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?
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.