Justin Poehnelt built a CLI for Google Workspace. It went viral, hit number one on Hacker News, and gained thousands of GitHub stars and real users in days. Then Google fired him.
The story he posted on X is worth reading in full, but the short version is this: an engineer who spent nearly seven years at Google built something useful, saw it get embraced by users and even internal leadership, and was terminated anyway — two days after Google Cloud Next announced that an official Workspace CLI was coming.
Here’s what happened and why it matters beyond one person’s story.
What Poehnelt built
Poehnelt created a command-line interface for Google Workspace that let users interact with Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and the rest of the Workspace suite from the terminal. For developers, power users, and anyone who lives in a CLI, this is the kind of tool that makes you faster at everything you do in Google’s ecosystem.
The tool resonated. It hit number one on Hacker News, picked up thousands of stars on GitHub, and accumulated thousands of active users. Directors and leaders at Google reached out asking what they could learn from it.
But legal also reached out. They questioned why the Google logo and brand colors were on the GitHub repo.
The irony of the timing
Here is where the story gets pointed. Two days before Poehnelt was fired, Google Cloud Next announced that an official Google Workspace CLI was coming. The company was literally on stage telling the world it was building what he had already built.
Poehnelt says he thinks the real cause was fear of disruption. Not specifically about his CLI — but a broader fear of what agents and AI-powered tooling meant for Google Workspace. The CLI was just the visible manifestation of a shift that Workspace leadership wasn’t ready for.
Whether that is accurate or not, the optics are brutal. Google announces a Workspace CLI at its flagship developer conference, then fires the guy who already built it and proved people wanted it.
What this says about big tech and internal innovation
This story is not unique to Google. It’s a pattern that plays out across every large tech company:
- An employee builds something useful on their own time
- It gains traction with real users
- Legal, brand, and internal politics get involved
- The employee gets shown the door
- The company eventually builds their own version
The irony is that Google’s official Workspace CLI repo — googleworkspace/cli on GitHub — now has over 28,000 stars. Poehnelt proved the demand. The company just didn’t want him to be the one delivering it.
Poehnelt’s own take is measured. He says his nearly seven years at Google were an incredible opportunity and that he had supportive teammates and managers through the process. He says posting his story is part of healing and owning his experience.
What’s next for Poehnelt
He’s already building his next thing at helensfoundry.com. No details on what that is yet, but if his track record is any indication, it will be something useful that probably should have been built inside Google.
Caveats
- This is one side of the story. Google has not publicly commented on the termination.
- Poehnelt acknowledges the process involved legal questions about branding and logo use, which large companies take seriously.
- The timeline and internal dynamics are self-reported and may have additional context.
Bottom line
A Google engineer built a CLI for Workspace, watched it go viral, and got fired for it — two days after Google announced the same thing at Cloud Next. Whether you see this as a story about corporate risk aversion, intellectual property overreach, or just bad timing, it’s a reminder that building things people actually want is not always rewarded inside the companies that should want them most.
The full thread is worth reading. Poehnelt handled it with more class than most would.
