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Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons: The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple

Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons: The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t. I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play. Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff. - Your Average Xoogler

aix1 4y ago
> he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?
- googthrownaway 4y ago
  As a small person, I have zero desire to invite recrimination from anyone. This is not a comment about the person the thread concerns. It is a small world and industry. My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.
alpb 4y ago
Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years. That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.

aix1 4y ago

> he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?

googthrownaway 4y ago
As a small person, I have zero desire to invite recrimination from anyone. This is not a comment about the person the thread concerns. It is a small world and industry. My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.

alpb 4y ago

Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years. That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.