As a manager, if someone gives an ultimatum, you basically have to fire them. There's no real option; Ben Horowitz covered it somewhere, but the bottom line is that if you yield, you've given up all control.
It doesn't imply that if a manager or VP or CEO concedes the point at issue once, then the person can now go around "putting their badge on the table" and getting their own way over and over again on other issues; probably making a habit of issuing ultimatums (ultimata?) will get you fired PDQ.
One case someone succeeded. The other case some other person resigned.
I guess it only works if you have a good enough reputation that people actually want to you to stick around.
An ultimatum like this is an opportunity for a responsible manager to talk and rethink, but it seems like Google jumped at the opportunity to double-down on their mistake and then send out cowardly emails claiming the employee had actually resigned.
If I were to apply a simplistic rule here, I would actually invert it - if you get to a point where you are sufficiently undervalued that you feel the need to issue an ultimatum, you basically have to resign.
No, an ultimatum is a choice between two options; she offered Google a choice, and they selected. Expecting them to try to carve out a 'third way' is just unrealistic.
I agree that you can frame this many ways; she could have portrayed this as her resigning in protest, instead of blaming Google for being vindictive.
But you're claiming that for a company there shouldn't be a choice, it should just lead to termination.
Accepting a resignation achieves three separate objectives:
-resolves the ultimatum
-discourages future ultimatums
-preserves the status quo ante
In every employment contract there is a balance of things and employee is willing to do and an employer is willing to provide in exchange. If my boss said that they wouldn't pay me anymore I would rightfully respond with an "ultimatum" of "pay me or I quit". That's the ultimatum they respond to every day by paying me; they look at the balance of things I offer, consider what I provide to the company to be adequate, and then give me the money I ask for. The same is true for any ultimatum: you come to the table with one final negotiation; the negotiation of "do you value me? Then you must provide me this". It's an entirely transactional exchange.
Now, ultimatums are general to be discouraged not because they undermine some sort of authority, but because they are a sign that negotiations have broken down on both sides. As a manager, your goal should be to try to reach a compromise far before that point–not only does to hurt your relationship if you don't, even when the ultimatum is "successful" from the point of the employee, but by letting a conflict reach an ultimatum point you're exposing yourself to significant risk and often poor deals. The way to handle an ultimatum is to forestall "pay me x or I quit" with "I'll pay you almost x if you show good performance for the next three months". If you are at the point where the argument is "I'm going to quit" then yes, you may have to carry through with the termination if you think what they provide is less valuable than what they want from you, but you should really be looking at what you did to get to that point instead.
You might think that's exhausting, I certainly do, but that's what we're dealing with here.
Why? Is there something about CRT that threatens your means and way of living, or is it forcing a type of introspection about what minorities have and continue to go through in various forms and machinations you'd rather not entertain?
Anyways I was just explaining to OP that the situation was already about that stuff before any response was considered.
That tactic is not a problem inherent to CRT, that tactic is a problem with how people deploy and weaponize CRT.
In the absence of anything else, yes, people are going to make assumptions.
Edit: I agree that one could incorporate some CRT into their worldview without becoming insufferable, in fact I think lots of normal people have without calling it that. That said, there are a lot of true believers out there, that's who I was talking about.
No, I'm not doing that right now, I am trying to understand your framing of CRT and where your issues lie with it. It would seem those issues lie with how certain people argue CRT, not CRT itself.
Thank you for clarifying that.
They are just that, objections and responses. Which you are free to entertain or not, attempt to unpack and understand or not, respond to with better critiques, objections, observations and rebuttals of your own...or not. But you're not being prevented from making them by anyone or anything short of I suppose committing some sort of crime in order to make that point (that's just an extreme example to stretch the metaphor).
This is the form and function of debate, it is a crucible that boils away impurities of all manner and dialect (for anyone who may be thinking they've heard this one before, yes, I absolutely stole this from an episode of Star Trek).
If you feel you are being stopped from doing any of this, might I ask why and how you have been completely prevented and kept from expressing yourself?
Elite coastal white: Absolutely not threatened. Beneficiary of the system and knows how to navigate all of the social codes.
Less elite or poor white: Takes the bullet that was aimed at the elite white.
Asian: Scores way too high on tests for their % of the population and this is a problem for a worldview that cares about what % of college slots go to which races
Professional class black or latin: Does great, huge beneficiary of CRT activism
Working class black or latin: Invisible and accidentally hurt despite good intentions. CRT proponents tried to pass a referendum legalizing racial discrimination in hiring in California this year, which would have helped professional class POC and probably hurt this class. Fortunately it failed.
EDIT: I removed some cattiness above. Not trying to pull the rug out from under you but I'm rate-limited and wanted to focus on my actual points. I don't think I'm a caricature of 'unwoke' person who never thought about or dealt with these things before.
Is that what you truly believe I did above? That I am labeling you, and think you to be a white supremacist?
If so then allow me to be clear for a moment: I have literally no way of knowing if you're a white supremacist. I have no way of knowing if you're not actually an armada of ants collectively working to actuate the keys of a mechanical keyboard or a Boltzmann brain sending these messages through some strange and baffling form of quantum entanglement. What I am trying to expose is the very real reality that these are uncomfortable conversations, that's just intrinsic to this topic and the climate we are in.
This is fine. It is fine to admit being uncomfortable trying to process where we are, how we got here, and how we got out of it.
But one has to start by looking that beast in the face first in order to reckon with it. For some, that uncomfort gets unwittingly channeled into anger and frustration and they might not even know why or even realize it, but that can be focused, and turned into knowledge and wisdom on the issues. One's just gotta start, like I said: see it for what it is, and working from there.
If you took that to be me associating you with white supremacy, I'll try to find other ways of seeking out clarity from people next time.
Looked like it to me, an uninvolved curious third party.
> the very real reality that these are uncomfortable conversations
Huh, that's what the poster that you replied to said. Weird that you got all up in their grill about it.
Let me just attempt to paraphrase the initiating series of comments, seeking only to illustrate how your comments looked to me, not attempting to do justice to the full meaning of each commenter.
nickff > advice on how the manager should do power dynamics
saagarjha > "strange power dynamic" [followed by lots of savvy commentary, irrelevant to my point here]
free_rms > CRT is all about power dynamics. That's the point. I find it exhausting, but me being exhausted is not the point, the point is that it's about power. [bit of a reductionist take on the parent comment, but probably correct?]
dvtrn > Are you exhausted because, as a beneficiary of oppression, you'd rather the oppression continue? Or is it because you're just too lazy to care about fairness?
free_rms > See, I dunno where you got that I'm an oppressor, where did this threat come from?
Yikes! And free_rms didn't even say that your implication that she/he is an oppressor was wrong, nor were they defensive about it. They just said that it's exhausting! I mean, it would be! Who would not be exhausted by that, whether or not it's a fair accusation!
I mean... now, at the bottom of this thread, you imply that you were seeking to know more, and not trying to imply that the exhaustion is evidence of being a bad person. Okay, I believe you, and nothing in your first comment belies that reading (though some of the intervening comments, hmn not so sure). But I don't think it's the natural read of what you said, at least it wasn't the natural read for me.
Me personally, btw, I dunno what CRT is, so in my privileged ignorance (enabled, of course, by my general white privilege) I'm immune to the exhaustion. I read this whole thread to see if I could learn something useful. Not so far, though I don't regret the time spent.
I dunno, is this helpful? Maybe I'm not being helpful.
Usually the goal of management is to employ explicit, stop-gap communication to avoid having to get to the explicit question of continued employment, because the company has already made a committment to that employment by hiring the employee in the first place. Obviously, most employees want to continue on, also. So it seems nonsensical to view anything save an explicit declaration of resignation as the same. "I would like to discuss what would cause me to resign," is not a declaration of resignation, and the people reading this situation in good faith understand that.
Yeah, and whether intended or not, a "fire anyone who gives you an ultimatum" strategy absolutely creates that vibe.
If you have a top down management style where you employees do not question anything you say, that might be the way to go, but I find in the software business what you want is the opposite. You want all the criticism and feedback you can get from your skilled and knowledgeable work force. If you don't get that, you're wasting the majority of that money in their pay check.
The irony here is that if you have a manager firing someone who presents an ultimatum, then tat in itself is effectively an ultimatum that you are supporting. ;-)
That of course also doesn't mean you accede to every ultimatum. I mean, if your business plan is to do X, you want employees that will help you to do X. If they are getting in the way of X, then you need different employees anyway. Usually though, you and they have already worked out that they want to work with you to help you do X before you hire them.
So the main reason you get ultimatums is because they didn't anticipate and do not like the approach you are taking to get to X. Assuming they are smart and have good judgement (and again, if not, why did you hire them? why are you paying them?), there's a very good chance that there are some problems with your approach and you'd be wise to at least consider that possibility and their perspective. They may be trying to save you from making a terrible mistake, and feel like it is incumbent on them to stop working for you because allowing you to proceed would be working against that goal you hired them for.
It's not uncommon for two people to have very different perspectives on what helps to achieve a company's objective. It's also not uncommon for one of those people to be horribly, horribly wrong. Sure, if you've got an employee who has presented an ultimatum based on horribly wrong judgement, it may make no sense be their employer.
I'll tell you though... just because their a subordinate doesn't automatically mean they are the ones exercising horrible judgement... and the farther you go up the food chain, the more severe the consequences from supporting someone's horrible misjudgement. So having a policy of summarily firing subordinates who present ultimatums both creates the wrong environment to get the best out of your team and terribly harmful for the leadership of your organization.
It is fine if you think that, but accept that you are the weak one here. If you want to err on the side of keeping your job it's fine, but don't pretend you didn't make a trade off.
You do not have to accept anti social behavior but a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom.
It does seem like she judged the situation incorrectly, as she is now complaining, not gloating.
The fact that this has over-flowed into the public sphere is a failure.
If they handled the situation correctly it should have been sorted internally. Whether the person in question spilled the beans at all is proof of that.
Managing people is a skill, and being good at computer science does not make you a good manager. They should know that complaining to social media is an option that someone might take and they should consider that when dealing with these issues.
The fact that we are here discussing anything at all proves the above, It isnt 1995, if someone feels slighted for whatever reason, expect it show up on Twitter, true or not. You don't want to be chasing the narrative with a potentially one sided google doc. No one is giving the mega corp the benefit of the doubt in 2020 which means it is bad PR either way.
"a good manager would have handled this and it would never have reached this point, public or otherwise. This whole episode is failure of management top to bottom."
My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better. We don't know enough to judge whether this could have been sorted out neatly. You seem to think that a clean resolution was possible, and you might be right, or you might be wrong.
I consider that this being discussed in a public sphere a failure regardless of situation as it looks bad on the company no matter what.
If a person feels their only way out is to appeal to the mob then I think the people doing the management have made a misstep. If that person has a history of appealing to the mob then it is still a misstep as that should have been considered when dealing with the issue.
Perhaps they did the calculus and this is the best result, but looking in, it doesn't feel like it.
Let's follow the timeline and discover a root cause:
1. Anonymous feedback being given through HR about a
research paper in AI Ethics to be published in an
academic forum.
2. Manager schedules a meeting where: “it has been
decided that you need to retract this paper by next week..."
without context and without a chance to confront others.
3. She puts an ultimatum to her boss that she can't
continue to work there with conditions like that limit her
freedom to speak and research. Google decides to accept
her resignation.
A. People can just go to HR with criticisms of a research paper
apparently with the intent to sabotage authors, and HR is
apparently fine with being used like this. Or possibly a manager
convinced HR that OKR's trump AI Ethics.
B. They wanted her to say certain things in an academic forum --
which didn't appear to be IP/Trade Secret related, but for
some other reason, which they refused to disclose. This is
in an environment of ethics where papers might become guidelines
for legislation.
C. They're not interested in fixing the issues she brought up,
because they allowed #1 and #2 to happen above.
Should HR be involved in "fixing" a paper in AI ethics? Probably not. Just like you wouldn't take your car to HR to get it repaired. They simply don't have the knowledge to do so.
Then Jeff Dean probably has $20 to $30 million wrapped up in Google, so he's going to take their side on the matter publically, unfortunately. Privately he may have been cussing out HR because of forcing him into the situation. We don't know.
Not saying it's wrong or right, but couldn't she make the exactly symmetric argument?
Ultimatums shouldn't be a frequent occurrence but they are a part of business relationships. It seems a bit unfair for an employer to treat an employee ultimatum as a fireable offense when company policies are sometimes the equivalent.
Employees sometimes decide that an employer ultimatum is offensive and quit sometimes too. But I don't think it is nor should be a set-in-stone rule that an employee that issues an ultimatum should be terminated.
Mostly it's an opportunity to let the staffer know that such ultimates are unacceptable, and that taken literally by her own terms - she could be called out and let go. Which is what happened.
It's very doubtful that if they wanted to keep her, that they couldn't have found terms.
Surely the manager would have bent, indicated the wording was a little bit strong, and found a way forward.
It seems clear they were wavering, she crossed a line and offered them the path out and they took it.
If there were material issues being covered up, there was material suppression of information, this story would look completely different - but there wasn't.
This was the right thing to do by Google in a tricky situation.
I told my company that I was fed up and the only way I would continue in that situation is if I was given a sizable raise because I wasn't paid enough to put up with him. They gave me the raise rather than having me walk. I worked there for several more years after that.
I never issued an ultimatum before or since. Maybe there are people issuing threats all the time, bug it seems to me that people usually do that if they're frustrated but they want to stay at the company. For IT folks with desirable skills it's far easier to just get another job.
A leader is not a friend or an ally, they are just a leader; the leader can be friendly and supportive, but they are still just a leader.
I hope you've said it with the intention to make a point about how dysfunctional certain managers can become, rather than illustrating a belief. If you can't lead other human beings without having control over them, then please hang up your leadership hat and go do something else for a living.
-Another manager.
The narratives from the participants on the actual communication differ on key points relevant to evaluating whether it was really an ultimatum.
"Tuesday Gebru emailed back offering a deal: If she received a full explanation of what happened, and the research team met with management to agree on a process for fair handling of future research, she would remove her name from the paper. If not, she would arrange to depart the company at a later date, leaving her free to publish the paper without the company’s affiliation."
I read that as an explicit ultimatum.
https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-ai-ethics-researcher-s...
"X is the lowest price I can sell for, take it or leave it" "How about X-10?" "Done"
"I want to read 5 books!" "You can either read one book before bedtime or go to bed now" "How about 2 books?" "Okay, but then straight to bed!"
Putting the ultimatum in e-mail form really raises the stakes, because there may be other people CC-ed or BCC-ed, and any response could later be weaponized.
If the relationship was already troubled, anything like an ultimatum is an opportunity for the manager to be rid of all their troubles.
The level of the threat also comes into play, and more severe threats increase the risk/tension. If the guardian had threatened to disown the child rather than send them to bed, we would read the situation differently.
They way this was handled doesn't make any of the involved parties look good.
There’s tons of issues I wouldn’t compromise on, and better leave the company if I had to. Does that mean I’ll be fired the very second these subjects become remotely relevant and/if I make clear where my boundaries are ?
Given that, at least in Timnit's narrative, the email included a request to discuss the issue in person when she returned from vacation, I don't think that the "ultimatum" characterization is uncontroversially accurate for the immediate case.
Sometimes the person making an ultimatum is right, sometimes they're wrong. It shouldn't be as adversarial as viewing yielding as weak. Insisting on always "winning" is in my view the weak position.
Additionally, firing someone is not always legal in some countries, even after an ultimatum, assuming they pick the wording of their ultimatum carefully (e.g. "I may very well resign if/unless [desired condition]") to retain control over whether they will later finalize their conditional decision to resign.
As one example, in Quebec, employees who don't qualify as "senior management" and who have been employed at a company there for an uninterrupted period of at least 2 years cannot legally be fired without what the law considers good cause, period, not even if the company gives them a notice period or pay in lieu. Any alleged noncompliance or misconduct that falls short of the most extreme examples must be first dealt with a graduated process of progressively stronger discipline, and it must be possible for someone to recover from that instead of having the outcome of the process as a foregone conclusion. There is a government tribunal to which an aggrieved party can appeal if they aren't happy with the outcome, with the power to order remedies including back pay and even reinstatement.
Similar things are found in many European countries, though certainly not all.
Of course, ultimatums with more definitive wording like "I resign if/unless [condition that the listener has control over]" -- note the absence of hesitating words like "may very well" -- can irreversibly become an effective resignation worldwide, based on choice of the listener on whether to satisfy or reject the condition.
This doesn't seem logical to me. I don't doubt there are indeed scenarios where this is true, but as an absolute, this doesn't resemble my real world experience at all. It seems like kind of the opposite of how human interaction should work.
I think that statement presumes some degree of unreasonableness. Honestly, I value having employees that have principles and clear boundaries, if for no other reason than I can rest assured that when I'm not observing/involved, those principles and clear boundaries are still there. Now, if those principles are, "I won't accept that paying me gives you any kind of authority over what I do", then you know that's not going to work out for anyone involved. However, if it is something like, "You can't pay me enough to do X", and I have no desire for them to do X, I'm really okay with that.