That's... still a firing, no? What it's not, is a lay-off.
That Chatterjee was fired is seemingly not in dispute, but there was a lot of disagreement on HN over whether Gebru was fired or quit (she offered an ultimatum, which Google accepted.)
I spoke to a wide range of managers at Google afterwards and the most commonly expressed opinion was "I'm amazed that Megan did that, it normally takes at least a year to fire individuals". What Jeff did led to a significant exodus of Google researchers (including some very preeminent ones) and Zoubin has to do all the cleanup.
"I resign if you don't do X."
"We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
This is a resignation the way I understand it.
> "We're not doing X, we accept your resignation."
This approach from her managers can be criticized because it immediately closes the door on the possibility of her changing her mind and walking things back.
However, it sounds like she was causing a lot of internal problems so perhaps they were already working to get rid of her. Accepting the implied resignation may have just been expedient, and saved the company a bunch of severance money.
The real question for your framing is: Should Google have to say, “ok that’s it for real this time, no take-backsies”? I think that google should never have to say this any time someone says “or else I quit” because the threat of quitting tells us that they’re not willing to continue operating within Google. I honestly don’t see the reasoning behind drawing the line anywhere else.
The George Costanza scenario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW78swzn_Bs
Let’s think of a hypothetical. A student says “I’m going to quit eventually in order to attend classes” and the manager says “I accept your resignation, you are fired”. This generally seems more like a firing because somebody was going to resign, more than it seems like a resignation no?
In the Gebru case, Gebru didn’t express WHEN she was going to resign, and that’s google’s issue. Maybe Gebru was, for all Google knew, threatening to quit in a month or a year or in 10 years. Gebru never actually made the time of her proposed resignation clear. As such, the law doesn’t consider to actually have made a legally binding resignation.