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Comment by andyxor | Hacker News Reader

Timnit was a bully, the definition of 'toxic employee', so glad Google had the balls to let her go, PR hit be damned, it means they still have true leaders

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my complaint is merely that they continue to insist she resigned. She didn't- she was terminated without cause.

I personally think Timnit shouldn't have been hired in the first place, but if they were going to fire her, they needed to follow the path, which takes about 1-2 years, of establishing that she was not a good employee for Google.

Thank you for following up with some nuance. I did read her email, and do disagree with your stance that she did not quit, and presumably Googles legal team did as well. But I appreciate your thoughts.

Why shouldn't Timnit have been hired according to you?

According to her, she was recruited by Jeff at a conference specifically to work on improving Google's machine learning equity. As part of hiring somebody, I don't just meet them at a conference and read their papers. I interact with their prior employment network and read their social media. I think if Jeff had paid any attention to her tweets before she was hired, he would have thought twice about bringing her on.

I wonder if anyone's compared Timnit's firing to Apple's firing of Antonio García Martínez. It sounds like both are politically opposite versions of the same mishire situation.

I agree, even if she was in the right - she was and is still a bully. Just go on Twitter and examine her feed which gets updated literally every 5 mins everyday for 10 hours a day. Toxic, fuming and deeply disrespectful to others. She spews so much hatred on Twitter, it is unimaginable why anyone would hire such a personality. She wanted to become martyr and she indeed has.

Here is more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386

I haven't really followed this since the initial blowup. Did more information come out about her conduct there?

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