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