Even if it were the case, responding to "retract this paper" with "No; I prefer to resign" is/should be par for the course for a researcher.

They submitted thee paper for internal review one day before their external deadline.

They set themselves up for failure regardless of the paper's content.

A manager with every reason to cover his ass is claiming that.

Her email, sent before that claim was made, suggests that wasn't even remotely the case - and it's entirely possible to think "she seems like an ass" and "this smells like bullshit" are both true.

I suspect reality is somewhere between our two accounts, where one describes this as a purely deadline-related problem and the other describes months of effort to seek feedback via various channels and moving goalposts for what types of review were expected.

Their paper was accepted by the conference's peer review system. Google, not researchers in the community, wanted it retracted. The only logical explanation is that it was good science that did not put Google is a positive light.

> Their paper was accepted by the conference's peer review system.

Source? The linked article says it was submitted but nothing about whether it was accepted. If it was accepted, is it available for public viewing?

I don't think the paper has been accepted, because the conference itself has not made decisions on the papers. This article [1] says that the paper was submitted to "ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency", which sends paper decisions (accept or reject) next week [2]. Of course, it might be accepted at that time, but that doesn't seem to be decided yet.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-03/google-s-...

[2] https://facctconference.org/2021/cfp.html

What's your experience with corporate internal processes been? Mine has been that they often exhibit an extreme disinterest in the judgment of external parties that are not part of the internal process. Whether or not the external group accepts the paper was likely irrelevant to what would be internally seen as a breach of process.

Generally "It worked out, everything's fine" is not a line that flies.

Very hard to take that at face value. This is the email that management took as somehow being beyond what an employee at google can do. The title is quite correct IMHO.

If you accuse unnamed co-workers of not only ignoring your expertise and of micro- and macro-aggressions, but also of dehumanizing you, yeah, someone is going to have an uncomfortable work environment.

> contained an ultimatum and a threat to resign. The employer then called her bluff and accepted her resignation

A threat to resign isn't the same thing as resigning. And it seems you don't think so, either, since you characterize her threat as a bluff. It can't be both a bluff and a resignation.

"Calling one's bluff" doesn't imply that there was a bluff in the first place. It's a common figure of speech. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/call%20one%27s%20bluff

If I say "I demand X or else I resign", (I don't know if that was actually said) I think it's fair to consider that a conditional resignation.

It's the ultimatum part that makes the difference.

So was it a bluff or was it a resignation?

The original post was updated with more information.

Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

I would say that describes a conditional resignation, and the fact that she called this “being fired” indicates she didn’t really plan to resign (ie. she was bluffing).

She called it being fired because Google terminated her employment earlier than she offered to resign.

It’s a strange reaction though. “I’m resigning.” “OK, that’s your prerogative, bye.” “Wait! I didn’t mean NOW! How can you fire me like this?!” Then make a big deal about being fired on social media. Seems to me that someone who genuinely was ready to resign would have just quietly walked away, even if they imagined it ending less abruptly. Can’t know for sure, obviously.

Resigning doesn't mean leaving quietly. Especially for a researcher ordered to retract a paper.

Y'all are alleging that it was phrased as an ultimatum. I'm not so sure that's the case. Proposing an option of resigning is not the same thing as "I will definitely resign".

> I'm not so sure that's the case.

The person who benefits from your doubt, _and_ could resolve your doubt, chooses not to.

"Chooses not to" is so disingenuous it's hard to take you seriously.

She cannot and will not expose that information without inviting all sorts of litigation. This is not a case where she can just "choose" to release that information.

If she were making a legal case, then I gather it could harm her case to release this information to the public.

So, she might be choosing not to for this reason.