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If someone says (in nicer words) "Do X or I'll resign" and the company doesn't agree to those terms, it's best to accept the resignation immediately because the employee's interests aren't aligned with the company's.

It's also pretty common in roles like sales and PR to be shown the door the day you give notice, especially if you're going to a competitor.

This is really obviously clear to the point wherein it shouldn't be a discussion. Anyone with two years in any industry has to know this.

If you make an ultimatum to your employer, and they don't want to accept, assume that it's over, right then and there.

Unless you're Michael Jordan, or have some kind of really existential terms with the company.

I'm surprised that she opted to publicly put the blame on someone and link to their Twitter. That could be interpreted as a dog whistle to her followers to start the public shaming.

But at the very least, I'd guess that this will make any potential future employer think twice if they really want to be her manager.

And lastly, I remember the name Jeff Dean from reading about advanced AI research, so if someone publicly says "Jeff Bean says XY is unbearable", I'd be inclined to just believe it.

All in all, this looks to me like Timnit Gebru could improve her career chances by being a bit more diplomatic with her public announcements.

Jeff Dean isn't just someone from advanced AI research. He's one of the longest time Google employees and a key part of the company's success. He's one of the chief engineers behind MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, the re-awakening of neural network research and many other incredible achievements. At one point inside Google there was a website called "Jeff Dean Facts" similar to the Chuck Norris facts. The guys reputation is out of this world.

He's also a rather mild mannered and very nice man. When I worked there I never heard anyone say anything bad about Dean. He rarely expressed strong opinions even on engineering topics; the sort of guy who prefers to win debates by simply coding up the best solution.

The name Timnit Gebru also rings bells for me. Last time this name came up she was busy chasing Yann LeCun off Twitter with pitchforks. LeCun! One of the other major luminaries of AI research. In fact she stirred up so much trouble and made so many outrageous accusations he quit Twitter altogether. She appears to be a serious troublemaker, far more interested in identity politics than AI. She was an embarrassment to Google before and it's good for them they finally canned her, but seriously, why did it take this long? And who will hire her next? I'm sure someone will be dumb enough to do that but hardly any companies have openings for "ethical AI researchers", and she already burned her bridges at Facebook.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted? I fact checked the Yann Lecun claim and I learned something new. Similar to Stallmans pitchforking, it's a sad case.

Wow... didn't connect the two! I remember the Yann LeCun controversy. Didn't dive into it. Now the same person has an issue with Jeff Dean?

I second the fact that Jeff is an extremely mild-mannered and kind (and supportive to young employees) person. If he reacted this way I assume his patience must have been worked to the ground...

"I'm surprised that she opted to publicly put the blame on someone and link to their Twitter."

Because public division creates sides, and taking one of those sides gives you favour with one group.

A pragmatic, mild mannered person who works on such issues behind the scenes is not going to be popular.

But division makes enemies in one camp, allies in the other.

Now we all know someone's name whereas we wouldn't have before.

So one can make a career out championing said allies.

I think a lot of people have this instinct, just expressed in different ways.

She is being dishonest from what I can tell. She thought she could just boss people around without consequence but now she is - hopefully - finding out that isn't the case. I really hope Google doesn't buckle under Twitter pressure...

You're right but, the tone of the mail hints that there's an underlying tension already. Also, the mention of other email (which I didn't read) further hints that there's something heated going on amongst the parties.

So looks like Timnit sent an e-mail to the group which wasn't OK in the eyes of the higher management, then sent a strong mail about her demands to the same management and used "I'll resign otherwise" card to force her way.

The management, agitated from the first e-mail, didn't buy it and sent her home. The way they did is neither elegant nor polite but, she pushed a lot to get this response it seems.

This is my understanding of the issue and I may be completely wrong but, this is what I was able to decipher.

Google did the right thing and they were civil.

She made some pretty serious demands, not having been met, with such politicization there's no reasonable way to accommodate a longer handoff, and she knew that. Waaay too much risk there.

She set her own terms, they accepted, that's it.

She should have been more transparent in this, because in her Tweets she wasn't forthcoming that it was her terms.

There are a ton of people who are sympathetic to those who are oppressed, but misrepresentations, cancelling etc. on the wrong terms are going to lose general sympathy very quickly.

None of this should be construed as a measure of whether or not Google is 'Good or Bad' or whatever, all these things are individual situations, with their own unique circumstances.

Do you know what the demands were? I don't think anyone has published them yet.

Do we even know what her demands were? I haven’t seen them posted anywhere. That said, it’s not behooven on either party to be transparent — to the public, or even other employees — because that’s just lawsuit bait.

All we know is that she gave a hardball ultimatum, and Google accepted option 2. I don’t know enough about what’s going on, but if you say “Do this, or I quit,” you have to be prepared for them to show you the door immediately. That’s how at-will employment works.

Some third hand hearsay mention:

> In the letter she criticised the use of pre trained language models in Google's products (e.g., BERT is now used for most searches, machine translation, etc.). Apparently, the two conditions she mentioned concern how Google goes forward in deploying these models despite the warning of (their own) AI ethics researchers about biases that are manifested in these models.

That seems like its not only reasonable, but what her job was. Now if she said, "Do this or I quit" then that is on her. But if she criticized them harshly then that seems completely appropriate.

"That seems like its not only reasonable"

Is it though? There is bias in everything.

There is bias in Googles original search - it crawled content. That content will be biased.

Google search has been biased since the start. It has nothing to do with AI.

Biased is also contextual: what does it mean for all of us non-Americans to see tons of American content in everything - the 'American bias' is overwhelmingly the strongest bias, where are the concerns about that?

And how does bias imply a 'lack of ethics'?

The entire consideration is ridiculous:

1) AI is not special and odes not deserve it's own ethical oversight. Every social tech has issues and it all needs to be thought about.

2) Someone with no real training in the issue may very well merely be injecting their own politics into the situation, and possibly overstating issuses.

3) There's nothing objective about morality or ethnics, so it's really hard to even find such at thing as 'objective'.

What the company needs is a clean, comprehensive framework for the issue, and probably some independent oversight that can given them private assessments of where there are red flags.

Not individuals who want to make a name for themselves on the issue publicly, and who might be part of some kind of ideological movement.

There is bias in everything -- that is why you need ethics. You need to determine which biases are problematic and which aren't. If Google search favored Chinese government results in the US you'd probably say, "that seems biased in a bad way".

Your disagreement seems less to do with that and more to do that you disagree with where her ethics rest. I think the reason why she pushes for marginalized groups is that those are the groups that are less likely to be able to stand for themselves and thus become the victims of the bias. A bias against corporate or powerful interests will likely be rectified relatively quickly.

Yes - the bias can be worse for marginalized groups and that's a legit issue for sure.

But hiring activists, and particularly those with a focus on a very specific technology ... I think is a double-wrong.

'Ethics' is all encompassing, every company has to deal with it ... it needs probably specialization and some cold calculating.

If there were some gigantic loophole whereupon marginalized people were truly thrown under the bus here, then maybe there's a case, but I seriously doubt that.

https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a... Not sure how genuine this email is, but its all we have

At least one of the demands was, quoting Jeff Dean's email, "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."

It doesn't matter really what they were other than we know she offered to resign if they were not met.

"“Do this, or I quit,” you have to be prepared for them to show you the door immediately. That’s how at-will employment works."

That's pretty much it.

She must be smart enough to know better and possibly she was looking for an exit of some kind.

>There is still a civil way to accept a resignation, with proper timelines and transfer of responsibilities.

that just reminded how Marisa resigned - if i remember correctly she just called on Monday morning to notify that she is already at Yahoo. So the "at-will" works both way.

>> certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.

as my friends managers explained to me - a manager represents the company to employees, i.e. when a manager speaks it is basically the company speaks and thus [until the company reacts quickly by disowning the manager's words] the company bears the burdens and responsibilities that the manager made promises/representations about - similar to that relationship between Pope and God pictured in the Dogma - so managers are trained to be very accurate with their words, and understandably a manager going off-rails is like a fire emergency to be dealt with immediately.

I'd call it petty more than sleazy. Drama queens on both sides.

Threat of resignation is not a resignation. Either they follow due termination process, or she might still be employed or have good legal case.

There's no legal requirement for a termination process in the US. A company may choose to give notice, but with a few rare exceptions, they can fire you on the spot at any time for any reason if they want to.

Is that true? Is there not any laws protecting the employees or setting time limits for the notice and the actual end of the contract?

In many U.S. states to include California, employment is legally considered “at-will.” This means the employer can terminate the employment agreement at any time and for nearly any reason.

You cannot fire someone for membership in a protected class (race, religion, sexual orientation, etc) or participation in protected activities like reporting an employer’s violations of the law, but it’s difficult to prove intent in such cases.

There are exceptions for unionized workplaces with collective bargaining agreements. Employers in those situations cannot fire employees without “just cause.” Google R&D is not unionized, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

why is this being downvoted? They stated facts not opinions.

Im most cases downvotes are knee-jerk reaction. I find it normal. People are sensitive creatures with strong biases as default. I read HN actively from 2008 (good old days:) ) nowadays I always look at downvoted comments first to gain information.

I have been long time HN lurker and I too miss the older times, but have hard time finding better alternative.

There is no alternative, and probably will not be another. HN is a result of optimistic hacker culture with big dreams for success and tons of useful info and people. Ideological and practical Impact of HN on my career (18 years +) is enormous, it is on pair with early Google, INFOQ, Nielsen Norman Group. We live in different times now, innovation is hard, most of the valuable users don't have free time to post and I understand this. You can still extract value from HN, but with more friction and effort.:)

Analysis: true

Her tweet suggests she submitted a resignation letter, and offered to "take her name off of it" if they met her terms. Means that's not a threat, they got a signed letter for her resignation.

Unless she has a bespoke employment agreement, it probably says that employment is “at-will” and can be terminated by either party without notice.

Is this true, legally? Can they not accept a demand for resignation and be legally immune from claims of discrimination?

I assume they wanted her out and she accidentally gave them immunity, so they jumped on it.

I don't think she ever resigned. My guess is that her manager Megan was being nice to her by saying that this is not firing but "accepting resignation". Unfortunately, her manager was obviously not trained in firing. Never "accept resignation" if employee didn't actually resigned, even if you want to nice to them.

If you say “I will resign unless X”, your employer is then entitled to accept your resignation. HR prefers to accept resignations rather than fire people, because then the company is much less likely to be found at fault, and it sounds like this communication was carefully managed with the help of HR.