Google is losing and FIRING (?) top personnel
MMaximilian Schwarzmüller
Business NewsManagementComputing/SoftwareInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00ready for some google drama let's go now this is not even about top ai personal leaving google
00:00:08which even caused their stock to drop by five percent reportedly but it's about a way more
00:00:16niche story which i as a developer find pretty interesting justin pernald ponald you may not
00:00:23know him i didn't know him before was fired two months ago by google for creating the google
00:00:29workspace cli now what's the google workspace cli you're asking it's exactly what it sounds like
00:00:35it's a cli a command line interface that allows you to interact with all those google workspace
00:00:41services like google drive gmail calendar sheets stocks and many more why would you do that well
00:00:47you probably wouldn't but your ai agent maybe would because we learned this year that ai agents models
00:00:56are pretty good at using command line interfaces command line tools at least if they're well
00:01:00documented because they're pretty good at using the command line in general that is why peter steinberger
00:01:06the creator of openclaw of course created his gog cli which is a totally unofficial cli for google for
00:01:14using google services last year already so that openclaw can for example use that so that you can set up your
00:01:22openclaw agent and if you ask it to tell you which new emails you got it can reach out to your google
00:01:29mail account if you authenticated it of course and it can find those new emails that is the idea
00:01:37now kind of makes sense for google to build an official thing right because this gog cli by peter is
00:01:43inofficial it would make sense for google to have its official one so that they have a bit more control
00:01:48over it they can seem a bit more cool and maybe get a better stake in the entire agentic ai world
00:01:58because remember the hype died down a bit now but earlier this year everybody wanted to get peter the
00:02:05creator of openclaw mark zuckerberg wanted to acquire him or hire him open ai did hire him
00:02:13google i don't know if they tried but yeah this would be a small chance to move a small step forward
00:02:20into being a bit more engaged in that ai agent game here so it makes sense that the google team where justin worked
00:02:32built such an official cli the problem just is that it isn't an official cli right there on this
00:02:41official not official um github repository page which is part of an official github repository organization
00:02:51or scope but this specific repository there despite being in the official google github or the official
00:02:59google workspace github account is not an officially supported google product as it says right there on
00:03:06the readme of that repository so again repository uh scope or github account is official this repository
00:03:14is not and justin who created it was fired because of it now as he mentioned in his post on x which you
00:03:21also find below of course this repository this tool went viral hit number one on hacker news gained
00:03:27thousands of github stars and many thousands of actual users in just a couple of days why would you
00:03:34fire him then if he built something people wanted and people then actually used and it was popular why was
00:03:42he fired hold that thought now it's not just him eddie osmani who was a top googler for 14 years
00:03:52also left now he was maybe not fired on linkedin he shared a post that it's time to move on find
00:03:59something new the kind of stuff you write in situations like this and i don't know i don't have
00:04:04any special insights regarding his departure here maybe he really just wanted to leave it in this context
00:04:12that we have here with justin and addy promoting that tool when it was released which is what he did on x
00:04:22it seems like maybe he was pushed to go you know the kind of stuff you do if you want to get rid of
00:04:30somebody but he's been there forever he is kind of popular out there in the community and you want
00:04:36to make it a a good deal for both sides well then you offer someone to leave on their own terms before
00:04:43you make them leave on your terms maybe that is what happened here maybe not i don't know it would
00:04:48make sense though because eddie did promote this not official not really supported google workspace cli
00:04:58now as justin wrote he worked on the workspace dev rel developer relations team and they regularly
00:05:05created open source layers and abstractions over apis and he wrote this because there have been
00:05:12accusations or mentions that he clearly didn't go through the official uh process for getting your
00:05:21your repository in this case here which you want to release to the public signed off by legal there
00:05:27is an interesting thread on hacker news you also find it linked below which is super long now i took the
00:05:32time to read through many of the comments there and in there you'll find many ex-googlers at least people
00:05:38claiming to be ex-googlers obviously hard to validate who write that it was pretty normal that when you
00:05:44wanted to publish something like this you had to go through a certain process you had to get approval
00:05:50and it seems like justin didn't do that here now again as he wrote that's kind of the thing they
00:05:55did maybe they always did it in the wrong way but nobody cared until this came and the question then
00:06:01still is why does google suddenly care here and the simple answer here clearly is politics it's enterprise
00:06:11politics but there are multiple layers to it now clearly google is an ai first company i mean every
00:06:19company is ai first these days but of course google yeah it is a lot about ai it's about the gemini
00:06:24models they shove ai into your face and every product they build like microsoft with github copilot
00:06:30gemini is everywhere so why would they not support a tool like this which makes using google services
00:06:37easier for agents for ai agents well couple of reasons now one reason not a good one i think
00:06:47is that google actually did announce an official cli as it seems though i wasn't able to find that maybe
00:06:55it's those google workspace developer tools though which i found uh after justin released the
00:07:01inofficial cli now those more official google workspace developer tools for example are about having a
00:07:09gemini cli extension for google workspace development now i don't know anybody who uses the gemini cli but
00:07:15yeah there was this extension or there is this extension though i guess that doesn't matter because
00:07:21gemini cli is not continued anymore but anyways so yeah maybe google was working on something official
00:07:28and then somebody else suddenly releasing something like this yeah obviously not great can definitely catch
00:07:35the team that was working on the official integration on the wrong foot now another thing another
00:07:44potential problem of course is if you used any google products and you certainly have you can sometimes see
00:07:50that there clearly are very different teams pushing their stuff into the same product i mean take
00:07:57gemini it's in all those google workspace products and it's clearly shoved into every single one of them
00:08:04we have inconsistent user experiences it's just flat out broken in some of them it's clearly not in the
00:08:10the interest of some team that's building the gemini integration for google docs let's say
00:08:15that suddenly we have a cli which makes agents use docs and therefore people not visiting the docs apps
00:08:23which the team that built the gemini integration of course want they want real humans visiting the
00:08:29app so that they use the integration so that they hit their numbers and stuff like that so clearly
00:08:35politics are the best explanation for this specific case here in my opinion now obviously you can also
00:08:42ask why why do we care about this at all i mean some guy being fired by google who cares right that
00:08:47happens all the time and yeah that is of course kind of true and especially justin already got some nice
00:08:54offers here uh right below his post so he he will be fine he'll find a job i think it's just really
00:09:00interesting to see how google is struggling with the current rapid development in the ai space despite
00:09:09being one of the leading ai companies now clearly they are not really at the top of those companies when
00:09:17we talk about agentic coding the open ai and anthropic models but also the brand new glm 5.2 model are way
00:09:25better than the gemini models for coding and i don't know any developer who really uses the gemini
00:09:32models for coding and i have a hard time keeping up with all the tools google is releasing that should
00:09:37help me with agent decoding i mean gemini cli is not continued anymore we have anti-gravity who knows
00:09:43when they will stop continuing that anyways they are clearly not at the top when it comes to agent decoding
00:09:49but of course the world is not just about agent decoding and if we look at the consumer space
00:09:55they will find out that they will be able to find that they will find that they will find that
00:09:59and that they will find that they will find that the online at least for now people still google and
00:10:01now they got chat gpt integrated into google they can chat right there they got the ai summaries there
00:10:05is little incentive for normal people to to switch and to use chat gpt for research instead of google
00:10:12since it's all there it's built into google so they'll be fine regarding that the only area where these
00:10:18these top researcher departures here could matter is that all these top ai companies are now racing to
00:10:28build systems that are self-improving so to say the idea of course is that if you have a top model that's
00:10:34really good at writing code you can use it to also accelerate the development of the next even better
00:10:42model and you can also use it to build all kinds of tools around it that you can then sell to your
00:10:49customers like anthropic is doing it with claude tag with claude co-work with claude code obviously and
00:10:55all that stuff so having a model that's great at agentic tasks including coding could be very important
00:11:05for the future where this leads to like a self-accelerating upward spiral and that is where google could fall
00:11:14behind if their models are not as good at agentic tasks and coding obviously always a bit hard to
00:11:22judge from the outside but at least that is what it looks like that it could be a potential problem for
00:11:28google in the future and with top personal leaving it seems as if development inside of google is maybe
00:11:37a bit too slow for those people they want to work at a company that feels more on the edge in a bit
00:11:43more of a leading position but these are of course just all speculations just as here with justin being
00:11:51fired because of the google workspace cli still the main takeaway and why i find this interesting is that
00:11:59google is in such a weird place i mean such a large company obviously successful in so many
00:12:04different layers and again they will likely be fine but then they mess up so bad here where they could
00:12:11have been the cool guys again where they could have potentially attracted some talent where they could
00:12:16have be more involved in the entire ai agent dabbling that's happening at the forefront by all these early
00:12:25adopters right now and they decided to not do that because politics anyways i thought this was quite
00:12:34interesting here which is why i wanted to share it and as always i'm of course very interested in
00:12:39in hearing your thoughts on this
00:12:40and what I may be missing here.
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