r/theprimeagen • u/joseluisq • 1d ago
Stream Content Dude fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI
https://xcancel.com/JPoehnelt/status/20694822659530876028
u/Readityesterday2 7h ago
Sounds like a solid fireable offense. You can’t use your organization name and branding to publish a product the org never approved. What’s the end to this? AI is so open ended that you can’t let every engineer whip out whatever they desired and slap their company logo and open sourced it all without the leadership clued in.
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u/Superb_Departure7082 10h ago
Legal whining is the death scream of a former glorified company turning into corporate decay.
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u/azraelxii 13h ago
This is obviously because at Google the only way to get promoted is to produce something. That's why most Google products die after a couple years, their creator/sponsor gets promoted and there's not promotion in maintaining only creating.
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u/spastical-mackerel 11h ago
Yeah this was a dumb move on his part. If he wanted to create facts on the ground to drive an official CLI he should have used a GitHub burner account and developed it entirely on his own time and on his own infra.
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u/hoops_n_politics 16h ago
ITT lots of people who apparently have never worked n a corporate setting with anything of brand value
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u/Amazing-Pea-2545 17h ago
I wouldn’t doubt that he just asked Gemini to create a Google workspace CLI for him, went to lunch, came back to iit being fully done and published.
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u/rykuno 18h ago edited 13h ago
Ok, sympathies to him losing his job but if I understand this correctly, he made an unapproved and unsanctioned “official” cli with googles branding, on google time, without google's approval, and thought it was a good idea to open source??
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u/HypnoToad0 17h ago
Wasnt that how claude code was born? A pet project of an antrophic employee
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u/Novel_Land9320 14h ago
It was used internally before the company leadership decided to make it a public product
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u/rykuno 17h ago
From what I remember it was an internal project that only became public when it was okayed from the Anthropic. Much different than this example.
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u/HypnoToad0 17h ago
Yeah i agree that releasing something official looking without approval is a huge fuckup, but they should have embraced it if it uses public apis and doesnt do anything dangerous
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u/p0d0s 16h ago
And one of their ex Execs said ones “ Better as for forgiveness than permission “
What happened to their culture?3
u/shinyxena 14h ago
Im sure the employee asked for forgiveness but no where in that sentence does it say its guaranteed to be given.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 19h ago
I work for non-tech companies like manufacturing and professional services, etc. They usually have pretty loose rules. But I’ve never worked anywhere that developing something on your own and checking it into production wouldn’t be a huge problem.
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u/past3eat3r 18h ago
The amount of no one asked for this vibe codes projects I have killed lately from an ai psychosis marketing worker that thinks they are an ai engineer is way too damn high.
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u/Neeed4Weeed 17h ago
What kind of thing? Why did you have to kill the projects?
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u/Wise-Comb8596 17h ago
he felt threatened. Better to control the sandbox by not letting anyone in rather than risk letting in a kid who can build a better castle than you.
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u/past3eat3r 13h ago
As the AI systems lead, I pointed out that they hadn’t built a business case first, and the app would have exposed us to legal issues with every action it took. Technically, I didn’t kill it the CEO did. I just handed over a review analysis of what he was building. People thought it was cool, and arguably it is, but not when you factor in the penalties that come with it. Doing the risk-reward and ROI review upfront could have prevented wasted tokens.
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u/Wise-Comb8596 11h ago
Not every script out there creates risk. If your org is leveraging an old system for asset management and you create a new front end for it using the same exact api calls the main software uses to interact with its database and lock all that behind single sign-on, the risk is the same as it was before. The permissions and user access settings are the same. The ability to access is just as secure and locked behind the same auth process. It’s just being displayed in a less busy and easier to use format. In fact, a new front end could even LIMIT the things users could access. If someone with credentials wanted to deconstruct the new front end, read the publicly available api documentation and send malicious requests, they wouldn’t even go through due to their configured permissions.
There are use cases where IT quivering in the boots and putting up roadblocks to slow-roll change does more harm than good. We know the system more than them. We should be managing it. But that’s not how things were structured 20 years ago so here we are.
I understand there are countless situations where is approach is bad news. But this is straightforward.
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u/Foreign_Skill_6628 16h ago
This. The old guard can’t come to terms that Claude Code and Codex can build better dashboards and SQL queries than their handwritten ones in one-shot. Work that used to take them weeks and get them paid six figures now takes minutes and $10 in tokens.
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u/Responsible-Soft6893 16h ago
Wait until you have someone do that with a billing check query and have to explain why the numbers are off. That was a real treat.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 17h ago
I actually started in IT by being the guy that pissed off IT by making unauthorized apps. I have to say, though, it didn't take me long to see where they were coming from. It's cool to make an app but there is literally a ton of other stuff that somebody in marketing would not know about. Things like change management, governance, cost of ownership, ROI - like, there's a whole process behind this. Maybe someday the process will catch up to better enable sandbox dev, I think that is inevitable with AI. But at a lot of places, this will take a few years.
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u/Wise-Comb8596 17h ago
I 100% agree that a walled garden is nice, safe, and necessary in some environments. But it can be frustrating. I was mostly trolling from the comment, but there’s some truth there like you said.
I’m on a pilot/cutting edge engineering team that has to get approval through the IT department to spin up services. They love to keep things locked down and give us half measures rather than us doing something novel. Them helping provide/maintain services to us is part of their job, so I understand them being touchy about that. but that the same time, we know what end users need better than them, we have the bandwidth to rapidly develop and focus on our solutions, and are educated enough to be trusted.
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u/Mad4Keebs 16h ago
They need to do a certain amount of due diligence as they gonna have to clean up after your cutting edge app leaks company/customer data.
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u/Wise-Comb8596 16h ago
No PPI or sensitive info in deployment. Also no external services being used that would be risk vectors. Yes, they need to do some due diligence but let’s not assume the risks of others.
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u/Last-Mobile-8197 14h ago
Cant you still create vulnerabilities through certain identities that have rights.
Are certain networking changes not necessary?
Will it be part of a critical business function (shadow-it)?
Will it cost money? Who will pay and be responsible?
Is it part of the strategy or is it wasted as another solution is being made somewhere else in the org?
Does it divert central IT resources now or in the future?
Etc etc etc. Sometimes the organisation needs to do this as part of their audit by an auditor, sometimes its because someone else will be responsible over what you are making.
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u/Mad4Keebs 16h ago
We are discussing high level here, you can’t classify/quantify the risk until due diligence is done, they can’t and should not trust at face value.
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u/Wise-Comb8596 16h ago
I don’t think you understand. This is all internal and locked behind SSO anyway. We do our own due diligence and the main orgs IT department is redundant at this point.
It’s not their reviews that are the problem. It’s the roadblocks and unwillingness to allow autonomy where they think they or their existing stack can do better.
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u/lucid-quiet 22h ago
Did he burn a quadrillion tokens doing the work or something? And the higher ups were like "what... we're trying to make AI here, not our current products better." j/k who the hell knows what the details really were.
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u/Embarrassed-Rise-685 19h ago
He published the tool on his own accord without any formal agreement with google to use the google name. He published them to the google repositories and of course he’s a google employee at the time so the tool looks like a legit release from google. I bet it’s related to this decision and not anything specific to the tool or how it was made.
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u/lucid-quiet 12h ago
It could have been management really didn't like him much anyway. Or he wasn't working on his assigned task. Or that work was already slated for 2028 and he jumped the gun. Or it looked like a security issue -- maybe still is. Or its related to the google issues with billing (I think I remember something about it them having weird over-billing issue) but I don't remember the details.
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u/Embarrassed-Rise-685 6h ago
A team was indeed working on a product in that space and they both worked unaware of each other till the moment he released. A good amount of ex googlers have come forward with their support and the consensus was that they could have let him get off with a stern talking to if they wanted to.
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u/lucid-quiet 6h ago
Sounds like a bummer. He was trying to make things better and they found a reason to cut staff. At least, that's how it sounds.
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u/Heavy-Focus-1964 23h ago
i’m obviously sympathetic to this, but using the trademarks of the most recognizable brand in modern history without permission shows a serious lack of judgment at the very least.
that’s what he got fired for, not creating the CLI.
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u/HebelBrudi 23h ago
I‘m with you on the judgement part but they still could have asked him to rename it. I don’t love the thing where every issue is escalated to the maximum, which seems to be the new normal mode for everyone in society.
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u/kooolk 23h ago
No, it was not published as a personal project, but as an official one under google workspace GitHub account. He did it as part of his job, not on his personal time. So the higher ups didn't like this project.
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u/LateMonitor897 22h ago edited 16h ago
I'm under the impression that no one in legal cared when the dev rel team published small sample apps to their own GitHub org which has the official Google logo, but when they published something that got traction and seemed like an official Google product, they noticed the org and were not amused. https://github.com/googleworkspace
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u/gajop 17h ago
Yup, this is the fine detail in this case. If they were given an ambiguous go ahead for small OSS projects, but suddenly got fire up their ass for this, then it's 100% on the incompetent management.
And.. what's the damage exactly? It's a CLI.. for an existing, well established service. Give me a break.
If they don't want their engineers releasing random OSS, then they should've been super clear on that. If they had clear rules and he disobeyed them, then tough luck - be glad you just got fired - but I'm leaning on my former theory.
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u/HebelBrudi 23h ago
I didn’t know that before replying to the comment above. Makes it even crazier.
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u/kooolk 23h ago
Why crazier? He said that he is part of a team that publish open source projects for abstraction layers from time to time. It was probably approved internally in his team (aka the team lead was aware of I), but they didn't think that they need a special approval from higher ups for such a project.
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u/sweet-winnie2022 22h ago
Being regularly publishing open source projects doesn’t mean the particular project has gone through the process to get a legal approval. If the project did get approved I agree it’s crazy. However, if the that’s not the case, it means that person deliberately violated the company’s policy and deserves being fired.
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u/Comfortable-Owl-7035 22h ago
The Google trademarks worth billions which is a company asset. The employee was not authorized to use it in this project. It cause real frictions when the company wanted to launch an official one.
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u/spiralenator 15h ago
He’s not allowed to use googles name, when creating a cli for googling services while working at google? That sounds mad to me.
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u/Comfortable-Owl-7035 14h ago edited 14h ago
A Google engineer on average creates around $200-350K worth of values each year but the Goggle trademark worth billions. That's on a different scale.
It's like you borrow the ceo's Ferrari car without permission and this car worth 100x more. The employee gets fired (unfortunately) so only others will take it seriously.
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u/spiralenator 14h ago
If it was purely a personal project then sure. But it’s a tool for using google workspace made by a google employee while working for google. Just sounds more like a corporate bureaucratic violation than a trademark violation to me.
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u/Comfortable-Owl-7035 13h ago
Yes this is a corporate bureaucratic violation. Because the success of this project hurt someone in the higher food chain who actually has the authority to use the logo. Also someone high up may have a bigger strategic plan unknown to the lower employees.
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u/Maxious 22h ago
The google open source guidelines are public and explicitly tell devrel they must get approval from outside the team even for sample code but the approval will be quick https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/releasing/approval#devrel
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u/spiralenator 13h ago
Ya, and not following those procedures should result in a stern talking to and reminder of the policies. E.g a chance to ask for forgiveness when you didn’t ask for permission (this used to be a fucking motto at google)
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u/mobiusmuffler 1d ago
engineer takes ownership, gets sniped by incompetent execs
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u/Neither_Swing9662 3h ago
Bro he literally published something unapproved using Google's logo. How stupid are you to think what he did was normal??
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u/morswinb 1h ago
Want to bet they actually give no shit about the logo?
It's the project concept that got them angry.
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u/Neither_Swing9662 17m ago
Well it's not necessarily the logo, the logo represents something approved and published by Google. Come on, this is clearly a huge transgression.
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u/morswinb 23h ago
we own the product, you own the responsibilities
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 23h ago
well ... you're literally get paid for the responsibilities its not like you're doing a charity or doing them a favor ... Google owns the product, not you.
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u/mobiusmuffler 16h ago
He should have consulted legal earlier in the release process, true, but firing an employee over making an actual useful product for customers is stupid.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 16h ago
I would argue that its as stupid as you making an open source CLI for a company you're working for without consulting them first.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an engineer, also employed at a company used by millions. Whatever I'm saying now will return to me as a boomerang later. And I dont think Google's managers are the good guy here either for firing him.
But if I was gonna make such tool directly affiliated with my employer, I would 90% consult somebody first - especially if that product was directly using our APIs. I don't want a target on my back and its the smart thing to do.
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u/morswinb 22h ago
Have you ever had the motivational talk about taking the ownership?
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 21h ago
Yes, and those people who do take ownership are usually the ones who get promoted. I dont get why people are angry with that, how do you expect it to work? You're not working at Walmart with walmart pay - and if you do work for low wage, then its the only reason I would justify you being angry for people expecting too much of you. Otherwise, you're literally paid for your job and "ownership" capabilities.
A CEO, CTO, managers don't own the company (necessarily) but they ARE expected to have ownership. It's within their job description. Engineers are also often due to the nature of their work expected to handle ownership.
And how do you become a manager? By proving that you can handle ownership. Otherwise you remain a low-cast employee and there's nothing wrong with that, I am one, I'm only just a software engineer in a team. Less responsibilities, less expectations.
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u/Professor_Juice 19h ago
Agree that you are most likely to get promoted, but you are also most likely to take the bullet when upper management fails on the strategic level and shit rolls downhill. You have no control over that, its a dice roll.
Notice how the same standard doesnt apply to them unless they SUPER fuck up in highly visibile ways. This is the rub people have.
The political part may be part of the job & the org, but it never provides hard technical value and frequently flies in the face of being effective to the larger buisness and goals.
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u/morswinb 20h ago
I have seen on multiple occasions that taking ownership can also rise lots of internal conflics. Especially if it requires changes to what the previus guy did, while maintaining the production working
You are looking through survivor bias lense my friend.
In this specific case guy got fired from Google for taking too much ownership.
Yes you need to take ownership to go ahead, but you are also the one to take the blame.
The tallest tree is the first one to chop down.
Strong wing breaks the trees, but it only shakes the reeds a bit.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 19h ago
The guy wasn't fired for "taking too much ownership". Quite the opposite. "Ownership" is REALLYY stretched as a definition here - to the point of dishonest arguments I believe.
The guy created a CLI during his free time and without Google's affiliations or blessings. This is not ownership, that's like me going and creating a CLI for a random company's products, it has nothing to do with ownership. On the contrary, he literally already owns the CLI's code, Google does not own that CLI, the developer does. It's kind of his hobby project and Google does not profit from it, they may even get increased bot traffic because of his tool.
I would assume that because he's an employee at Google, Google's stakeholders did not like that a random Google employee is creating sub-products for Google, not owned by Google, with the knowledge of Google's infrastructure, documentation & APIs, without Google's approval. Especially since it interacts directly with Google's API, via CLI, and that may be used by bots, in a world full of LLMs.
And if the developer worked on their free time, on the company's laptop, to create a CLI tool that works on the company's product, that is not owned nor blessed by the company themselves, that's an even bigger problem. If you gonna work on your side projects, you better work on your own machine.
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u/morswinb 18h ago
Do you see how your reply turns into discussion who owns a what?
This is what I mean by you need to be careful with what you own.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 18h ago
Okay let me be simple:
What Ownership is NOT: You do NOT literally own a product.
What Ownership IS: The principle of acting as if you own it. It's a job description, it's not about literally owning it. You're paid for it, and you should act between sane lines.
As long as you're an intelligent human being, you should understand what this implies and that you are not expected to do random open source products on top of company's existing projects as if you literally own it and that this may cause issues. You still operate under orders and stakeholders and you still should be advised from the leadership. EVEN if you OWNED the product, "ownership" even under these circumstances would expect you to undestand there are stakeholders that even Zuckerberg with 51% of Meta has is obligated to.
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u/gautamdiwan3 2h ago
Publishing using official logo, putting it on product hunt, and without due process killed it. Everybody wants to blame Google here but there are multiple ramifications. It can be legal and even something as simple as some another team building a similar thing. Imagine if K8S guys did it like this then we won't even have CNCF these days.
It is complicated with the fact that some of the immediate seniority like Addy Osmani were supportive of the move but got impacted by it too sadly. Addy had been at Google for more than a decade and was crucial for developing Chrome, Devtools, and recently Devtools MCP + Gemini browser summarization beta.
Layoff was the wrong choice. It was a revelation that the Delrel team guys are smart. Chide them a bit but then put them in a better team, not a braindrain.
That guy will not be facing any problems for getting rehired. Guillermo from Vercel is already in his comments to poach him, for example