That's a fair point, and I agree that (if so; those of us who don't work at Google don't really know what's going on) the argument that he should have expected not to talk about this at all is invalid. That's useful context, thanks.
However, I don't think this necessarily excuses him entirely. If there's a company-wide discussion group for future directions on tech stacks inviting input, and I write a long post arguing, in complete seriousness, that the best long-term tech stack for the company is to use Classic ASP on Windows NT 4.0, and I pull some stats about successful companies in the dot-com boom that used ASP, I think it is entirely reasonable for the company to re-evaluate whether they badly misjudged my critical thinking skills. I am not excused simply because they invited feedback from the whole company.
Whether this particular post is a comparable situation is certainly debatable, but I think that we cannot simply excuse it by saying that feedback was requested.
However, I don't think this necessarily excuses him entirely. If there's a company-wide discussion group for future directions on tech stacks inviting input, and I write a long post arguing, in complete seriousness, that the best long-term tech stack for the company is to use Classic ASP on Windows NT 4.0, and I pull some stats about successful companies in the dot-com boom that used ASP, I think it is entirely reasonable for the company to re-evaluate whether they badly misjudged my critical thinking skills. I am not excused simply because they invited feedback from the whole company.
Whether this particular post is a comparable situation is certainly debatable, but I think that we cannot simply excuse it by saying that feedback was requested.