It's not that Google didn't tell me I had an alternative (I knew about the patching process), it's that they ignored my email asking for further info entirely. I wanted clarification on what it means to be a maintainer of an open source project, to then join Google, and to be rejected for IARC.
There was no place for me to list prior projects I had worked on before joining Google. I've heard about this from one other person. It must vary depending on where you joined Google, because I never heard about any such process through my contract/onboarding in Ireland. All I had was the IARC and patching documentation. I was told to go through IARC for existing projects.
In fact, most of my OSS contributions are to random projects. I only listed the PA one because it was the one that got me in trouble, and the two kernel ones because you'd be familiar with that area (in fact those two didn't even happen during my employment with Google). My OSS contributions are completely random. It's rare that I contribute to the same project more than once or twice, with a few exceptions, outside of personal projects and a few things I may be more invested in, or stuff so fundamental and large like the kernel where over the years I end up finding reasons to send a patch multiple times (and even then to completely unrelated subsystems).
What ends up happening 99% of the time is that I use some open source software as a user, I find a bug, I fix it and send a patch. Chances are small I'll ever contribute to that project again. I just happen to enjoy making small contributions. Often those contributions involve high effort but small amounts of code - both inside and outside of Google, I'm somewhat notorious for figuring out issues that nobody else can, even if the resulting patch is one line of code. I've fixed a problem in the Golang runtime that was breaking Google prod even after leaving Google; that bug had been open for half a year. I've fixed an Inkscape bug that was open for many years. This is what I do - little things in random projects that may not be much code, but I'm sure are very appreciated by people affected by the bugs.
And so, with this kind of development, the old process of "get an approval for every project" was completely unsustainable. I work in bursts. I'll spend an evening finding and fixing a bug that has eluded the project developers for months, then I'll move on to the next thing. The last thing I need is to have to go through a multi day approval request after that to be able to send the patch. It completely kills any motivation to do this kind of stuff. And so this is how you wind up with Googlers ceasing to contribute to open source when they join Google.
There was no place for me to list prior projects I had worked on before joining Google. I've heard about this from one other person. It must vary depending on where you joined Google, because I never heard about any such process through my contract/onboarding in Ireland. All I had was the IARC and patching documentation. I was told to go through IARC for existing projects.
In fact, most of my OSS contributions are to random projects. I only listed the PA one because it was the one that got me in trouble, and the two kernel ones because you'd be familiar with that area (in fact those two didn't even happen during my employment with Google). My OSS contributions are completely random. It's rare that I contribute to the same project more than once or twice, with a few exceptions, outside of personal projects and a few things I may be more invested in, or stuff so fundamental and large like the kernel where over the years I end up finding reasons to send a patch multiple times (and even then to completely unrelated subsystems).
What ends up happening 99% of the time is that I use some open source software as a user, I find a bug, I fix it and send a patch. Chances are small I'll ever contribute to that project again. I just happen to enjoy making small contributions. Often those contributions involve high effort but small amounts of code - both inside and outside of Google, I'm somewhat notorious for figuring out issues that nobody else can, even if the resulting patch is one line of code. I've fixed a problem in the Golang runtime that was breaking Google prod even after leaving Google; that bug had been open for half a year. I've fixed an Inkscape bug that was open for many years. This is what I do - little things in random projects that may not be much code, but I'm sure are very appreciated by people affected by the bugs.
And so, with this kind of development, the old process of "get an approval for every project" was completely unsustainable. I work in bursts. I'll spend an evening finding and fixing a bug that has eluded the project developers for months, then I'll move on to the next thing. The last thing I need is to have to go through a multi day approval request after that to be able to send the patch. It completely kills any motivation to do this kind of stuff. And so this is how you wind up with Googlers ceasing to contribute to open source when they join Google.