Looks like a textbook example of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.[a]
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
Yikes. The lack of judgement involved in personally releasing something that could be confused for an official release (I was confused) by your employer is someone who has huge wildcard risk in the future. I would expect significant disciplinary action if they didn't follow procedure, and termination if they were directly warned at any point.
Interesting that people here seem so sympathetic to the fired guy. Wouldn’t you kind of expect to be fired if you release a project under your employers name that’s not even associated with them and hasn’t been cleared? Working for them actually makes it worse because people could look up your name and would see that you actually work for google. It’s kind of obvious that this is a bad idea, right?
Yikes. I see Justin posted this, and I'm sure he can't say much - but this is an absolutely insane story.
Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.
There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?
I am not going to share much more than what I already have, but I think this speaks to the experience of working in big tech and the disruption caused by AI both at the level of teams/roadmaps/incentives and changing user behavior.
The concerns seem to be primarily around trademark and logos? Unless there's more to it, those seem trivial to remedy by requiring removal of logos and renaming in the style of Clawdbot -> Moltbot -> OpenClaw. Google is well-known to be pretty sparing with firing people even for performance, so either this is a change in stance (entirely possible) or there's more to it.
IMO: If the project leverages Google branding or authority improperly, then it shouldn't be on github and should not be under active development by Google employees; yet it is. If Google is suddenly alright with the way the project leveraged Google branding and authority, then the cause for firing the original developer, especially given Google's famously lax stance toward 20% projects and internal open source, is a lot weaker. In other words: Healthy companies do not fire individuals simply for breaching branding guidelines in a way that is ultimately beneficial and looked favorably upon by the company. That's literally just not a thing that happens; at worst you get a reprimand, and in many healthy companies you'd actually get a promotion.
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.
I don't get it – you called the GitHub org 'googleworkspace' and used the Google logo? Presumably without permission? Don't Googlers regularly open-source side projects under the official org(s)? Did you really think this was going to be fine, or was it 'growth hacking' with tougher consequences than expected?
Around that time I built a CLI to access and manage monitoring cameras that my company is selling. After giving a demo to my leadership I strongly adviced against releasing it to public. Giving agents access to some stuff is bad for customers.
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
> getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories.
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
Google seems to be filled with really talented people, technology, and every resource anyone would ever need, but their execution and management seems to be severely lacking. This account is a pretty damning indictment of Google.
Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.
The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.
Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI
(twitter.com)130 points by justinwp 2 hours ago | 79 comments
Comments
People like the OP, Justin Poehnelt, who build cool things out of self-motivation that others find interesting and want to use, are now at the mercy of those inside Google who care more about the company's internal bureaucracy and their own role and importance within it. To them, the fact that the OP's project was an instant github hit meant nothing.
--
EDIT: Others here are saying that Justin released his code with Google's branding without asking for approval. If that's true, it wasn't right of him, and his firing was justifiable. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650310 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48650192
---
[a] https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Google has gone from encouraging 20% time (to create amazing projects like this) to firing people for doing it.
There seems to be some true maliciousness going on at Google. You have this, you have the open source Gemini CLI getting replaced with a shittier closed source Antigravity CLI, etc... etc... What is going on there?
So, something does not add up. It might be the story of the person fired. It might also be on the other side; that our external impression on what's been going on inside of Google needs to be re-adjusted, and this company will be a lot weaker in ten years than I would have originally estimated.
I guess we all get to continue trusting GAM (https://github.com/GAM-team/GAM) with an entire companies most precious data, instead of, I don’t know…Google?
> I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted.
I normally don't defend Google - this pure Evil should not exist. Degoogling is a holy act. But it is also kind of silly to create a project, attach Google logo etc... to it while working at Google. Or perhaps it was a genius move. Either way I am not entirely certain whether the description is as clear here. If it was an internal tool only, did it need a logo? If it was external, who would use it when a Google logo is attached? That's all very strange to me.
> But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace.
That may be the case - Google lies to humans all the time. See when they killed ublock origin via fake "arguments" that were lies (killed it in the sense that the Google store crippled it: https://chromewebstore.google.com/search/ublock%20origin?hl=... - I just tried to find the old webpage on chrome webstore but the search results no longer show it, only alternative names that are fake projects. I should have bookmarked the old link, Google is REALLY so annoying. The world wide web needs to overcome its number #1 enemy here. Which is Google.)
Sucks for the author. Hope they land a good gig at a frontier lab.
Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.
The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.