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> 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

• 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.
      • pathseeker 7y ago
        Because reviewers aren't held to the same level of responsibility for the content of the change as the author. Making them responsible for back-door vulnerabilities slipped in by employees compromised by a nation-state would grind the company to a halt.
      • singron 7y ago
        If Google just doesn't want unionized engineers, it could just fire all engineers. Obviously they need to balance their various objectives and firing productive people is costly to the business. I think they are hoping more to send a strong message to the whole company with as small a disturbance to the business as possible.
    • ummonk 7y ago
      My understanding is that Google is a rather bottoms-up culture regarding internal tooling, and that you don't normally need sign-off from management to take initiative and make changes to tooling like this. They're only mad that the particular change here involved labor organizing, which is obvious retaliation.
• debt 7y ago
  “organizational approval” Is the literal problem, which necessitated the pop-up. The Organization Does Not Approve™ It’s like asking someone if you can kick them in the knee before doing so. What do you think they’ll say? Y’all seem confused: the organization, Google in this case, is antognizing it’s organizing employees. Google absolutely do not, will not, can not approve of unionization efforts. Ever.
  • ddalex 7y ago
    how about not kicking them in the knee ?
• gnopgnip 7y ago
  It doesn't really matter if google would approve. There are a lot of activities that would not be organizationally approved, but are protected concerted activities and it would be unlawful to fire someone for.
  • bduerst 7y ago
    GP was referring to approval for code review and organizational approval of security extension notifications, not the right to organize or unionizing activities.
  • jefftk 7y ago
    As I said, I don't think any of them should have been fired. But I don't think glossing "the change went through code review" as "She did it exactly according to internal policy" is helpful.