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Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's miscommunication in anyway. Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time.

This feels like a classic privileged tantrum which has blown up in the face because Google refused to bend this time.

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> This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time.

Jeff's email explicitly says the paper was "approved" then submitted, albeit perhaps in one day. The two-week thing might be a policy but would be immaterial if it ended up approved anyway within whatever timeframe. It sounds like a red-herring to emphasize the time-in-advance; in any case the blame, if any, is to be on whoever flipped the approval bit and did not wait for other reviewers (possibly her manager?)

She sends for approval 1 day before the conference deadline, proceeds to submit the paper with conditional approval, and waits for the actual approvals. It is common practice with one side effect: if reviewers don't like certain parts of the paper, they can ask you to withdraw it (since you don't have an option to update the paper at this stage). If the paper was submitted for approval before submitting to the conference though, then they would have some room for back-and-forth engagement with updates on the paper.

Nowhere in the account of the story from the other party anything is specified as "conditional" nor whoever issued the initial approval is mentioned at all. More weirdly, in her account of the story, the "back-and-forth" came from, tada... HR department, which is super weird.

Look, I am not necessarily picking her side in the more general story, but it is apparent this paper submission story in isolation is super weird. It seems feasible that she was in the queue for getting the axe having engaged in prior fights with the company (some mention of threat of lawsuit, etc). I also acknowledge the account of story from her side was quite cherry-picked and actively strategic, if not deceitful, and it does not even seem that Jeff was a direct player in this saga. Looks the highest level person in the loop was Megan, not Jeff, and Jeff is simply dragged into the mix for the opportunity to throw a punch at his reputation. That, however, does not minimize the weirdness of putting the whole thing on this two-week paper submission policy.

I agree with you for almost everything you said. This case is definitely unusual. What I mean by conditional is that the person who approved it initially is not an actual reviewer.

For your last sentence, I think Jeff uses that 2-week policy to state that his position is "technically" right.

I agree -- the passive voice here (intentionally?) makes it impossible to tell whether the external submission was done in good faith:

> Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

If (to the best of her knowledge) she got approval through the correct process, and then an unidentified party opaquely removed the approval after the fact, I think her questions are justified.

I found the quoted sentence to be very unclear, which is surprising because it is the crux of the matter. From it, I can't tell the timeline between the order of when things happened and who did what. Who approved and submitted what and when?

> where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past

I'm curious, is there anything in the posted information above that points to the fact they were able to go around the 2-week limit in the past? Or is that just a guess?

As a side note, I worked there as a run-of-the-mill engineer and the 2 week deadline was respected as far as I can tell. I once couldn't submit a paper to an external conference exactly because there was not enough time to get the internal review and approval.

It could still be miscommunication. It is quite plausibly that she did not have any previous papers fail internal review, and almost certain that she did not have any fail internal review while already submitted to a conference (and thus "published" in Google's POV).

Not understanding Google's policy of retract it now, possibly re-"publish" (resubmit) later after addressing Google's concerns, could very well escalate things, especially since it sounds like this all occurred right as a bunch of people were taking vacation, so ability to get answers to questions/concerns was likely greatly hampered.

> Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time.

If the established practice differs from the nominal process, a no-notice switch to rigorously enforcing the nominal process is for most practical purposes no different than a no-notice change of process. Out of date documentation is at least as common in human processes as software; the real process is what is actually recurrently executed, including how that recurrent practice takes into account position of particular participants.

Also, the description of the official process (much less what is typically done in practice) seems to be in dispute:

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1335017524937756672?s...

> classic privileged tantrum

just... wow. Can anyone point to a man ever being labelled in such a way on HN?

Edit: comparing the number of comment hits for " his tantrum" vs " her tantrum" to the relative numbers for " his " and " her " shows that "tantrum" is, indeed, used 2.5 times as often to describe women as it is for men.

It's not automatically a given that women don't do things that get labelled as tantrums at a higher rate. To demonstrate this is sexist, you would have to show that people judge the same behavior as tantrum or not tantrum at a different rate depending on the specified gender. Which may well be the case, in which case please link the study.

To turn it around: an interesting self-experiment is to try flipping the pronouns in the story and seeing if your internal reaction to it changes.

FWIW, searching for "musk tantrum" gives 24 comments. (Musk is a known nutcase, though, so it may be an unfair comparison.)

The price suspect I think about when I hear "tantrum" is Trump, so I don't know...

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