This whole question of resigned or fired seems like such a weird one. It's getting so much debate! I think everybody understands that she gave an ultimatum that included a "or else I will resign." I think everybody understands that Google responded with a "you are out as of now" that took her by surprise.<p>And yet there are a bazillion articles debating what verb best describes that pair of events. I get that there is legal relevance, and let the lawyers argue that one. But the rest of this seems to be a court of public opinion thing, in which case it should have no relevance given that everyone is agreed on the facts. Why do we care so much about the one-word linguistics of it? How about you just don't use a single verb alone, and instead spend the literally two sentences it takes to explain that part?
There's was an incident a while back where 2 engineers were joking between themselves about a "big dongle" and the woman seated in the row ahead heard it, turn around, took their picture and posted it online. It ruined everyone's life including hers. I thought we learned from this that airing things publicly is fraught with danger. I imagine there is a time and place for it, but very carefully with intention.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled-way-out-of-control/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...</a>
It disturbs me how much of a news story this is.<p>This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Even if she didn't resign (which is questionable, because she did send an ultimatum), is it wrong for Google to fire a person who writes stuff like this?<p>> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.<p>This excerpt is from the email that according to her triggered the firing. This person threatened her employer with a lawsuit in the past and now people are outraged that she got "abrubtly fired". Arguably, the way Google treated her was even too lenient: many companies would have fired her at the time her original threat was made.
Saw this on her Twitter feed:<p>> you know these last 2 weeks were supposed to be my vacations and we’re currently on a road trip.<p>Probably best not to send an email threatening to resign, then go on vacation and expect things to be normal.
Google is not a Academia. There is no tenure or intellectual freedom protections. Poke the bear often enough or make a nuisance of yourself you will be shown the door. The only ones who get to stay around and be a thorn in the side of management are board members who control a chunk of voting stock.<p>Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."<p>Seems like there should be a corollary for companies and difficult employees. Like public complaints that jump the chain of command from replaceable employees usually result in employee being replaced.
Can I ask with the upmost politeness what is going on? I genuinely went into this considering that this was someone who is essentially decrying that normal work difficulties are sexism or racism. But I'm now finding that the procedure claimed actually essentially doesn't exist or if it did it was never enforced until now. What is going on?<p>If this was an issue of the researcher unprofessionally airing her frustrations on a listserv with direct reports that's one thing. It's another thing to say being upset at all was an overreaction because the treatment was totally normal and that her frustration was a resignation, when in fact, none of that is true in any good faith interpretation.
When I worked at Google, there was always this sinister edge to all corporate events and communications and their culture, in general.
It was like that Star Trek episode - everything is paradise unless you commit a transgression. Any transgression, even minor, would result in your termination. In the Star Trek episode, it meant death, at Google, luckily, it just meant an involuntary "resignation".
Looking at all this drama, the AI researcher sounds toxic:<p>* Picked a public Twitter fight with Yang LeCun<p>* Her peers are so afraid of critiquing her paper, that they demand anonymity through HR<p>* Tells co-workers to stop working on documents<p>One of the things that has been emphasized in tech for the past several years is not to allow justifying retaining toxic people on account of their talent. In addition, your life experiences don’t justify being toxic. For example, even if a person’s Dad was an abusive alcoholic, that would not justify them being abusive to co-workers.
Direct link to the original blog post the new article is referencing: <a href="https://googlewalkout.medium.com/setting-the-record-straight-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-5d7bbfe4ed90" rel="nofollow">https://googlewalkout.medium.com/setting-the-record-straight...</a>
I think "do you have dealbreakers would you be prepared to resign over?" would be a reasonable interview question for a researcher in <i>ethics</i>.
Why would other employees be knowledgeable in the employment relationship between someone and a company? Unless the employees are in the direct management chain, or HR or something, aren't they just parroting what Timnit is claiming?
Where is Sundar Pichai in all of this? Why is it up to Jeff Dean to publicly represent the company? Pichai appears to be in hiding, as per usual. It's astounding how weak he is, especially compared to the very strong decision making that typified life under Larry/Sergey/Eric.<p>It's obvious that people like Gebru terrorise their colleagues by claiming anyone who doesn't join their racist jihad against white men are terrible and need to be fired. When Pichai canned Damore he set Google up for a never ending strem of events like this one: he basically told the extremist activist wing of the workforce that they were in charge, not him. Very few tech CEOs in America are more deserving of being replaced than Pichai but given the voting structure of Google stock it's hard to see how that can happen.
How did she not resign? She gave them an ultimatum demanding that the identities of peer reviewers be revealed to her and said that she would not work there if her demands were not met. That is a resignation since those conditions cannot be met. Even leaving aside the threat of resignation, such a list of demands worded as they were, simply shows that this person is unprofessional, aggressive, and immature. And that's leaving aside the fact that the paper in question seems very scattered and unimpressive (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...</a>). Frankly, reading the MIT Technology Review article makes me question the legitimacy of this entire field of AI Ethics and those who participate in it.<p>As a reminder, this isn't the first problematic incident involving Timnit Gebru either. She previously went on an unhinged Twitter attack against Yann LeCunn, one of the pioneers of deep learning. He won a Turing award for his work on this topic and is one of the foremost experts on it, and understands its various nuances very well. When she was challenged, Timnit's line of attack was leveraging a word soup of progressive identity politics, demanding Yann LeCunn apologize to her, claiming harm was done to the community, etc. This highlighted her aggressive tactics (weaponization of her Twitter following and leveraging cancel culture) and it is clear she must be a very difficult employee to manage or work with.<p>Coming back to the article linked here: whenever there is some incident (a firing, a walkout, a protest) at one of these big tech companies with a large activist employee population, articles get written that purport to present the opinion of the employee base at large. But usually, these articles only represent the loud minority that is willing to speak up and faces no repercussions. The employees that agree with Timnit Gebru leaving the company (supporting the company's stance) don't have psychological safety. Timnit wields the power of a big following of social justice activists on Twitter, and could shame/destroy people who speak up against her. The small number of employees voicing their support for her, even with total psychological safety, is a tiny percentage of Google's employee base. Those numbers paint a false picture that she has broad support when she doesn't. Perspectives from other Google employees are only available on anonymous forums like Blind (<a href="https://www.teamblind.com/post/We-stand-with-Jeff-Dean-and-Yann-LeCun-and-many-researchers-bsU03R70" rel="nofollow">https://www.teamblind.com/post/We-stand-with-Jeff-Dean-and-Y...</a>) and Reddit (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/geqzqlq/?context=3" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...</a>).<p>Lastly, this has all been discussed in depth previously in a few different discussions on HN. The one with the most comments is <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386</a>.
Hard to understand this without the right intel from the management team. A big puzzle piece is missing. Let's see if there're going to be any insiders sharing more info.
This illustrates how unethical Google is. Google AI Ethics was just Google's attempt to obtain self-regulation of AI, but now, Jeff Dean completely destroyed their dream. At this point, governmental regulation is inevitable.
It seemed like she was totally opposed to the basic concept of Google actually -- uses a huge amount of electricity, uses AI which is based on massive uncurated (biased) datasets, etc. Has a ton of white men working there and basically gives the equivalent of a "are you really a CS genius" bar exam to anyone who applies, so that even some developers with massive open source user-bases can't "qualify". Which makes affirmative action even harder in a field that is already very diversity-challenged. So to me it's amazing that she worked there for more than a week.