alt Hacker NewsIt sounds like a big part of why he was let go is that he created a work-related product, possibly using his '20% time' meaning he created it while at work, and then released it with Google branding and logos, all of which without clearing it with anyone at the company, while his name is attached to the company.
In other words, he created an extremely official-looking product and released it in a way that made it look extremely official and blindsided everyone when suddenly there's a viral Google Workspace tool released by a Googler with Google branding that wasn't released by Google.
I'm not saying he should have been fired, necessarily, but he demonstrated _extremely_ poor judgement in doing this the way he did and put his manager and everyone else in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable position.
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Struggling to see how google was harmed by this but yea it's true he didn't dot the i's and cross the ts.
I actually thought when it was released that it was a pretty clever move by google in a sea of bad decisions but they've cleared that misapprehension right up.
The branding and logo on the embed comes from the org it is attached to, which is an official GitHub organisation owned by Google and contains many other open source repositories.
I think there is probably way more to this story - maybe he was told about the upcoming official use/variant and was asked to not preempt it before the cloud next conference with his one?