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Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

In any large company there are lots of process rules and internal deadlines that are unrealistic for whatever reason and don't get followed in practice, leading to many last-minute exceptions. I don't know about the specific case of research papers, but if would not surprise me at all if "one day before the deadline" were a common submission timeframe at Google. Of course that not ideal and probably sucks for the team in charge of reviewing these things, but in that context it wouldn't be such a "damning" piece of evidence against her and the other researchers.

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Submitting for an internal review a day before the deadline is not a common thing in Google Research at all. I worked there and actually was not able to submit a paper to an external conference because the internal deadline was only 3 days away and it was likely we wouldn't be able to get the internal approval ahead of time. The rules were clear and as far as I understood it, people did follow them. If there was any selective enforcement, it would be in her favor if she expected a single day to be enough.

A lot of process rules are unrealistic, but that doesn't mean this one is, and that can't be used to conclude that all internal processes are unrealistic and wouldn't be followed. It's an quite unrealistic statement to make. Most places rely on internal processes to work, and it would be extremely rare for any case of exception.

> Most places rely on internal processes to work, and it would be extremely rare for any case of exception.

That's a pretty broad statement with no supporting evidence. In fact, I'd argue that most large organizations rely on internal processes to be ignored or bypassed just as often as they rely on other processes to be followed.

I've been on teams that required "every feature" to go through a design review. Guess what? Suddenly a lot of what we were already working on stopped being "features" and started being "small bug fixes". Approvals for launches are often sought from the last few approvers just before launch because the list of required approvers is so long, and the VP of engineering isn't going to approve until everyone else has already approved etc... This kind of shit is par for the course at a large company because the alternative is basically a "work to rule" strike.

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