Not at all. I've read everything she's written on the issue including the long message she wrote to the brain group, and her tweets where she shared what Google said when they accepted her resignation. These latter make specific reference to the ultimatum, which was the ultimate reason for her departure.
As I pointed out in the previous discussion she may have faced some sort of disciplinary action upon her return from vacation due to the content of her message to the brain group.
However, when she resigned what Google managers did (and this is no great leap of logic) is figure out that if they made her work her notice period she'd probably only cause more trouble in the meantime, so they brought it forward and made it effective immediately.
This might or might not be unusual behaviour for handling a resignation at Google, but it is fairly common practice amongst different organisations for a variety of different reasons that usually boil down to mitigating some kimd of risk to the organisation.
It's definitely not common place and should not be encouraged except under severe circumstances e.g. violence, criminality etc.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/02/google-spied-on-employees-il...
Well, I mean, for one thing it about $20K difference in salary alone.
> She's gone either way
True.
> because they wouldn't let her publish the paper.
That's...less clearly true in any meaningful sense. The public statements from all the other Google AI people about how the official narrative is inconsistent with general practice on publication review suggests very strongly that the management actions related to the paper were a pretextual component of a constructive termination campaign, and that even when it succeeded in generating something management could at least seize on as a “resignation” the result was insufficiently immediate requiring finding another pretext for immediate termination.
Should we believe her or her managers? Her managers pretending they just accepted her resignation is dishonest.
I don't have a strong opinion in the matter (and have no connection to Google), but if she in fact unambiguously offered her resignation conditioned on her paper not being approved to publish and Google accepted her offer, I don't see how she can turn around and claim she was fired.
> 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.
Do you believe she fabricated Megan's email?[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334364735446331392
Google, talking through Jeff Dean, claims that Timnit was unhappy with her situation and submitted a good faith resignation which Google accepted due to her not following their policies. Timnit claims that she was forced into a position where she had to issue her ultimatum, forcing her into a resignation. And we have claims from Google employees saying that the process she had was unusual and did not match a normal review. Isn’t the true journalistic malpractice ignoring this and claiming that any title that doesn’t match your view, which appears to be Google’s view of the situation is inaccurate?
Ok so it's established that she threatened her managers and employer to either comply with her personal wishes or she would "exercise her leverage" to cause the company harm.
And in the end, as their managers didn't caved into her threats, she decided to pull the trigger.
> But can I say that this ultimatum wasn’t the result of Google pulling the rug out from under her and putting her in an unfortunate position (...) ?
So she threatened someone, her target didn't caved in, and thus she proceeded to execute her threat.
And somehow the responsibility of her executing her threat is supposed to be on her target?
This sounds a lot like victim blaming.
"Look what you made me do! Are you happy now?"
It's also clear that before learning of this event, we had 0% knowledge of the situation.
Between 0 and where we are now with both sides expressing their point of view to some degree, people on HN began making up their mind in the absence of complete information. There is no requirement or urgency that we come to some inconsequential conclusion of our own.
My bias is that it seems difficult to obtain the position the researcher held at Google. How can I be willing to believe the engineer has the ability to navigate the subject matter and its application without being able to navigate this employment scenario. It feels as though I am required to accept the engineers brilliance while calling them dumb at the same time. That feels like a larger handwave than considering the known actions of Google and questioning the few assertions they are willing, but not required truthfully or untruthfully to provide.
Or it doesn't and we victimize people with smaller PR budgets to present their perspective.
I, like many others, dont like the way she deals with people. It is toxic. You call a toxic person, a toxic person. Ample evidence for it. Its not outrage, its just facts.
My message wan in reponse was to.
> Toxic is an inflammatory and unnecessary word to use when no-one is privy to the actual facts.
This response reflects an unwillingness to understand a situational nuance from multiple sides, show empathy to a person in distres and offers no workarounds, support or evidence. I've grown so tired of these factual tug of wars to justify callous.
This sounds a lot like taking what Google said without including Timnit’s point of view. Is it really fair to disparage an article for having a title like that when you’ve completely ignored such a large part of the issue?