Only very (awesome) good and very bad experiences are widely shared.
The problem is that creating a truly great (awesome) memorable support experience happens less than 5% of the time (as you said it is rare). And that experience is shared to 10 people in average: not really a lot.
Sadly, it is hard to convince people of this unfortunate and depressing fact: customer support is nice, but in the grand scheme of things, it usually does not matter that much.
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
Every inexperienced entrepreneur starts with a promise that their support will not be terrible like Google, Comcast, or other big companies. And that will be their path to success.
But in the end, you learn that you need to offer the same level of support that other companies in your market offer. And if your support is really better, nobody will really notice. It does not matter.
And inexperienced entrepreneurs are stubborn (a good trait). So they usually have to learn that lesson on their own.
Over 90% of new vehicles sold in the U.S. already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
So it is kinda expected to be there: if it is not there then a car needs to be something special. So I think buyers don’t even ask for it because they assume it will be there (and absence becomes much more noticeable than its presence).
I think that can work if you narrow the issue only to medical advice.
But trust is also eroded by completely unrelated things, like “Iraq has WMDs” and other stories pushed by our governments. Or even the recent argument that we need ID to access the internet in order to “protect children.” Sure.
The key point is that for things like vaccines, people need to trust the goverment and the process. Most people are not going to read medical papers. They should rely on government health agencies to tell them what to do.
So when trust is damaged (even by unrelated government decisions), it affects how people respond to medical guidance too.
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Meaning, it creates one more hurdle for businesses. I think that is an objective statement.
Is it bad? That depends on your point of view. If you are pro-business, then yes, the bill is bad. If you are not pro-business and you are pro-worker rights, then you will not see it as bad.
Michigan has relatively business-unfriendly laws and regulations.
Apparently their tax system is quite favorable to businesses, but taxes are only one (small) part of the equation. The taxes matter more once a company is making a lot of money.
In short, tax incentives and random per company “investments” (bribes?) are not enough to offset certain laws and regulations Michigan has.
I am not saying those laws and regulations are bad. I am just saying that targeted tax incentives and investment for specific companies are the wrong way to solve the problem.
I do not want to speculate too much. Sure, many things could have happened, even things unrelated to this project, that led to the firing.
But since this project is still on GitHub, I would say the project itself was probably not so bad that releasing it should be a fireable offense.
So my thinking is this:
Did the employee act with the goal of helping the company?
If the answer is yes, and the action did not cause serious harm to the company, then you do not fire the employee. At my old company, the employee would probably be sent to take a couple of courses related to whatever rule they broke.
In general, smart people should be encouraged to take initiative.
The real problem (and the reason why you have all these HR rules) is when you have stupid employees who take initiative. Actually, you should never hire someone who is both unintelligent and full of initiative. It is okay to hire someone who is stupid and lazy and has no initiative (You need those people too).
And OP is obviously smart and talented and should be encouraged to take initiative.
In any reasonable company (with common sense leadership), someone would not be fired for doing something (with good intentions) that does not harm company very much.
Releasing something like this did not really harm the company (the project is still on GitHub).
Any smart executive could have spun the release of this CLI into a win.
Even if some other team complained that this was encroaching on their work, a smart executive would say: “cool show me your work tomorrow morning so we can replace this with you work”
That part is odd, especially the fact that his boss tweeted about it.
So there is probably much more to the story. My guess is that this is more of an internal fight, possibly with unwise executive involvement (meaning there were no grown-ups in the room).
His team was supposed to develop GWS API samples. And very good samples can become quite sophisticated and start looking almost like an official product.
I never worked for Google, but I do have fairly extensive experience with these kinds of situations. From that perspective, I assume there has to be more to the story for it to lead to a firing.
In general, when a talented employee (like OP) does something like this, the response is usually something like:
“We appreciate and love your initiative, and we want to encourage you to keep doing this kind of work. However, this needs to be taken down, and you need to make sure this does not happen again.”
Usually, these things are not career-ending moves. Actually it might be even opposite. Sure one might get labeled as a “cowboy”, but there is always some executive who will support “cowboys” because they shake things up. So one can actually get a promotion.
So I think there is something more here.
Either Google handled this very badly (and organization is broken) or the OP did not act in the company’s best interest and intentionally refused to follow certain instructions.
AI works by learning patterns. So it will become bias by just learning from factors like education history, schools attended, employment history, ZIP codes, or geographic location. Those 3 factors alone are an easy proxy for race.
And if you add names into the equation (if the AI was trained without removing applicant names), the model can become even more bias.
Germany is very debit-card oriented (with no interest of switching). The Netherlands seems similar. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are also mostly debit-card oriented, but people seem more open to switching to credit cards (if they can get one - especially the younger generation).
Ireland and the U.K. seem much more credit-card oriented than rest of Europe. Turkey is also very CC oriented (kinda strange - was not expecting that).
Only very (awesome) good and very bad experiences are widely shared.
The problem is that creating a truly great (awesome) memorable support experience happens less than 5% of the time (as you said it is rare). And that experience is shared to 10 people in average: not really a lot.