I don't really know enough to agree or disagree with you.
She claims she's in a role to make judgment calls on adding content - and that this was reinforced by her previous stellar performance reviews, which made her confident in her judgment - but I don't personally have enough info to know if that's the truth. She very well could be stretching the truth that maybe every other addition she's made was under the direction of HR or product, in which case she is definitely out of line here - it would take the input of a Googler on her team to know for sure.
Googlers are encouraged---well, in the past, have been encouraged---to consider themselves capable of making judgement calls like this one.
That having been said, this would still be considered an unusual call to have made. But had I been on the receiving end of this message, I suspect I'd have found it annoying unless she remembered to suppress it after first display---if she had, I wouldn't have been bothered by it.
Part of being encouraged to exercise personal judgment is being responsible enough to participate in the consequences. Judgment with no/few personal consequences is reserved for children and legislators.
Getting fired is encouragement to you? Why would anyone input any value if having no platform to excercise judgement calls? 2/3 of typical decisions are either wrong or neutral..
The article says she's a security engineer. It would be pretty unlikely for a security engineer's job to include messaging employees about HR rules. It sounds more like this engineer modified a security tool to spam a bunch of coworkers with pro-union popups.
True, but the optics are terrible on this one. They should have seen this one coming and promoted her instead. They also should stop trying to prevent googlers from unionizing. The google of today is not the google of 15 years ago that's for sure.
While they're at it, they should stop bending (and probably breaking) export controls regarding China, and stop doing immoral DoD and ICE projects.
And heck, why not implement a process by which all private contracts are approved by a company-wide vote? Including the guy that sweeps the floor. Oh, afraid that employees will leak the details of the project? There's always NDAs, but if you are so concerned about leaks, maybe that's not a project you should be doing then.
Um, there's already a process whereby private contracts, as well as all other company business is approved by a vote. It's called the shareholder meeting.
Now understandably the janitor has provided a lot less capital than deeply invested shareholder, so their votes are uniformly weighted according to their share of ownership.
I'm guessing the engineer might own about 1/10,000,000th or so of the company if she has a healthy 401K. So as long as she can convince 10,000 or so other employees and 49.91% of the rest of shareholders to go along...
| And heck, why not implement a process by which all private contracts are approved by a company-wide vote?
Wait, what? How would this work? Who would take a Google bid seriously if, after awarding them the contract, they turn around and have to ask the employee population for permission to proceed?
The big issue I see with a lot of discussion around this issue is not a lot of thought is put into the practicality of running a large business concern. Stuff that works when it's two guys and a server does not (can not) fly when you have a large group of people to manage.
Those are well defined roles. Specially in a company of that size.
She didn’t just make a judgement call. She went way outside her role imo.