftk 7y ago
      Reviewers are supposed to review holistically, and in cases where something raises larger questions (do we actually have approval for this change?) they shouldn't approve until those questions are resolved. In this case I suspect the reviewers were supportive of the protest, and so approved it even though their authority didn't cover this kind of change. I don't think any of these people should have been fired, but "by the book" is not a good way of characterizing this process. That would have been proposing the feature to management, getting their sign-off, and then making the code changes.
      • javajosh 7y ago
        >Reviewers are supposed to review holistically That sounds about right. So why doesn't Google fire the reviewers? If they don't, then they are inconsistently applying the standard. If they do, then they are punishing a coordinated employee action.
• sbochins 7y ago
  Sounds like a code review—which you should all be familiar with. Adding something like that to a security tool requires more approvals than two engineers sitting next to you giving a green light.
  • mkolodny 7y ago
    Not necessarily. If it's your job to add notices to internal tools, and you've added notices to tools before without approval outside the engineers on your team, then I wouldn't expect someone to get more approval than that in this situation. If I were Google, I'd give the employee a warning (one of three strikes). I'd tell them that they need approval from someone in a certain role (that's not an engineer) to post internal notices. Otherwise, it's up to the employee and their fellow engineers to make a judgement call about which notices are right to post.
• mtlynch 7y ago
  >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. Getting code review approval is not the same as following internal policy. Adding a conspicuous feature to a security tool installed on every employee's computer requires approval from higher-ups before writing the code. The approvers should have recognized that and rejected the change, but that doesn't absolve Spiers of responsibility for the change. As an analogy, suppose that I'm a crew member on a submarine. I have authority to fire torpedoes when a higher-up orders it, but I require a peer crew member to push their own "fire" button at the same time. Obviously, if I go rogue and start firing torpedoes myself, that's a serious violation, even if I convince one crewmate to go along with it.