That's only the conditional part of the ultimatum, not the threat. (the "X" in "Do X, or I'll do Y").
The exact phrasing she used is (probably - IANA employment lawyer) very important. If she said something like "Do X, or I'll have to reconsider if I want to continue working here", that doesn't sound like an ultimatum. But if she said "Do X, or I'm going to quit on December 5th", then that definitely sounds like an ultimatum you're begging the company to take you up on.
That tweet is the "conditions" part of the ultimatum. The other part was the "consequences" if the conditions are not met (the consequences were that she would resign at a to-be-determined date).
When you threaten to resign the other person may decide they don't want the headache of having you around.
She had already sent an email asking other people to stop their work on diversity. It's at best naive to think that Google (or any employer) would give her a few more weeks to lower morale or cause trouble.
If someone says "if you don't fix this thing I will look for work elsewhere" that doesn't mean that you can say "I accept your resignation." If you want that person gone immediately, you have to fire them.
Edit: if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired.
> if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired.
I can't speak for California, but in my state, if you are fired and not laid off[1], you don't get unemployment benefits. I've anecdotally heard this is also the case in California. However, I've also heard that many tech companies state they will not dispute unemployment claims when fired (my company certainly says that), so people in these "privileged" companies often do collect unemployment even when fired.
Generally, if you are fired for poor performance, or poor conduct, you are not eligible for unemployment benefits. If the company is eliminating your position or downsizing, then you are.
There might be specific criteria that needs to be met for each, so details matter. My guess is the reason my employer does not dispute unemployment claims is they've calculated that the cost to dispute them exceeds the amount they expect their unemployment insurance contributions to go up.
I've stated before that I don't want to work at a job without intending to actually leave the job or having a last date. In those cases I was venting and was burnt out. I've even admitted this to managers I could trust to talk about how to unburn me instead of declaring I've 'resigned', because I bring a lot of value to teams I'm on.
That's a completely separate issue as to whether or a set of statements all mean the same thing. I entirely agree that there was serious unprofessional behavior in venting out to a listserv of direct reports. But that doesn't mean all the criticisms laid out are correct, such as "saying X means Y".
So, that's getting fired for cause, maybe, but not resigning. Google's official story is that she resigned. You have to stretch things pretty far to say that taking an action that might get you fired is the same as resigning. Resigning is handing in your badge and laptop and leaving the building. Getting fired is being called into a 4PM Friday meeting with HR and they escort you from the building afterwards.
I am not really even sure how meaningful an email telling your coworkers to stop working on their projects is. It really depends on the tone. When I was at Google, I used the internal social media extensively. I am sure at some point someone said something like "I'm really depressed about how my project is going" and I would reply with something like "You should join my team! I have a req!" That's technically telling someone to stop working on their project, but is a completely acceptable thing to do.
Ultimately the exact details matter, and we don't have them.
The key here is that you were venting to 'managers you could trust about feeling burnt out'. If you were talking to a manager who didn't see this as just 'venting', nothing stops them from accepting your resignation.
Ridiculously untrue. This specific case aside, if you are a manager and see all of these as equivalent statements, it's a pretty clear sign you don't care about your team.
I've never regarded those as equivalent. Some are equivalent to others, but they range from expressing displeasure about your job to flat out quitting.
It's fuzzy. If someone in a heated dispute says, "I resign, effective some time in the next month", what do you do? Keep them on until you agree in a date? Even if they give a date like "Dec 31", do you let them keep all their access to sensitive company data, or you lock them out for security's sake and settle the legal and payroll paperwork separately?
All states are at-will states but not all employment in an at-will state is at-will (at-will states allow and make default at-will terms, but specific employment contracts may still set other terms.)
> If someone says "if you don't fix this thing I will look for work elsewhere" that doesn't mean that you can say "I accept your resignation."
I think you'll find from a legal standpoint, it does.[1] At least I know that they teach in negotiations courses that any time you make a counteroffer, the original offer is legally null and void. So if I give you an employment offer that is good for 30 days, and you counter the following day with a higher salary, then I legally can say "No, and we will not hire you" (i.e. the 30 days clause became invalid once you gave me a counteroffer).
This isn't exactly the same, but we are at least taught to treat it similarly.
Also, she didn't merely say "I will look for work elsewhere". She said something to the effect of "Let's meet to decide my end date." There's a significant difference.
[1] Although being an at-will job, the legality is rather moot.
That’s about whether pay is owed. I’m certain that Google did not simply stop paying her checks, but told her to go home and that the remainder of her employment would be paid out. I suspect that’s enough for the law to agree that she was terminated voluntarily.
In that case an employee gave a resignation date of 11/15. Employer cut off the employment two weeks early and court ruled that it shouldn't be considered a resignation, but instead a termination by employer.
What's the parallel between those facts and the dispute here? Just not seeing any applicable precedent.
> In that case an employee gave a resignation date of 11/15. Employer cut off the employment two weeks early and court ruled that it shouldn't be considered a resignation, but instead a termination by employer.
> What's the parallel between those facts and the dispute here?
That it's, at best for Google, the exact same thing, except that Google gave Gebru, in writing, an explicit, non-resignation reason for the early separation, making it even less disputable that it was a firing and not merely accepting the (disputed) resignation? Paraphrased most favorably to the Google management narrative, Gebru said “do X or I will conduct discussions around setting a date on which I will resign” and Google management said “we accept your resignation and, further, based on an internal group e-mail you sent after this dispute started which we find unacceptable, we are ending your employment immediately.”
The difference between being fired and resigning isn't moot, even in an at-will job where the employer can fire you without cause or explanation. How/why you departed can affect your severance, unemployment insurance, and other financial considerations. In some industries, it may also affect the report submitted to an industry regulator.
If you ever say something like this and you are fired, you should not be surprised. There’s basically never a reason to do this. If it’s something that your manager can fix, and you’re valued, you wouldn’t use an ultimatum. You’d have enough influence and mutual respect to have a conversation about it. If it’s something they can’t fix, your ultimatum is useless anyway.
Otherwise, this is an all-in bet, and you need to be fully committed to leaving before doing it.
Yes, actually, it does. That's how the disjunctive "or" works.
If I tell Perl to
do_the_thing() || die();
then the Perl interpreter is well within its rights to say "Well, doing the thing doesn't work, so I am terminating your script." Indeed, that is what one would expect it to do.
Yes.
But they said "we accept your resignation" without waiting to see if she'd follow through on the ultimatum, and without respecting her stated plan to work on an end date.
When you put an ultimatum forward, you must expect being called on it and lose. She got called on it and lost. The least she could do is walk away with some honor and walk her talk. Not only she doesn't even seem to be able to do that, but she keeps playing victim...
AIUI, she is still on the payroll, but has just been restricted from accessing anything. There's no law (at least -in the US) that says that if an employee gives their 2 weeks notice, that you have to let them keep coming in for those 2 weeks. You can just give them 2 weeks of salary and tell them to immediately leave. From one of the leaked emails, it seems like she would have been given her 2 weeks if she hadn't written a rambling screed imploring other employees to stop working on certain projects.
That'd be smart; you can meet her timeline so it's officially a resignation, but with all the benefits of ending the relationship that day.
I've seen people walked out the day they give notice, but I assume they weren't technically fired, and paying out their two weeks is the right thing to do.
> without waiting to see if she'd follow through on the ultimatum
Sending an email to your boss saying "I'll resign unless X" is a serious ultimatum. You need to be prepared to not have a job when at the end of it, and you were the one who initiated the process. I'm not too concerned with if she technically should have been given a chance to take it back. Don't send an email threatening to resign, lose your job, then say "actually, I was fired."
> and without respecting her stated plan to work on an end date.
You don't really want to let an employee already sending inappropriate emails to a wide audience have another week to send more.
I've been in a professionally self-destructive place before and I didn't realize it until later. 100% speculation here, but I wouldn't be shocked if she had a death wish and was hoping for some version of this outcome. Could be frustration with work, covid depression, or something else.
My uninformed interpretation is that Google wanted her gone and jumped at the first opportunity they got. If they wanted her around I don't think the reasons they've given for letting her go would have been dealbreakers.
Ethics work will inherently raise questions that challenge a company's narrative or image. Clearly both employer and employee had conflicting opinions on how to deal with said work. You can portray any large corporation negatively given the right thesis and research. I have the same hunch that this was a long-running contention between the two sides—one side had enough and fired the other; the other side went public to retaliate. Sure, you can add nuance, but I don't think it's much more complicated than that.
Technically speaking, how is that a problem? If your theory is right that Google was looking for a reason to fire her, then she shouldn't have given them a 'legal' one. At the end of the day, it boiled down to - she gave them an ultimatum and they called her bluff (this has nothing to do with whether her reasons were right or wrong; if her reasons were right and she really didn't want believe she could work under such conditions, then the focus of her statement and public debate should be about that and not whether Google fired her or she resigned.
The debate about her being fired or resigning is a debate about who to believe about what led up to it. People who think she resigned see her saying she was fired as evidence of a victim complex and publicity seeking. People who think she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.
Why would other employees be knowledgeable in the employment relationship between someone and a company? Unless the employees are in the direct management chain, or HR or something, aren't they just parroting what Timnit is claiming?
There is a difference between not having evidence and not providing evidence.
My point wasn't even about the truthiness of the claims of either side, but rather that if party A claims X, and then parties B and C just repeat the claims without being able to add anything - that's not news. That's just a person having allies who believe their claims.
If Microsoft chimed in and said Timnit actually resigned, no one would write an article on that (besides for how bizarre of a statement that would be by another company), because no one expects Microsoft to be apprised of what happens between Google and its employees.
Just wanted to say that I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago (I'm sure you've all read what happened already). I have always been and will remain a strong supporter of her scientific work to make sure that AI becomes a positive force for the minoritized, as well as her generosity and tireless actions to lift the voices of the silenced ones. She taught me a lot and still is. I stand by you, Timnit. I also stand by the rest of my team who, like me, was stunned and is trying to make sense of all this. In particular the Ethical AI team, but also the broader Brain Research team.
I mean that's a pretty big endorsement and something people here should think about.
Also I read the highlights of the paper linked here and it seems fine and reasonable. These are reasonable questions to ask. Sure we can mitigate the cost of training these models with green energy or finding new optimization./compression techniques etc... but that doesn't mean that with ever evolving data volumes we will ever fully mitigate that. Bitcoin for all its merit consumes a lot of energy. Is that more than USD or something else?
Another thing to consider is that AI right now has a rich get richer winner take all dynamic. We have titans battling it out for NLP supremacy. Deep mind just revolutionized protein folding which has direct implications into biomedical research and technology. Small academic labs are at an extreme disadvantage unless they collaborate with big tech. Interestingly physics research evolved in a similar way with large particle colliders and telescopes started up. So you can make a direct analogy to that, that the basic research can only be done with million dollar investments. That's an ethical question. GPT-3 trained on misinformation would make pizza gate look tame in comparison. So there are huge social implications.
Even real datasets collected from society and social data will have implicit and explicit biases in them. There are huge ethical concerns with data, data collection and with the interpretations AI models will make.
Your credit score, your social credit score, a company that refuses to hire you because a chat bot has labeled you subversive.
The TSA/DHS blanket banned people from flying and gave no feedback or transparency into why. It took members of Congress to get some people redressed.
There's another Googler who needs to be fired. Anyone who uses phrases like "minoritized" (that's not a word) or "the silenced ones" is quite clearly fighting the culture war and not even slightly interested in the norms of management. What kind of a manager "stands by" someone who is as completely poisonous as this woman is? What kind of "generosity" did she show to her colleagues when she demanded their identities and called them racist on Twitter?
Google needs a massive clear-out. People aren't doing their jobs anymore there, they've become so obsessed with fictional narratives about non-existent racism and sexism.
Exactly the case. Plus, I'd trust someone like Jeff Dean who is accomplished and does not have a history of crying racism and "microagressions" at the slightest beurocratic issue. There are already a couple of posts on reddit from ex-colleagues who explained what it was like working with people like her. People are tired of "woke"ness.
Looking at someone's history is a good indicator. Hasn't she already threatened to sue Google barely a few months into her job? If so, I don't blame them for letting her go at the soonest possible time. She gave them the opportunity, and it was only smart of them to take it.
From what I have read about the affair, e.g. the latest "setting the record straight" blog post linked from the article, I have strong reasons to believe that the paper in question:
1. Did in fact go through and pass the internal approval process that he implied it didn't.
2. Was then subjected to a second, intransparent "review" that is not customary practice at Google.
3. The results of that "review" were presented to the author as a decree (which also is not customary practice).
4. And when the author subsequently protested that she would not work under such rules (as well she should) that was taken as a pretext to let her go — without even involving her direct manager.
Under those circumstances, Dean's response is misleading and evasive, a practice often characterized as "gaslighting" or, in the term that the grandparent comment ridiculed, a "micro-aggression".
It's not about whether you're a "white dude", it's what rules you set for "white dudes" vs. "non-white non-dudes".
Those 4 points are all theories of yours - I wonder - where does Timnit's previous employment at Google and published papers fit into the theory? Why would they publish multiple of her papers on basically the same exact subject, but then decide they need to stop her at all costs for this paper?
Did Jeff Dean think Timnit was a white dude and so let her publish, but when he found out she was a brown woman, he said he cannot stand for this?
> Why would they publish multiple of her papers on basically the same exact subject, but then decide they need to stop her at all costs for this paper?
You tell me. If they were truly on "basically the same exact subject", there can't really be a scientific explanation for some to be publishable and others not, can there?
> If they were truly on "basically the same exact subject", there can't really be a scientific explanation for some to be publishable and others not, can there
Or, your theories are flawed in some manner and don't actually capture the truth. I'm asking you how previous behavior would fit into the theories that you yourself believe.
This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Obviously the individual who was let go loves the fame but I see most news website are pretty much looking for some sensational story to run mainly because doing more thorough analysis doesn't pay for itself. That's the problem.
I don't think it's as innocent as "loves the fame" ... there is a greater theme in our society regarding the influence of public opinion; and how influencers are abusing that in politics/positions of power.
The media of course enables it, which I think is a sign of a growing, large scale, rational fragility across society (demand controls their publication, there is a large demand for this type of information)
FB gets criticized a lot in HN but Twitter isn't. IMO Twitter is absolutely the worst platform for things like these because of the prevalent mob culture. It is very easy to organise people using your influence and they can easily hound out any dissenting opinion.
I will have to search for them now but I saw people doxxing some of the current Googler's identities if they agreed with the resignation. This is extremely toxic.
Even the old media seems to love Twitter and it escapes FB level of scrutiny.
Completely agree. I'd say, historically speaking, that Facebook became a constrained negative environment while twitter was more of an open, entertaining, and free environment (and less tied to actual life/society). This isn't the case any longer.
Facebook is now far less egregious & more of a soft environment to socialize with people you personally know. Bubbles/pockets of societal function and some large-influence which is lesser enabled than the prior.
Twitter is a platform that justifies large societal movement through "influential information".
(I don't have the best english to articulate here)
Just a nudge from a stranger: Please take a moment to consider the extremely difficult position "the individual" may be in, the frustrations leading up to this, and the possible negative impact this has on their career that they had to weigh before naively thinking that they "love the fame." that's gamergate mentality in action and will work against you.
even if i agreed with you about some of those points (and i worked at google 2013-2015, internally criticized many of their processes, and was lectured about "my place" at google), everything you said is independent of reading into someone's motives. you're arguing with a point i am not making at all and trivializing the abuse timnit subjects herself to in going public with this.
> Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG
FAANG employs a tremendous number of technology workers, are key drivers the industry-wide technical agenda formally (standards bodies) and informally (open source project management, areas of active research), are often the first line of serious education for new workers, and the fallback for workers when riskier undertakings fail.
If anything far more of their internal management (project and people) processes should be scrutinized.
If we were talking about Linus Torvalds, Jim Keller or Raja Koduri someone who is actually an industry driver then sure. These are individuals who have had considerable impact on a piece of technology whose names I can recognize for the tech they built.
I have no idea what or how this individual matters at all or the tech that she is relevant in. Not everyone at FAANG are industry leaders, and there are several cogs just like at IBM. I fail to see why I should care for every individual starling who can't stand out other than the company they work for.
This random individual along with James Damore and that random FB grad are not on the same level.
Your arguments tell me more that FAANG should be broken apart. Public attention and scrutiny would achieve nothing in affecting Google's decision making here.
In articles discussing Raja, Jim, Linus and their various moves. The first paragraph introduces into great detail about their impacts relating to their contributions to x86, GPUs or the kernel.
This individual's highlight appears to be her employment at Google. She is an AI ethics researcher? So what makes her important or an 'industry leader'?
Why should I care and why is Google's dirty laundry here in the open?
Because leaders are... leaders. Google doesn't exist in a vacuum, take crazy jobs interviews for example, it started in companies like Google and now even the smallest startup will make you go through Google like interviews.
Just the fact that we're all talking about it proves it's bigger than just internal affairs. If it was as clear cut as you seem to imagine nobody would talk about it
I'm pretty sure you know the name Jeff Dean, who seems to have taken a personal role in this drama.
It's rather telling that your entire perspective is to demonize and diminish Gebru, who you don't even bother to name in your criticisms.
Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru. These aren't even remotely comparable situations.
Public attention and scrutiny is why we're talking about this, and have been, for a week now. It's pretty head in the sand to think this doesn't have impact.
I didn't know who Jeff Dean is, other than the fact that he is another AI researcher at Google. My work involves low-latency network drivers, not at all the field of AI.
Fine, there are AI stars too, but the article could lead about what they have done and why they are important no? A discussion involving Jim Keller would lead to his contributions to x86, Apple A10 series, Tesla chips and Zen.
I don't want a hand wavy discussion over ethics and AI, I want an explanation as to what they have contributed to the field that justifies why their opinion matters.
>Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru.
I am trying to establish that these random individuals don't matter to me. They are not known for their tech contributions but for the dirty laundry being exposed to the public.
These individuals from an external perspective seem to be known for being employed at Google and for some public controversy that cannot be influenced externally.
My point is why are these individuals in the news? Why should I care? They aren't industry leaders and from my perspective appear about as important as 'GE fires engine tester'.
Jeff Dean invented BigTable that powers search, was a main author of the Google Mapreduce paper, and invented the tech that took Google translate from 85% accuracy to 96%. He is a big deal, bigger than linus, keller, kodhuri combined. The latter 3 make incremental changes whereas Dean is known for revolutionary discoveries (okay not StuckTable).
Because she is was an ethicist in google, an AI company. People are very afraid that google fired her because they don't care about bias and unethical use in AI.
So, for us that care about google's use of AI and ethical use of it, it's important to understand what happened.
Then surely the article focus should be described and focused on precisely the issues raised in the controversial paper no?
> She tweeted Wednesday that Google had abruptly fired her after a disagreement about a research paper that scrutinized possible bias in large-language AI models, which the company asked her to retract.
The article should be focusing on the disagreement here.
Instead the article focuses on employment which I don't care about.
This is not logical at all and seems either completely hysterical or deliberately malicious.
If Google fires a janitor, does that mean they don’t care about a clean work environment? If they fire a VP of engineering, does that mean they don’t care about engineering?
No, it means that person didn’t work out. And considering how she is handling it by going nuclear with the press and the twitter mobbing, I for one am not the least bit surprised.
The main ethical problem of AI is it quantifying every possible metric that can be attached to individuals and resulting reduction of said subject. Talk about bias, which is mostly inevitable, is a cheap distraction at best, even though AIs will mostly be stereotype generators in the beginning. It still isn't even good or foundational criticism about ethical AI programs.
That said, I don't believe that decisions about application of AI can be made internally at Google. These are basically PR jobs that come with the product.
It definitely was the hiring when HR was targeting SJW's to show how "progressive" the company is. What those employees end up doing is causing tantrums and playing victim then suing their employers. Now that the employers are finding out how expensive and destructive those people are, they'll actively avoid hiring them.
Much of what was regarded as “woke SJW nonsense” 15 years ago is now completely mainstream. I’m sure even you — who clearly has some preoccupation with progressive social thought as you post on about “SJWs” multiple times per day on average — have some beliefs that would have been considered insufferably woke and obnoxious by people like you in 2003.
The things that I believe are real social justice have no hint of becoming mainstream anytime in the next 20 years. SJW, in the connotation, is a term reserved for extremists, and there's no shortage of them, and they deserve the same scrutiny as any other political extremist.
No not really. Just as I probably wouldn't care if Boeing fired one of their plane testers or Rolls Royce for one of their engine testers.
It's 1 employee out of 120k. There are probably other ethicists in AI at Google.
Also the story seems to have devolved more specifically to employment rather than talking about the specific ethical issues relating to Google's language models.
Yes because the individual internally can see a better picture as to why the disagreement has occurred and why it's important. More importantly, the individuals within the company can influence the decision much better.
None of that is useful here which from an external perspective looks like a employment dispute. She isn't exactly doing a Snowden here.
Even if the individuals internally view it as problematic, I am not gonna stop using Android, Google or Youtube. What are these individuals expecting to achieve from airing the dirty laundry in public?
Are they expecting people's opinions to have changed at all about Google?
> This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites.
When the triggering event involved a collaboration involving non-Google parties, that became pretty much impossible.
> Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Maybe you shouldn't, but not everyone outside of Google is you. Other people in the field of AI ethics might want to know, because Google’s practices when it comes to employee research have a significant impact on how publications from Google authors are approached. And people who might consider working at Google, especially in the same field, have an interest in information about the working environment, positive or negative.
Can I ask with the upmost politeness what is going on? I genuinely went into this considering that this was someone who is essentially decrying that normal work difficulties are sexism or racism. But I'm now finding that the procedure claimed actually essentially doesn't exist or if it did it was never enforced until now. What is going on?
If this was an issue of the researcher unprofessionally airing her frustrations on a listserv with direct reports that's one thing. It's another thing to say being upset at all was an overreaction because the treatment was totally normal and that her frustration was a resignation, when in fact, none of that is true in any good faith interpretation.
The reality is that none of us have any idea what's going on. There's a bunch of employee-said/employer-said going on, with leaks to the press and rants on Twitter, but nobody has the whole picture. Plenty of people are willing to make guesses based on the fragments they have combined with their own biases, though.
Searching in HN under "Gebru" (the employee's last name) pulls up a bunch of past threads.
The other bit I'd add is Google will be silent externally for legal reasons, and not to read into that. The internal messaging was likely truthy and omitted things. Timnit Gebru also omitted some important things in her twitter posts.
1) If you ask me, this is a story about an influential technology company, one whose approach to business has an outsized influence on the entire industry, has unethically fired an employee while making mis-statements to cover it up.
2) Others will say: this is about a ethicist being unfairly treated with different standards because of her gender and race, a microcosm of what it is like to be a minority race and/or female in the tech industry.
3) Still others will say: This is about an employee who disrupted the workplace. She rudely interacted with her colleagues and prominent names outside of the industry (Y. Lecun). She prevented collaboration by making spurious claims of sexism and racism.
4) Another line of thought that is a variant of #1: This is about an employee who did not follow company rules and processes. She was fired as a result. The statements privately and publicly about "resignation" were an attempt to not publicly disparage her
Did I miss any others? With a nod to the Rashomon Principle, your interpretation of these events depends on your perspective.
> This is about an employee who disrupted the workplace. She rudely interacted with her colleagues and prominent names outside of the industry (Y. Lecun). She prevented collaboration by making spurious claims of sexism and racism.
Sounds like a perfect fit for Google's new Chief Legal Officer. Or maybe SVP Social!
I feel strongly that it was one particular option that you listed, but I think this is a fair assessment. Wonder why it's being downvoted (maybe I'm missing something from this story too).
This is a very charged subject, akin to a political discussion. I am not surprised if it gets more downvotes. That is why I made an anonymous account. Pick the "wrong" side and now all your opinions are suspect.
My take: Google and the researcher had some issues around internal review of a paper that could be perceived as criticism of Google. Google ordered her to withdraw the paper from review at an external event. The researcher demanded to know names of the internal Google reviewers. The researcher said she will resign on a later date if her demands are not fulfilled. Google did not reveal the internal reviewers and let her go immediately.
5) A variant of 4. She gave notice. Google must have put her on gardening leave. Firing her would just give her a chance to sue. Google wouldn't make that mistake.
I'm aware of that and, to my bafflement, the paper isn't even that bad! It looks like fairly bog-standard "huh, ok" work. I have no idea why it would be requested to be retracted completely with no ability to simply revise/resubmit or to allow the academic peer review procedure, a move that from what I understand from other googlers is completely out of line with the norm there.
>>"the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms."
It's terrifying that these are the kind of views people in high places of major tech companies have. And that we are entrusting our tools of societal communication to those who see themselves as fighting in a culture war.
Basically google (edit: I should say executives at Google, 1500 other googlers have signed a petition supporting her) wanted her to retract her (and 7 co-authors) ethics paper, wouldn't give her clear reasons or work with her on it, and then fired her when she objected to that and other ways it wasn't living up to it's commitments.
She not only objected, but made it a deal breaker. She clearly said that she will resign on a later date if her demands are not meet. Google let her go immediately.
google hired someone solely for their physical characteristics and then got shocked when they used their identity against google and bit the hand that feeds.
Hard to understand this without the right intel from the management team. A big puzzle piece is missing. Let's see if there're going to be any insiders sharing more info.
When I worked at Google, there was always this sinister edge to all corporate events and communications and their culture, in general.
It was like that Star Trek episode - everything is paradise unless you commit a transgression. Any transgression, even minor, would result in your termination. In the Star Trek episode, it meant death, at Google, luckily, it just meant an involuntary "resignation".
Is there a large corporation that is not an enormous faceless entity resembling 'Big Brother'? All it takes is one person above you in the corporate ladder to not like you and you're done for. They could dislike you for any number of reasons including trivial aspects of your personality or a one off comment that got interpreted wrongly.
Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by "transgression", but when I worked at Google the following are lists of things that were not considered transgression:
* Saying a high profile project is botched, mismanaged, and doomed to fail. (Anyone remember google+?)
* Mocking and criticizing the SVP who led the project.
* Rejoicing in the departure of the said SVP.
* Talking about one of the founders having an affair. (Well, to be fair, the news broke outside first.)
* Memes disagreeing with company decisions, including one that literally said "What the fuck are you doing" for firing someone.
* And, last but not least, complaining that the quality of microkitchen has gone downhill since $(the year you joined).
No clue what part of Google you worked at but that's the exact opposite of the company I worked at. Non-eng lived in fear of eng employees because the latter were widely seen as unfireable regardless of how bizarre or problematic their behaviour could become.
There's was an incident a while back where 2 engineers were joking between themselves about a "big dongle" and the woman seated in the row ahead heard it, turn around, took their picture and posted it online. It ruined everyone's life including hers. I thought we learned from this that airing things publicly is fraught with danger. I imagine there is a time and place for it, but very carefully with intention.
At the time I remember quite clearly that everyone felt wrecked by this incident. I forgot that when you say someone's life is ruined, people translate that to mean ruined permanently. It's not like she got drunk and killed someone with her car.
Looking at all this drama, the AI researcher sounds toxic:
* Picked a public Twitter fight with Yang LeCun
* Her peers are so afraid of critiquing her paper, that they demand anonymity through HR
* Tells co-workers to stop working on documents
One of the things that has been emphasized in tech for the past several years is not to allow justifying retaining toxic people on account of their talent. In addition, your life experiences don’t justify being toxic. For example, even if a person’s Dad was an abusive alcoholic, that would not justify them being abusive to co-workers.
People who point out problems are called toxic, not because they are in anyway injuring others, but because attacking them is easier than addressing their criticism.
Employment is at will on both ends of the contract! Live with it and stop whining! If you don't like your employer and believe they dehumanize you, sue them, or leave them for another more humanizing company! Enough of this BS, please! If she put new conditions on her employment and the employer cannot meet them, then she terminated herself. This is no kindergarten!
How did she not resign? She gave them an ultimatum demanding that the identities of peer reviewers be revealed to her and said that she would not work there if her demands were not met. That is a resignation since those conditions cannot be met. Even leaving aside the threat of resignation, such a list of demands worded as they were, simply shows that this person is unprofessional, aggressive, and immature. And that's leaving aside the fact that the paper in question seems very scattered and unimpressive (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...). Frankly, reading the MIT Technology Review article makes me question the legitimacy of this entire field of AI Ethics and those who participate in it.
As a reminder, this isn't the first problematic incident involving Timnit Gebru either. She previously went on an unhinged Twitter attack against Yann LeCunn, one of the pioneers of deep learning. He won a Turing award for his work on this topic and is one of the foremost experts on it, and understands its various nuances very well. When she was challenged, Timnit's line of attack was leveraging a word soup of progressive identity politics, demanding Yann LeCunn apologize to her, claiming harm was done to the community, etc. This highlighted her aggressive tactics (weaponization of her Twitter following and leveraging cancel culture) and it is clear she must be a very difficult employee to manage or work with.
Coming back to the article linked here: whenever there is some incident (a firing, a walkout, a protest) at one of these big tech companies with a large activist employee population, articles get written that purport to present the opinion of the employee base at large. But usually, these articles only represent the loud minority that is willing to speak up and faces no repercussions. The employees that agree with Timnit Gebru leaving the company (supporting the company's stance) don't have psychological safety. Timnit wields the power of a big following of social justice activists on Twitter, and could shame/destroy people who speak up against her. The small number of employees voicing their support for her, even with total psychological safety, is a tiny percentage of Google's employee base. Those numbers paint a false picture that she has broad support when she doesn't. Perspectives from other Google employees are only available on anonymous forums like Blind (https://www.teamblind.com/post/We-stand-with-Jeff-Dean-and-Y...) and Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...).
This whole question of resigned or fired seems like such a weird one. It's getting so much debate! I think everybody understands that she gave an ultimatum that included a "or else I will resign." I think everybody understands that Google responded with a "you are out as of now" that took her by surprise.
And yet there are a bazillion articles debating what verb best describes that pair of events. I get that there is legal relevance, and let the lawyers argue that one. But the rest of this seems to be a court of public opinion thing, in which case it should have no relevance given that everyone is agreed on the facts. Why do we care so much about the one-word linguistics of it? How about you just don't use a single verb alone, and instead spend the literally two sentences it takes to explain that part?
'Resigned' indicates an action on her part, and typically considered to be an amicable parting. 'Fired' means an action on Google's part, typically because of a perceived misdeed.
By calling it a resignation, Google is making it sound as if it was an amicable choice she made, not their judgement call about her actions.
Words matter. Word choices always matter. Especailly single words which come with a lot of built-in context.
I completely agree words matter. They matter immensely because of what they communicate. That's my point. It seems plainly evident at this point that neither word is aiding communication, because we're arguing about what the words mean, rather than the facts of the situation. A sentence saying she was fired and a sentence saying she resigned both miss too much of the situation to be called clear, honest communication, which matters.
It’s no one’s business outside of the organization and the person. You may feel entitled to an explanation as an uninvolved third party, but I can’t think of any legal reason why you would be.
> This whole question of resigned or fired seems like such a weird one
It's mostly the side that supports Google management that is focussed on it as the primary issue; the side backing Gebru is more focussed on the triggering event itself, the unusual (for Google AI, and apparently for the field in general, as far as internal reviews go) review process applied to the paper on which Gebru was lead author and which she was told to retract, with the resigned/fired issue as an additional indicator of Google management being deceitful, but not the primary issue.
I think this is the argument equivalent of bikeshedding in design documentation - people feel like they need to have an opinion, and “which one verb best summarises these two events?” is the discussion with the lowest barrier to entry.
Additionally, in this world where barely anybody reads past a headline, that discussion does have _some_ merit, even if every other part of this issue is _more_ important...
I don't think it's a need to have an opinion. They're trying to spin it as a firing so they can claim Gebru is an oppressed black woman who's a victim of racism. If she resigned then that narrative falls flat.
It seemed like she was totally opposed to the basic concept of Google actually -- uses a huge amount of electricity, uses AI which is based on massive uncurated (biased) datasets, etc. Has a ton of white men working there and basically gives the equivalent of a "are you really a CS genius" bar exam to anyone who applies, so that even some developers with massive open source user-bases can't "qualify". Which makes affirmative action even harder in a field that is already very diversity-challenged. So to me it's amazing that she worked there for more than a week.
Google is not a Academia. There is no tenure or intellectual freedom protections. Poke the bear often enough or make a nuisance of yourself you will be shown the door. The only ones who get to stay around and be a thorn in the side of management are board members who control a chunk of voting stock.
Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Seems like there should be a corollary for companies and difficult employees. Like public complaints that jump the chain of command from replaceable employees usually result in employee being replaced.
Even if she didn't resign (which is questionable, because she did send an ultimatum), is it wrong for Google to fire a person who writes stuff like this?
> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
This excerpt is from the email that according to her triggered the firing. This person threatened her employer with a lawsuit in the past and now people are outraged that she got "abrubtly fired". Arguably, the way Google treated her was even too lenient: many companies would have fired her at the time her original threat was made.
For some reason there is a subculture within Google where employees act antagonistic towards their employer and go all Pikachu-faced when they're then terminated. Then they speak out and claim they were retaliated against, whereas people who worked for conventional companies would think, "well, what did you expect?"
It is part of Google's culture to not blindly agree with leadership on every issue and you're encouraged to voice differing opinions, but I guess some take this too far in the other direction and assume that every kind of negative feedback is appreciated and "protected".
Lol. Yes, fair headline, she resigned. It's right there in the piece:
> “Dr. Gebru did not resign [...] Dr. Gebru has stated this plainly, and others have meticulously documented it,” the Walkout group wrote in Monday’s blog post.[1]
Translation:
"She didn't resign — she said she didn't resign. She told us so."
The logocentrism of the midwit elite.
That "meticulous documentation" that was mentioned:
> Expressed intent to resign - provided date + immediate termination = legally fired in the state of California.[2]
This illustrates how unethical Google is. Google AI Ethics was just Google's attempt to obtain self-regulation of AI, but now, Jeff Dean completely destroyed their dream. At this point, governmental regulation is inevitable.
Where is Sundar Pichai in all of this? Why is it up to Jeff Dean to publicly represent the company? Pichai appears to be in hiding, as per usual. It's astounding how weak he is, especially compared to the very strong decision making that typified life under Larry/Sergey/Eric.
It's obvious that people like Gebru terrorise their colleagues by claiming anyone who doesn't join their racist jihad against white men are terrible and need to be fired. When Pichai canned Damore he set Google up for a never ending strem of events like this one: he basically told the extremist activist wing of the workforce that they were in charge, not him. Very few tech CEOs in America are more deserving of being replaced than Pichai but given the voting structure of Google stock it's hard to see how that can happen.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334900391302098944
The exact phrasing she used is (probably - IANA employment lawyer) very important. If she said something like "Do X, or I'll have to reconsider if I want to continue working here", that doesn't sound like an ultimatum. But if she said "Do X, or I'm going to quit on December 5th", then that definitely sounds like an ultimatum you're begging the company to take you up on.
She had already sent an email asking other people to stop their work on diversity. It's at best naive to think that Google (or any employer) would give her a few more weeks to lower morale or cause trouble.
- I will look for work elsewhere
- I will work on a last date
- My last date is <X>
- This job isn't working out
- I don't want to work here anymore
- I offer my resignation
- I quit
Edit: if you say "I don't want to work here anymore." And you get your "resignation date moved up" you still get your unemployment benefits because you were fired.
I can't speak for California, but in my state, if you are fired and not laid off[1], you don't get unemployment benefits. I've anecdotally heard this is also the case in California. However, I've also heard that many tech companies state they will not dispute unemployment claims when fired (my company certainly says that), so people in these "privileged" companies often do collect unemployment even when fired.
[1] I hope people know the difference.
There might be specific criteria that needs to be met for each, so details matter. My guess is the reason my employer does not dispute unemployment claims is they've calculated that the cost to dispute them exceeds the amount they expect their unemployment insurance contributions to go up.
I am assuming that was the red line, I am not a manager but it would have been for me.
I am not really even sure how meaningful an email telling your coworkers to stop working on their projects is. It really depends on the tone. When I was at Google, I used the internal social media extensively. I am sure at some point someone said something like "I'm really depressed about how my project is going" and I would reply with something like "You should join my team! I have a req!" That's technically telling someone to stop working on their project, but is a completely acceptable thing to do.
Ultimately the exact details matter, and we don't have them.
If you immediately fire someone for that, that may be illegal age discrimination.
Cheers.
What do you do?
If there’s no notice period (legal only in “at will” states, I believe) then it would seem reasonable to fire them immediately.
I think you'll find from a legal standpoint, it does.[1] At least I know that they teach in negotiations courses that any time you make a counteroffer, the original offer is legally null and void. So if I give you an employment offer that is good for 30 days, and you counter the following day with a higher salary, then I legally can say "No, and we will not hire you" (i.e. the 30 days clause became invalid once you gave me a counteroffer).
This isn't exactly the same, but we are at least taught to treat it similarly.
Also, she didn't merely say "I will look for work elsewhere". She said something to the effect of "Let's meet to decide my end date." There's a significant difference.
[1] Although being an at-will job, the legality is rather moot.
In fact, it specifically does not: https://cuiab.ca.gov/board/precedentdecisions/docs/pb39.pdf
A manager told it was effective immediately and mentioned her final paycheck.
What's the parallel between those facts and the dispute here? Just not seeing any applicable precedent.
> What's the parallel between those facts and the dispute here?
That it's, at best for Google, the exact same thing, except that Google gave Gebru, in writing, an explicit, non-resignation reason for the early separation, making it even less disputable that it was a firing and not merely accepting the (disputed) resignation? Paraphrased most favorably to the Google management narrative, Gebru said “do X or I will conduct discussions around setting a date on which I will resign” and Google management said “we accept your resignation and, further, based on an internal group e-mail you sent after this dispute started which we find unacceptable, we are ending your employment immediately.”
The only interesting implication is unemployment, but if it's a termination, Google might tell the unemployment office it was for insubordination.
Otherwise, this is an all-in bet, and you need to be fully committed to leaving before doing it.
If I tell Perl to
then the Perl interpreter is well within its rights to say "Well, doing the thing doesn't work, so I am terminating your script." Indeed, that is what one would expect it to do.I've seen people walked out the day they give notice, but I assume they weren't technically fired, and paying out their two weeks is the right thing to do.
Sending an email to your boss saying "I'll resign unless X" is a serious ultimatum. You need to be prepared to not have a job when at the end of it, and you were the one who initiated the process. I'm not too concerned with if she technically should have been given a chance to take it back. Don't send an email threatening to resign, lose your job, then say "actually, I was fired."
> and without respecting her stated plan to work on an end date.
You don't really want to let an employee already sending inappropriate emails to a wide audience have another week to send more.
I've been in a professionally self-destructive place before and I didn't realize it until later. 100% speculation here, but I wouldn't be shocked if she had a death wish and was hoping for some version of this outcome. Could be frustration with work, covid depression, or something else.
Obviously, not if you're BIPOC, in this case, bullying is encouraged and any negative outcome will reinforce your victim status.
The debate about her being fired or resigning is a debate about who to believe about what led up to it. People who think she resigned see her saying she was fired as evidence of a victim complex and publicity seeking. People who think she was fired see Google saying she resigned as evidence of unfair treatment and dishonesty.
My point wasn't even about the truthiness of the claims of either side, but rather that if party A claims X, and then parties B and C just repeat the claims without being able to add anything - that's not news. That's just a person having allies who believe their claims.
If Microsoft chimed in and said Timnit actually resigned, no one would write an article on that (besides for how bizarre of a statement that would be by another company), because no one expects Microsoft to be apprised of what happens between Google and its employees.
Full text:
Just wanted to say that I was stunned by what just happened to Timnit Gebru, who was in my team until a few days ago (I'm sure you've all read what happened already). I have always been and will remain a strong supporter of her scientific work to make sure that AI becomes a positive force for the minoritized, as well as her generosity and tireless actions to lift the voices of the silenced ones. She taught me a lot and still is. I stand by you, Timnit. I also stand by the rest of my team who, like me, was stunned and is trying to make sense of all this. In particular the Ethical AI team, but also the broader Brain Research team.
Also I read the highlights of the paper linked here and it seems fine and reasonable. These are reasonable questions to ask. Sure we can mitigate the cost of training these models with green energy or finding new optimization./compression techniques etc... but that doesn't mean that with ever evolving data volumes we will ever fully mitigate that. Bitcoin for all its merit consumes a lot of energy. Is that more than USD or something else?
Another thing to consider is that AI right now has a rich get richer winner take all dynamic. We have titans battling it out for NLP supremacy. Deep mind just revolutionized protein folding which has direct implications into biomedical research and technology. Small academic labs are at an extreme disadvantage unless they collaborate with big tech. Interestingly physics research evolved in a similar way with large particle colliders and telescopes started up. So you can make a direct analogy to that, that the basic research can only be done with million dollar investments. That's an ethical question. GPT-3 trained on misinformation would make pizza gate look tame in comparison. So there are huge social implications.
Even real datasets collected from society and social data will have implicit and explicit biases in them. There are huge ethical concerns with data, data collection and with the interpretations AI models will make.
Your credit score, your social credit score, a company that refuses to hire you because a chat bot has labeled you subversive.
The TSA/DHS blanket banned people from flying and gave no feedback or transparency into why. It took members of Congress to get some people redressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction
Google needs a massive clear-out. People aren't doing their jobs anymore there, they've become so obsessed with fictional narratives about non-existent racism and sexism.
I bet Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t have a history of complaining about cannibalism either, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the good guy.
1. Did in fact go through and pass the internal approval process that he implied it didn't.
2. Was then subjected to a second, intransparent "review" that is not customary practice at Google.
3. The results of that "review" were presented to the author as a decree (which also is not customary practice).
4. And when the author subsequently protested that she would not work under such rules (as well she should) that was taken as a pretext to let her go — without even involving her direct manager.
Under those circumstances, Dean's response is misleading and evasive, a practice often characterized as "gaslighting" or, in the term that the grandparent comment ridiculed, a "micro-aggression".
It's not about whether you're a "white dude", it's what rules you set for "white dudes" vs. "non-white non-dudes".
Did Jeff Dean think Timnit was a white dude and so let her publish, but when he found out she was a brown woman, he said he cannot stand for this?
These 4 points were all taken from the blog post I referenced, which I found well documented and thus credible:
https://googlewalkout.medium.com/setting-the-record-straight...
> Why would they publish multiple of her papers on basically the same exact subject, but then decide they need to stop her at all costs for this paper?
You tell me. If they were truly on "basically the same exact subject", there can't really be a scientific explanation for some to be publishable and others not, can there?
Or, your theories are flawed in some manner and don't actually capture the truth. I'm asking you how previous behavior would fit into the theories that you yourself believe.
This should be handled internally and not aired in public across several media sites. Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
The media of course enables it, which I think is a sign of a growing, large scale, rational fragility across society (demand controls their publication, there is a large demand for this type of information)
I will have to search for them now but I saw people doxxing some of the current Googler's identities if they agreed with the resignation. This is extremely toxic.
Even the old media seems to love Twitter and it escapes FB level of scrutiny.
Facebook is now far less egregious & more of a soft environment to socialize with people you personally know. Bubbles/pockets of societal function and some large-influence which is lesser enabled than the prior.
Twitter is a platform that justifies large societal movement through "influential information".
(I don't have the best english to articulate here)
Now social media sites encourage people being public figures, which is an insanely bad advice for the vast majority of individuals.
No one forced her to do any of the following things:
1. Griping about the racist reviewers of her paper on Twitter.
2. Sending an email to a internal list criticizing Google's behavior and telling people to stop working on diversity.
3. Demanding the names of reviewers and threatening to resign if they weren't provided.
#2 or #3 would get you fired or cause your resignation to be accepted any place that I've worked.
#1 wouldn't get you fired but it's not going to help your career.
FAANG employs a tremendous number of technology workers, are key drivers the industry-wide technical agenda formally (standards bodies) and informally (open source project management, areas of active research), are often the first line of serious education for new workers, and the fallback for workers when riskier undertakings fail.
If anything far more of their internal management (project and people) processes should be scrutinized.
I have no idea what or how this individual matters at all or the tech that she is relevant in. Not everyone at FAANG are industry leaders, and there are several cogs just like at IBM. I fail to see why I should care for every individual starling who can't stand out other than the company they work for.
This random individual along with James Damore and that random FB grad are not on the same level.
Your arguments tell me more that FAANG should be broken apart. Public attention and scrutiny would achieve nothing in affecting Google's decision making here.
> I have no idea
Why are you commenting then?
In articles discussing Raja, Jim, Linus and their various moves. The first paragraph introduces into great detail about their impacts relating to their contributions to x86, GPUs or the kernel.
This individual's highlight appears to be her employment at Google. She is an AI ethics researcher? So what makes her important or an 'industry leader'?
Why should I care and why is Google's dirty laundry here in the open?
> Why should I care and why is Google's dirty laundry here in the open?
Because Google is big and powerful and how Google treats its workers matters to everyone in the software industry.
Nonsense, it affects the people at Google.
If it affects everyone in the software industry, feel free to explain precisely how.
Just the fact that we're all talking about it proves it's bigger than just internal affairs. If it was as clear cut as you seem to imagine nobody would talk about it
This could happen at any other company and the outcome would be the same.
The fact that she was fired does not make this news worthy.
The disagreement is the interesting aspect, but that doesn't seem to be the focus of the article.
It's rather telling that your entire perspective is to demonize and diminish Gebru, who you don't even bother to name in your criticisms.
Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru. These aren't even remotely comparable situations.
Public attention and scrutiny is why we're talking about this, and have been, for a week now. It's pretty head in the sand to think this doesn't have impact.
Fine, there are AI stars too, but the article could lead about what they have done and why they are important no? A discussion involving Jim Keller would lead to his contributions to x86, Apple A10 series, Tesla chips and Zen.
I don't want a hand wavy discussion over ethics and AI, I want an explanation as to what they have contributed to the field that justifies why their opinion matters.
>Why are you trying to establish some "level" distinction between Damore and Gebru.
I am trying to establish that these random individuals don't matter to me. They are not known for their tech contributions but for the dirty laundry being exposed to the public.
These individuals from an external perspective seem to be known for being employed at Google and for some public controversy that cannot be influenced externally.
My point is why are these individuals in the news? Why should I care? They aren't industry leaders and from my perspective appear about as important as 'GE fires engine tester'.
So, for us that care about google's use of AI and ethical use of it, it's important to understand what happened.
> She tweeted Wednesday that Google had abruptly fired her after a disagreement about a research paper that scrutinized possible bias in large-language AI models, which the company asked her to retract.
The article should be focusing on the disagreement here.
Instead the article focuses on employment which I don't care about.
I have not heard anyone express this fear, certainly not in the AI community.
I have not seen any part of the Timnit Gebru incident that paints Google in a bad light or corroborates any type of inconsistency or unfair judgment.
Google has done plenty of that stuff in other situations, just not in any part of the handling of Timnit Gebru’s very inappropriate behavior.
If Google fires a janitor, does that mean they don’t care about a clean work environment? If they fire a VP of engineering, does that mean they don’t care about engineering?
No, it means that person didn’t work out. And considering how she is handling it by going nuclear with the press and the twitter mobbing, I for one am not the least bit surprised.
That said, I don't believe that decisions about application of AI can be made internally at Google. These are basically PR jobs that come with the product.
Such as? Furthermore, I don't care about mainstream, a lot of mainstream stuff today is trash honestly.
> have some beliefs that would have been considered insufferably woke and obnoxious by people like you in 2003
My basis has been consistent for over 1400 years now.
It's 1 employee out of 120k. There are probably other ethicists in AI at Google.
Also the story seems to have devolved more specifically to employment rather than talking about the specific ethical issues relating to Google's language models.
I mean google employees including most of her coworkers seem to think it's problematic.
None of that is useful here which from an external perspective looks like a employment dispute. She isn't exactly doing a Snowden here.
Even if the individuals internally view it as problematic, I am not gonna stop using Android, Google or Youtube. What are these individuals expecting to achieve from airing the dirty laundry in public?
Are they expecting people's opinions to have changed at all about Google?
The firing/resigning/petitions are irrelevant.
The wider community important information would be the specific ethical issue she is keen on raising.
When the triggering event involved a collaboration involving non-Google parties, that became pretty much impossible.
> Why should I care about the dirty laundry of FAANG and some random individual?
Maybe you shouldn't, but not everyone outside of Google is you. Other people in the field of AI ethics might want to know, because Google’s practices when it comes to employee research have a significant impact on how publications from Google authors are approached. And people who might consider working at Google, especially in the same field, have an interest in information about the working environment, positive or negative.
If this was an issue of the researcher unprofessionally airing her frustrations on a listserv with direct reports that's one thing. It's another thing to say being upset at all was an overreaction because the treatment was totally normal and that her frustration was a resignation, when in fact, none of that is true in any good faith interpretation.
Searching in HN under "Gebru" (the employee's last name) pulls up a bunch of past threads.
1) If you ask me, this is a story about an influential technology company, one whose approach to business has an outsized influence on the entire industry, has unethically fired an employee while making mis-statements to cover it up.
2) Others will say: this is about a ethicist being unfairly treated with different standards because of her gender and race, a microcosm of what it is like to be a minority race and/or female in the tech industry.
3) Still others will say: This is about an employee who disrupted the workplace. She rudely interacted with her colleagues and prominent names outside of the industry (Y. Lecun). She prevented collaboration by making spurious claims of sexism and racism.
4) Another line of thought that is a variant of #1: This is about an employee who did not follow company rules and processes. She was fired as a result. The statements privately and publicly about "resignation" were an attempt to not publicly disparage her
Did I miss any others? With a nod to the Rashomon Principle, your interpretation of these events depends on your perspective.
Sounds like a perfect fit for Google's new Chief Legal Officer. Or maybe SVP Social!
This whole thing is a confusing mess.
It's terrifying that these are the kind of views people in high places of major tech companies have. And that we are entrusting our tools of societal communication to those who see themselves as fighting in a culture war.
* Saying a high profile project is botched, mismanaged, and doomed to fail. (Anyone remember google+?)
* Mocking and criticizing the SVP who led the project.
* Rejoicing in the departure of the said SVP.
* Talking about one of the founders having an affair. (Well, to be fair, the news broke outside first.)
* Memes disagreeing with company decisions, including one that literally said "What the fuck are you doing" for firing someone.
* And, last but not least, complaining that the quality of microkitchen has gone downhill since $(the year you joined).
> you know these last 2 weeks were supposed to be my vacations and we’re currently on a road trip.
Probably best not to send an email threatening to resign, then go on vacation and expect things to be normal.
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...
Source? Last I heard the two men were hired elsewhere fairly quickly. Their names are also hardly ever associated with the story.
Don't make genitalia jokes unless you have balls of steel.
* Picked a public Twitter fight with Yang LeCun
* Her peers are so afraid of critiquing her paper, that they demand anonymity through HR
* Tells co-workers to stop working on documents
One of the things that has been emphasized in tech for the past several years is not to allow justifying retaining toxic people on account of their talent. In addition, your life experiences don’t justify being toxic. For example, even if a person’s Dad was an abusive alcoholic, that would not justify them being abusive to co-workers.
But she isn't a victim because of her life experiences; it's because of her skin color and gender identity.
As a reminder, this isn't the first problematic incident involving Timnit Gebru either. She previously went on an unhinged Twitter attack against Yann LeCunn, one of the pioneers of deep learning. He won a Turing award for his work on this topic and is one of the foremost experts on it, and understands its various nuances very well. When she was challenged, Timnit's line of attack was leveraging a word soup of progressive identity politics, demanding Yann LeCunn apologize to her, claiming harm was done to the community, etc. This highlighted her aggressive tactics (weaponization of her Twitter following and leveraging cancel culture) and it is clear she must be a very difficult employee to manage or work with.
Coming back to the article linked here: whenever there is some incident (a firing, a walkout, a protest) at one of these big tech companies with a large activist employee population, articles get written that purport to present the opinion of the employee base at large. But usually, these articles only represent the loud minority that is willing to speak up and faces no repercussions. The employees that agree with Timnit Gebru leaving the company (supporting the company's stance) don't have psychological safety. Timnit wields the power of a big following of social justice activists on Twitter, and could shame/destroy people who speak up against her. The small number of employees voicing their support for her, even with total psychological safety, is a tiny percentage of Google's employee base. Those numbers paint a false picture that she has broad support when she doesn't. Perspectives from other Google employees are only available on anonymous forums like Blind (https://www.teamblind.com/post/We-stand-with-Jeff-Dean-and-Y...) and Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...).
Lastly, this has all been discussed in depth previously in a few different discussions on HN. The one with the most comments is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25292386.
And yet there are a bazillion articles debating what verb best describes that pair of events. I get that there is legal relevance, and let the lawyers argue that one. But the rest of this seems to be a court of public opinion thing, in which case it should have no relevance given that everyone is agreed on the facts. Why do we care so much about the one-word linguistics of it? How about you just don't use a single verb alone, and instead spend the literally two sentences it takes to explain that part?
By calling it a resignation, Google is making it sound as if it was an amicable choice she made, not their judgement call about her actions.
Words matter. Word choices always matter. Especailly single words which come with a lot of built-in context.
She did not get a chance to offer up her resignation, Google terminated their employment relationship before that opportunity arose.
And thus, it is completely reasonable to boil it down to:
Google fired Timnit Gebru.
Words matter. Google is lying when they claim that Timnit Gebru resigned. Google should absolutely be called out for this lie.
It's mostly the side that supports Google management that is focussed on it as the primary issue; the side backing Gebru is more focussed on the triggering event itself, the unusual (for Google AI, and apparently for the field in general, as far as internal reviews go) review process applied to the paper on which Gebru was lead author and which she was told to retract, with the resigned/fired issue as an additional indicator of Google management being deceitful, but not the primary issue.
Additionally, in this world where barely anybody reads past a headline, that discussion does have _some_ merit, even if every other part of this issue is _more_ important...
Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Seems like there should be a corollary for companies and difficult employees. Like public complaints that jump the chain of command from replaceable employees usually result in employee being replaced.
> I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
This excerpt is from the email that according to her triggered the firing. This person threatened her employer with a lawsuit in the past and now people are outraged that she got "abrubtly fired". Arguably, the way Google treated her was even too lenient: many companies would have fired her at the time her original threat was made.
It is part of Google's culture to not blindly agree with leadership on every issue and you're encouraged to voice differing opinions, but I guess some take this too far in the other direction and assume that every kind of negative feedback is appreciated and "protected".
> “Dr. Gebru did not resign [...] Dr. Gebru has stated this plainly, and others have meticulously documented it,” the Walkout group wrote in Monday’s blog post.[1]
Translation:
"She didn't resign — she said she didn't resign. She told us so."
The logocentrism of the midwit elite.
That "meticulous documentation" that was mentioned:
> Expressed intent to resign - provided date + immediate termination = legally fired in the state of California.[2]
These people are grindingly stupid.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/google-employees-dispute-jef... [2]: https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/1335410735929765891
It's obvious that people like Gebru terrorise their colleagues by claiming anyone who doesn't join their racist jihad against white men are terrible and need to be fired. When Pichai canned Damore he set Google up for a never ending strem of events like this one: he basically told the extremist activist wing of the workforce that they were in charge, not him. Very few tech CEOs in America are more deserving of being replaced than Pichai but given the voting structure of Google stock it's hard to see how that can happen.