Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

> And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything

Interesting. Having been on the receiving end of a (later proven to be bogus) HR complaint, this is exactly how it was handled. I was forced to respond to allegations where neither the allegations nor source were ever shared with me.

View on HN

That's how it is supposed to work. If you complain to HR about your manager how can they reveal your identity when your manager controls your performance review and compensation?

Which doesn't seem to be what was happening here though, or at least there's no indication to that effect.

At the same time, the narrative that someone above her in the management hierarchy decided to pull her research seems more plausible. In that case, I would tend to "Privacy for the Weak, Transparency for the Powerful." What you describe is the former, but this would seem to be a case of the latter.

It's really hard to tell from this message what really happened. Why isn't it plausible that the paper in question was somehow upsetting to one of the dozens of people to whom the author circulated it? It reads to me like this person rejects the very idea that any criticism of their paper could possibly be legitimate.

That's not the impression I get.

First, for this to be a valid case of HR protecting someone who needs protecting, these complaints would have to come from someone who Gebru was managing and therefore have leverage on. I don't know the specifics, but it would stand to reason that she did manage some people, so that possibility can't be excluded for sure.

But from the last paragraph it seems that she did actually try to address the points raised:

> You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored.

I wasn't there, but simply not addressing counter points doesn't fare well in the public's (read: my) eyes.

I don't think modern HR policy really works like that. If one person complains to their HRBP that the speech or actions of another person at the company makes them feel personally attacked, derogated, or establishes a hostile work environment then the company will be forced to take that matter to the second person. HR isn't looking to setup an Oxford debate between persons A and B. They are required to resolve the hostile work environment allegation, else person A has an actionable complaint against the company.

Sure but HR wouldn't share the feedback on her paper and give her an opportunity to update it. Instead they demanded that she retract the paper.

How is it fair or standard to make someone retract a paper because of anonymous and secret criticisms that the researcher isn't even given a chance to address?

That's just how HR works. It's there to protect the business. They get a complaint and a bunch of HR people and lawyers decide what needs to happen, and then they make it happen. It's not a debating society.

Actually, to be fair, anonymous referee reports are absolutely standard in academia, and they may be standard part of Google practice in this field - and if so that might be good practice. Waiving anonymity could compromise the integrity of the intellectual process.

I could maybe understand the anonymity, but I don't see why the substance of the feedback that let to the whole paper getting retracted was kept secret at first. At least give the paper's authors an opportunity to update the paper.

The reasons Jeff Dean cited in his email for the retraction sound like things that could've been fixable.

That scenario still wouldn't be close to what the anonymity of the HR process supposedly exists for. Unless the research paper in question contained a footnote "oh, and BTW, <xy> is stupid".

>> Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, ... haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months).

Based on that I assume that the author was soliciting guidance from PR & Policy but didn't receive any. Someone higher up isn't doing their job effectively.

Oh, I agree, I just found it interesting that the AI Researcher's case was treated the same way. It makes me wonder if the issue was really feedback about the paper and not some other HR complaint.

>That's how it is supposed to work. The thing that sucked about it was that it was impossible to defend myself. I only found out details after the fact because the complaint was anonymously filed on behalf of a co-worker and it was the co-worker that later came to me to explain.

If the complaint is about academic research in a research institute, then there needs to be a different process. It's typically a fairly conservative idea, in fact (see: Chicago Principles [1]).

[1] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...

This is not a research institute, it's a division in a for profit global corporation. I'm frankly disgusted that people who call themselves researchers of the humanities go work in this sort of obvious PR stunt of an "institute".

If you're hired by a private company to do academic work, it may often be reasonable to expect academic norms to apply. I'm not sure why you're disgusted by the idea that people might take jobs at Google, who do quite serious work around AI.

I don’t think it is disgusting to expect that, but it most certainly is naive. There are a set of norms, but they are industrial-research norms, not academic norms and they overlap but are not the same

I agree that it is a perfectly reasonable expectation to have, however there is no notion of a tenure in a private company. To me that is a pretty fundamental distinction (with far reaching consequences) that people often overlook.

> That's how it is supposed to work.

How, exactly, is it supposed to work? If you are asked to respond to allegations, yet those allegations are not shared with you, what are they actually asking you to do?

In the article it says the company wanted the author to retract their paper. Doesn't sound like they were being vague about it.

"Retract the paper" not an allegation though. It is a demand / conclusion of a decision process. It doesn't allow any response/defense, and you're right, they don't seem to have been vague about not wanting any of that.

Something fishy about submitting paper with 1 day notice before its deadline when internal review process takes 2 weeks - she must have known the drill as she published dosens of papers before at G. Approval sounds like somebody's mistake maybe, not awaiting for review feedback for submission and submitting - feels strange. Especially when followed by threat of leaving company if identities of people consulted in review process is not revealed, at the same time being involved in litigation against G while on G's payroll etc.

It's like you have good Silicon Valley espisode just from that, I'm not sure if I buy total innocence here.

Sorry, I was talking about the commenter you were responding to above, who described being asked to respond to allegations without being told what those were.

> That's how it is supposed to work.

Are you sure? Even primary school bullying is better, at least you can see the abuser.

Except she is the abuser.

She is accused of being an abuser. I think we've seen enough fake accusations of various kinds of abuse (i.e. crimes without proof, one person's word vs another's) in the past few years to know better.

Has anyone (except grandparent) accused her of being an abuser? I don't think that is what Google claimed.

There's no evidence that she was accused of abuse. How do you abuse people in an academic paper, anyway? Seems much more likely that someone higher up didn't like what she might have implied in the paper in that it might have clashed with company policy somehow.

EDIT: a bit more info from the NYTimes: "In an interview with The Times, Dr. Gebru said her exasperation stemmed from the company’s treatment of a research paper she had written with six other researchers, four of them at Google. The paper, also reviewed by The Times, pinpointed flaws in a new breed of language technology, including a system built by Google that underpins the company’s search engine." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/technology/google-researc...

tbh I didn't look in details, I guess I mistakenly believed the HN comments...

my original comment was only targeted at the treatment of the (accused) abusers by the corporate HR, nothing with any specific person

Weird, when I complained about a coworker putting their hands down my pants at work, I was dragged into the same room with them without notice.

Fortunately, said person accidentally admitted to doing it, after changing their story a few times, and was summarily fired.

I remember that I read somewhere (maybe here on HN) years ago that HR is like the secret police of police states. Nobody willingfully talks to them, except their bosses. The dynamics of this incident, the secrecy, the lack of care about people, enforce that metaphor.

I wonder what People Ops is, something more about logistics maybe. Still paid by the company, so it can't be on the side of employees.

People Ops is HR.

I wonder how many years it will take them to switch their HR department to PRE (People Reliability Engineers)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com