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Comment by mstg | Hacker News Reader

Considering her previous attacks to anyone who disagrees with her and her previous public feuds, I'd say people may be afraid of being stamped as a racist/sexist because they had to reject her paper. She was a disruptive employee who threatened her employer and the employer didn't accept it. Why is Google obliged to keep her employed?

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There are many people in SV that are very quick to bring up race, gender and diversity whenever a dispute arises. It's becoming predictable to the point of being problematic.

As a POC myself, I understand there is a time and place for this.. and it definitely isn't all the time, publicly, on social media.

I fear that people like Timnit are inappropriately wielding justice rhetoric to benefit their own careers, at the cost of actual injustices that may occur to others. This is just my opinion.

That is very sad indeed. I am a second degree immigrant and active in politics in Norway. This behaviour is actually limiting our abilities to work towards eliminating real discriminatory behaviour. I've seen it first hand where someone has accused someone else of racism, when it was there own fault. I guess it benefits them, because they get their way but it also creates a divided and toxic society. Working with people like that is also very tiring and stressing.

The funny thing is she isn’t going to be harmed by this. In fact if she felt like she needed a different job this is one way to do it. I personally would hate the stress, but some people like it.

One thing I rarely see is people talking about her email where she said “give me a and b or else I’ll leave” - paraphrasing slightly. This isn’t in dispute, she readily admits this.

What ... is an employer supposed to do with this? Also she’s a manager, so there are extra lame legal crap. It feels like they could have not taken her bait - which sounds like hyperbole to me - but I guess they did, and do they have to?

I can’t say about any of the review things, if she is being over reviewed or not, could be. Demanding to know everyone who looked at her work so she could... wage a Twitter war of destruction, well I could understand not wanting to do that. I mean if I was asked to review her paper, I would decline. Who would get into that?

That's an angle I had not considered. She has a reputation for retaliation using -isms and those reviewers were able to successfully ask their employer for protections against a historically confrontational coworker. Google as a company takes the hit, as it is in their great interest to prevent their less-vocal employees from getting raked into a public fight.

Exactly. That would be very unfair to those employees. How she treated Yann LeCun and how she now publicly bashes Jeff Dean it is no doubt that those employees would also be named and shamed publicly. She threatened to resign and her resignation was accepted. Don't talk the talk if you can't walk the walk :)

My opinion of Jeff Dean has risen significantly after this. At least, he had guts to correct the mistake they made in her hiring.

Google still hired people like that. They only have themselves to blame at that point. What did they expect?

This is hardly the first time it's happened at Google and won't be the last.

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