She gave her employer an ultimatum, threatening to quit if she didn't get her way. They called her bluff. I don't see how that is the same as being fired.
At that point she was on her way out, one way or another; most employers would rather not work with people like this.
Initially I took Google's side given Gebru has history of bullying so aggressively and has no qualms to play race/gender cards at every opportunity she gets. But now that more details (including the paper in question) has been revealed, it's hard to stay on Google's side. It is clear that the peer review process that Jeff Dean had described has been optional for all intent and purpose. It says along similar lines that right there on their internal website. Too many Googlers have attested that they have bypassed the process with no consequences. Gebru's paper itself has no real technical novelty. There was no reason to fire her. It doesn't seem out of line that Gebru was befuddled, frustrated and made a threat on the basis that she had right for the information. Jeff Dean could have easily offered her feedback and transparency in decision process. He could have agreed to let her make corrections later in the submission process. He did none of that and doesn't want to come out clean.
Having said that I still feel Gebru is extra-ordinarily self-entitled person. Few months ago she insisted that Jeff Dean take her side in Twitter feud she initiated. She has the mindset of either you are with me all the time or you are racist+misogynist. She complains about "micro agressions" towards her from everyone but she herself is super aggressive. When disagreement arise, she marks you down as enemy and launches attacks to destroy you completely with sole purpose of making you homeless, jobless and making sure your kids die of hunger. I wouldn't wish upon her as colleague to anyone. You might have right to disagree with me but this is what I have felt. I still take her side in this current episode nonetheless because I think she is on the right side.
Ultimately we are all playing opinion game here and only few people knows what really happened.
Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.
To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.
The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
I think that's a balanced view. The fact is, Google might have constructively dismissed her because of her history and attitude and they knew if they outright fired her, it would be a PR nightmare. Letting her resign like this makes it much more complex and doesn't open them up to any serious threat of litigation.
She can try to sue them, but now that she made it public it's quite unlikely any court would look at it.
All in all, it's obvious Google didn't follow their own supposed research protocols, but this whole thing is much more complex and I think it has very little to do with her paper.
> All in all, it's obvious Google didn't follow their own supposed research protocols, but this whole thing is much more complex and I think it has very little to do with her paper.
She still had a job after she published the paper, she still had a job after she told people to stop working, she stopped having a job after she demanded confidental HR records of people who feared giving her rather simple feedback.
It's really sad watching people bend over backwards trying to give this person a break.
You admit she's a bully, super aggressive, constantly makes spurious accusations of racism, attempts to destroy her enemies totally and is in general a nightmare employee in every way. Then you say you take her side because Dean could have given her "transparency"? Are you aware she was demanding the identities of people who had criticised her work, presumably so she could then go and bully them too?
This person is a 100% A+ straightforward case of someone who should be fired and in fact should have been fired long ago. All those attributes are the sort of thing that absolutely qualify someone for dismissal. If you were feeling trollish, you might even say it's black and white.
Agree 100%. We should not be protecting bullies regardless of race, gender, position in the company whatever. If you don't treat people well you are out.
I haven't seen much by myself, but I witnessed that flame with Y.LeCunn and that alone gave a lot of information.
I can't understand WHY so many people obviously think that it is totally fine to be behave utterly unethical, especially when a person whose behaviour is in question is "professional ethics researcher". Looks like they think that a big goal justifies the means. Welcome to Russia circa 1917, or Germany of 193x.
I didn't even know that she had a history of bullying before I concluded she was in the wrong. My incomplete understanding is she submitted a paper, google said it was not submitted in time and they made her retract it, and in response she demanded the names of those who reviewed the paper or else she would resign. That is completely unacceptable behavior and they were right to accept her resignation. The fact that she has a history of bullying makes it even worse for her. Of course they aren't going to give her the names of those people so she can bully them too.
I think you aren't necessarily wrong that internal committees like this are about PR. It is simple industry self-regulation. Expectations should be adjusted accordingly.
But that would also mean Google exploited her for that.
In her group email she also asked other employees to stop working in any other related project.
I mean, I don't see how google could NOT terminate her after such an event. I am in a nation with extremly strong worker protection law but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot.
Reading the comments here I feel like HN lives in a completely parallel universe. The number of employees who have the ability to threaten to quit and not immediately get fired are very very few. Even at the executive level you can't just make ultimatums for your employment and expect that they won't consider just firing you. Even if you're the representative of a union speaking on behalf of thousands of employees you need make sure you have enough leverage before making demands like that.
This not some crazy conspiracy that she got fired. It would be noteworthy if someone who did what she did didn't get fired.
The reality is that the research organizations at big tech companies have always been a very different kind of labor relationship than typical rank-and-file business units. Many of the senior or otherwise high-profile researchers at FAANG companies would otherwise be professors or academics, in positions where there is essentially unbridled academic freedom and no expectation of separating personal convictions and principles from the academic environment.
Google lured many of these researchers away from academic roles, with the tacit promise that they would be able to continue their research - and at times political - endeavors relatively unencumbered. Google has built a research empire on this promise, which has been responsible in part for their continued dominance in various markets.
My point here is that these researchers have a lot of leverage. Advocating for action within an organization, counter to the current immediate goals of management, is only taboo (and thus “fireable”) in most companies because workers have almost no leverage, generally speaking. Not because it’s some inherently “bad” thing. If Google becomes seen as a place that fires researchers for advocating for their beliefs, especially in a capacity that they’ve been explicitly hired to do, then I think a lot of researchers would - and rightly should - reconsider whether such an environment is consistent with their values as academics and, often times, activists. Google’s research group is enormously valuable to the company, and there’s only so much reputational damage of this nature the organization can sustain before academics decide to take their talents elsewhere.
You can organize a strike BUT this is absolutely not the way you do it.
You have to follow strict procedures, work with your union and go into one or more formal negotiating tables with all the representatives of all the interested parts before even thinking about giving an ultimatum like that. And for sure you cannot communicate in that way using directly your work email
Because in my country you can't be fired for using the work email for that.
Communicating with other workers using their work email is absolutely allowed, courts ruled about it several times [1].
I usually receive trade unions (there are several of them) communications on my work email from the unions' work email, because they have been authorized by the company to send them.
In this case she wrote directly to workers using work email, but having no union or labor protection laws it doesn't make any difference whether she could or couldn't, she could be fired anyway without having to provide any reason.
In countries where there are strong laws protecting workers she would have written to the union members and they would have done the same thing: write directly to the workers.
Of course she did it at Google so it is different, but here the strict procedures to call a strike are only necessary if a public service that requires continuity risk to be interrupted, otherwise unions are only required to alert the company that the strike is going to happen, but have no requirement whatsoever on how to organise it.
Which sound logical to me,strong protection means IMO freedom to collectively counter the actions of the company, if that's not allowed the protection is not strong.
[1] Court of Catania, Labor Section, February 2, 2009 "The RSU employee can send trade union communications by e-mail to the employees of the company during their working hours and to their company e-mail address using his personal e-mail address"
In many countries you do need a vote for a strike to be organised. You can't just spam people with a request to stop working. Strikes are a powerful tactic that have evolved a lot of formality around them to try and ensure the outcomes aren't totally destructive. Italy is a rather unusual exception to this. Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy.
> Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy
Perhaps.
But doesn't explain stagnation in Japanese economy where there are no Italian unions.
Or why France did much better despite having even stronger work protections laws than Italy and wilder strikes (the gilet jaunes for example) or those happened last year against the pension reform where the workers of public transportation went on strike - for weeks - without even announcing it.
Even countries like Germany, Singapore, Switzerland and Finland are doing worse than Pakistan in the GDP growth race.
My point was than if there are stronger work protection laws somewhere else and the laws of your country are weaker, they are not very strong, they are moderately strong.
Japan seems to have evolved a work culture very similar to strongly unionised societies but without unions. Japanese salaryman culture is famously a culture of employment for life with unusually strong loyalty between employee and employer, hence weird things like "banishment rooms" that you don't find elsewhere. If it's the end results that matter and not the means, Japan might not be a good counter example.
I think French strike law sounds tighter than Italian strike law? The French are famous for striking but strikes must still be a collective decision and related to a specific set of issues, whereas Italian strike law really does sound incredibly broad and vague.
With respect to Pakistan, that's doesn't mean anything, poor countries always have very high GDP growth. It's easy to grow something small and backwards by a lot because you can get a lot of relative growth just by copying what other countries do, and less absolute improvement is needed to get a percentage point of growth to begin with. You can only compare GDP growth rates between countries of a similar level of wealth.
> but that action alone would be enough to fire you on the spot.
They are not as strong as you think then.
In countries where there are strong work protections law striking is a right, you don't get paid for the time you don't show up at work but you can obviously convince an entire department or an entire company workforce to go on strike, without consequences.
Without it the protection is not strong, it means an entire company against the individual worker, which is obviously unfair (regardless of what you think about work protections law, Google against a single human being it's an unfair battle, that's why "strong protection" means that the worker deson't have to fight alone and can call other workers to join the fight).
As I said in another sibling post, you cannot strike that way. You have to follow procedures to organize a legit strike.
If I wrote an email like that not only my union would not protect me, they would most probably tell me the employer took the right decision because I put at risk other employees positions (if they followed my reccomandations to stop working just because I said it)
You can't hand in your resignation effective at a future date. That's not how it works. If you resign, you resign. It's then up to the employer whether or not to hold you to whatever notice period is set out in your contract. Many places will not do so and release you effective immediately.
Of course, if you leave on good terms, your superiors might look at you kindly and work with you to meet not just their needs, but also your needs. That's why it pays to be humble and generous in your interactions with other people.
I think that would have been the civilized thing to do. But that is the exception, not the rule in the bay; I.e once you have made your intentions known, and are perceived as someone who could cause damage in the interim, you are out straight away. Feels like a natural consequence of at-will employment.
If employee is found using company resources inappropriately (in this case, mailing list to rant) then you can't give that employee 2 weeks notice. Google will then have to consider possibility that she will abuse their mailing lists.
In the US, in countries with more worker protections it is not. (unless they pay you for that 2-week, month, 3-month period when you aren't working for them, but they can't remove you from worker list).
Yes this is correct. The primary difference in at will employment is that I also am not required to give my employer notice, whereas in the countries you mentioned I am.
You can as an employer walk away whenever you want, you just don't get the salary for the difference between the notice and when you left.
Example: if you have to give 30 days notice (very common in Italy) and leave on the spot, after your resignation have been accepted, you have to give the company the equivalent of 30 days of pay.
Which is exactly the money they should give you aniway if you stayed for the entire notice time.
But usually the employer and company find an agreement before coming to that.
She said "at a later date" leaving it up to her discretion. Google accepted a resignation that didn't exist, and will probably be liable for it in some way.
So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good. But if you tell your boss that they should do something or you’ll quit, this is bad and makes you unemployable.
You realize that this is just an argument that whoever is in a position of authority over you is right by virtue of having that authority?
> So if you don’t do what your boss says at a job, even if you disagree, your boss can fire you, and this is good.
Gonna take a quick guess you're still in undergrad.
Yes, this is literally how employment works. Your future boss's job will be to use your labor efficiently for the company. You may disagree with your boss on an assignment, in which case it would be wise to schedule some time and professionally discuss your concerns. Your boss may be persuaded, and good bosses will try their best, within reason, to keep their subordinates content with the work they're doing.
However, at the end of the day, the boss may disagree with your points and still require you to do the job as assigned. If you refuse, you will likely be fired. Note that you also have agency here: If you don't like the work the boss makes you do, and you feel like your concerns are consistently falling on deaf ears, you can quit.
Not universally though. In countries with stronger labor protections and unions, you can’t just fire people for philosophical disagreements (not without those disputes being mediated anyway).
I don’t understand how we arrived at some conception of workplaces as little dictatorships, where bosses can treat people however they want and that’s somehow good or legitimate.
Managers are supposed to exercise power on behalf of the company. In this case, it’s unclear whether the manager was exercising power in the best interests of the company or of himself.
In my opinion, might doesn’t make right. Managers aren’t de facto right purely by virtue of being a manager.
A company is not a government... Yes, someone who owns a company has the legal right to do whatever they want, as long as it's not criminal, with their property.
They have complete authority... They don't have to have someone else endow it to them or give it to them...
So yes, they are by definition authoritarian. That's one of the cornerstones of being able to own private property.
Other people’s labor is not a company’s private property. That was known as slavery and we have mostly abolished it in the developed world.
But my point is that all of your arguments rest on an unquestioned assumption about how ownership translates to authoritarian control of others without explaining how or by what justification that power is arrived at.
The answer of course is that it’s a social construct enforced by states to varying degrees, present and historically, and thus no way inherent to the thing itself. Appeals to status quo are therefore not justifications for the validity of the relationship, as it has changed over time, proving malleable to all kinds of political and social forces (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the formation of unions, worker collectives). Defending an authoritarian relation to property as it relates to other people’s labor thus require an actual and explicit defense, which you have so far not provided.
Citizen of country with some of the strongest worker protections here: not over philosophical differences.
Very much so for refusing to do work assigned to you.
And it doesn't mean "bosses can treat people however they want". It means "you are employed to do a job, if you refuse to do that job, you are no longer employed"
As much as I support employment rights, you are paid by a company to do their bidding. If you don't like it start a company, but then you're just doing the bidding of the customer.
This is a uniquely American notion of employment. “Do my bidding or be done away with” is not the norm across countries with strong unions and worker protections.
No, this is not uniquely American. Which country are you from that doesn't require employees to act in a way as directed by the company that employs them?
Literally any country with strong laws protecting strikes and work stoppages? In many parts of Europe, I can convince my coworkers that our bosses are treating us unfairly, unsafely, etc, we can walk off the job and not get fired. I doubt any employer would want us to do that, so it would be entirely against their “direction.”
Just to clarify, in many parts of Europe you cannot do that, you would need to be a recognised union and in many cases at least hold a vote of some sort, there would probably also be requirements around negotiations. You would also be restricted in what you do to people who refuse to join your strike.
The UK is an example of a European country with relatively tough union laws. The list of issues that it's legitimate to strike over is restricted, votes are required, the general secretary of the union must authorise the strike and so on. Strikes do happen of course but not because some random middle manager threw a hissy fit about feedback on a paper she wrote.
"Do my bidding" is different from "do my bidding being paid way below market rate" or "do my bidding and I don't care if that involves a high likelihood of losing a limb".
Also, "do my bidding" should be written as "do your job."
I'm from a country with strong labor protections (striking, 3 strike dismissal etc.), and you're moving the goalposts.
After reading, it seems very much in line with her role as an ethicist. She merely states that there are various risks associated with processing large datasets.
Its a bit sad that they attempted to censure such an innocuous paper that without malice states “there are risks to consider.”
We haven't heard any arguments, only that management can do as they please when they don't like results of AI Ethics Research. We'll likely not get anything substantial, ever, either.
As I've stated in other post, this is very, very troublesome for AI and Google.
OTOH, Google has much emphasis on ethics in AI/ML otherwise. But the whole company, especially management, need to put actions in alignment with their words on this matter.
"No artificial neural network is near a point where we can talk about it having moral responsibility separate from its trainers’ and deployers’ – but we can make it sound like it does, and exonerate them, if we call it AI." https://twitter.com/shashashasha/status/1335067153402355714
Modern ethical AI / ML, is both that and beyond that. Issues range vastly in how complex algorithms can be used, misused and misinterpreted. There are also issues of uncovering hidden biases, unfairness, manipulative effects, privacy issues, risk and impact analysis, explanatory AI, who is accountable for accidents and malicious acts, etc. The list goes on covering both the legal and the political. This may not be unique to ML / AI, but is harder to quantify and prove, with more prevalent usage of complex algorithms.
My strongest argument is AGAINST managers at Google getting to micromanage, censor and to revenge-fire a researcher, just because they personally disagree with their published AI Ethics Research. A job said researcher was tasked with and leading.
Such behaviour, unless corrected, undermines Google's entire AI/ML and cloud operations.
That's not what I asked. If you can't argue the counter of your own position in the most honest way possible then either you're not prepared or not honest.
The best rebuttal so far has been to decline to comment.
However, without revealing names the paper outlines internal company matters, presenting opinions and tautology that do not fit proper format of professionally published research. Instead of reworking a flawed paper, the researcher escalated and exposed individual opinion, publicly. Such company representation is out of scope for research positions. As Google could not agree to terms of email, it was taken as resignation notice.
I believe we should have no curruption in Russia. By your logic, unless I can give a strong argument in favour of corruption, I am not prepared or not honest?
Are you prepared to give a rigorous argument in favour of: terrorist attacks, slavery, eugenics, facism, child labour, sexism
> If you can't argue the counter of your own position in the most honest way possible then either you're not prepared or not honest.
I didn't say that if your position is on the opposite side of child abuse and you don't want to change your position that you aren't honest.
Yes, I'm prepared to try and make the strongest argument possible for things I may not fully understand, until I do. Whatever those things make me feel.
Sometimes the strongest arguments have large flaws (mostly moral with you examples) but sometimes we just don't understand the opposing arguments and then just create strawmen to rage against.
I'm opposed to this type of irrational emotional behaviour. It causes things like mob violence which I'm very familiar with.
So when someone can't articulate the opposing views then they need to be warned or directed to do so. If they refuse and run back to a strawmen then yes they are not honest and obviously not prepared.
uMkhonto we Sizwe was a terrorist organization. But they had a very strong argument for why terrorism was an appropriate action.
I don't say that I agree with their use of violence, but they had an argument that makes blanket statements like "terrorism is evil" harder to make.
Bribes functions as oil in the machinery of society, and empowers strong men against rampant decadence. So is working for good when it is sanctioned and goes to the right people and their agendas, comprising of: terrorist attacks, slavery, eugenics, facism, child labour, and of course sexism.
Do we have the email with the "ultimatum" in it? I think there's a world of difference between
"Do these things or I'm gone and taking my team with me"
and
"These things are so fundamental to my role as an ethical AI researcher that it's difficult to see myself doing this job without them"
IANAL, but I suspect a court would also interpret them differently.
And even so, Google likes to position itself as a nice employer, which listens to their employees' concerns. De-escalating the situation would have been nice - immediately terminating the concerned employee makes Google seem like another giant faceless emotionless multinational corporation (which it may well be).
Whether or not I agree with the conclusions, that’s exactly the sort of paper one might expect to be written by someone whose job title includes the words “ethics” and “AI”. I’m not sure what Google expected.
The whole paper doesn't go beyond surface-level analysis. The main point is that language models reflect the same biases as its training data. Very little of it is technical. Most of it is about examples of how language models aren't as politically correct as the authors want it to be (e.g. calling female doctors "female doctors" when it's not relevant to the context). It's a legitimate concern, but anyone who remembered Microsoft Tay would know that.
the paper was not the problem, her attitude & reaction to peer review was the problem - giving ultimatums, demanding to disclose names of the reviewers, and broadcasting emails to entire team calling for sabotage.
Her behavior fits the definition of 'toxic employee', it was unprofessional by any standard.
The other curious thing is, behind the pink-boxed redactions are the names of four other Google employees. I'm wondering why they haven't been reprimanded in the same way. At least, not that we know of.
Well, she wasn't reprimanded for writing the paper nor for publishing it. In fact, she wasn't even reprimanded as far as I know for telling other employees to stop working on DEI. She told them she wanted confidental information or she will quit on a date she would like. They said they would not give her that information and that she is no longer welcome at the company. This isn't really reprimanding or even a normal firing. If I tell my boss do X or I quit and they say "Thanks for your work, we accept your resigination and the legal notice period applies." Fair play.
> As shown in the amount of compute used to train deep learning models has increased
300,000x in 6 years, increasing at a far higher pace than Moore’s Law which posits that the amount of computation that can be done per unit area would roughly double every two years. This means that power consumption per unit area is not staying constant as implied by Moore’s Law [108].
IIRC Moore's law doesn't make any predictions about power consumption at all, let alone ones meriting being cited in a scientific paper.
yeah, I've debunked this particular line as being technically nonsense. If I were a reviewer of the paper, reaching a sentence like that, I'd return to the editor with "revise and resubmit- this doesn't meet the basic technical level of expertise we require for publication."
if you build 2X the compute capacity with current nodes, you didn't violate moore's law.
She wasn't fired over the paper. She was fired because she demanded Google name the employees who gave (anonymous) negative feedback about the paper, and that anyone going forward who gave feedback on her work also be named, or she'd quit.
According to a seemingly credible account from a former employee, Timnit terrorized a Google Brain manuscript discussion forum with unfounded accusations of racist disregard for her contributions https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/com...
The thread is filled with agreeing comments from many people who seem to be ex-Google and who had access to the relevant thread.
This is crazy, I'm not sure why people aren't taking this more into account. By all accounts Timnit was an extremely toxic person to work with. Sure, perhaps she shouldn't have been fired for this paper, Google probably saw an opportunity to remove her that wouldn't be a PR nightmare for them. But regardless, it's hard for me personally to see them as being in the wrong given Timnit's history.
Gebru's brand of Twitter woke-scoldery is taken for granted these days. Par for the course. We all know the tired rhetoric that will be trotted out to defend it, so much so that we could write it ourselves.
A member of the corporate elite criticizing, let alone firing, a black woman for race baiting is now beyond the pale. So they got rid of her indirectly, by making her working conditions unappealing enough to induce her to quit. Too bad some Director Karen of Whatever lost her nerve and ended it on her terms rather than Gebru's. No finesse!
I find the semi-regular condemnations from employees of big tech companies hollow. If you work for one of these companies and find their behavior unsavory, go work somewhere else - this is actually what might cause executives at these companies to reflect on how they might change course.
The fact that most of these employees could easily get well paying (just not as _ridiculously well paying_) jobs elsewhere to me feels like they are not staying out of necessity, rather they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these, and continue collecting their exorbitant pay.
It may work with physical work, but at FANG companies software engineers will just make up for it on the weekends at nights. Stack ranking works wonderfully at making engineers to compete in working as much as they can (which is not a bad thing, just how the system works).
Stack ranking causes political backstabbers to rise to the top and filters out the conscientious. It probably functions well enough in companies that are fundamentally extractive, but it will put a company that is supposed to innovate on a self destructive spiral.
Microsoft improved a lot ever since it dumped stack ranking.
Microsoft was using per team stack ranking, Google global stack ranking. That's a huge difference I think. The problem is that the managers go to the promotion commitees and started exchanging promotions with eachother, so the system that was working before doesn't work anymore.
All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce.
The problem of the effectiveness of Facebook employee walkouts stems from the fact that they aren’t a real union, so the employer can just force them to make it up without providing for any additional compensation.
Any protest is a null option until the whole thing catalyzes and they form a union to address the repeated disregard the company shows them.
The only way for the company to avoid this is to self regulate or at least pay lip service to buy more time.
,,All that stuff sounds like systematic abuses that a union would reduce.''
It doesn't always feel like it when you get an above average salary. Also it really depends on the team, how much the tech lead and the manager can push back to external requests...I don't see how adding even more politics can solve political issues. The fact that it's super easy to move between teams is much more important than anything the union could achieve.
This wasn’t a labor dispute about being treated fairly but a position employees were taking on principles. The truly principled walked out and didn’t come back.
If your job is an ethicist, your company hires you to demonstrate that they are ethical.
If they truly aren't then you either have to sacrifice your integrity or kick up a fuss. Additionally once her integrity is lost she loses market value.
Her market (whitewashing/signaling of ethical behavior of a large company) is an odd one but she behaved it the most rational manner given the circumstances.
Moreover by kicking up a fuss she probably has sacrificed an non disparagement termination bonus. Real $$$. So she's probably not talking shit.
I agree with all of this, except you miss that she started playing those ultimatum games with her boss, this particular act, let’s be real, is something that gets you fired from most places. There would be a lot of merit to what you’re saying and a lot more sympathy for this woman if she hadn’t made these missteps.
However it’s also true that they can simply be a reflection of an otherwise unworkable situation.
In a regular employment situation, I think that if you get to the point of wanting to issue an ultimatums, it is just an indication that the company is not a good fit for you any longer. On an individual level it’s better to recognize the signal and leave without burning bridges.
However if you role is ‘ethicist’, it is fundamentally your responsibility not to turn a blind eye to or be complicit in unethical processes, so giving an ultimatum may have been the only option available to retain integrity.
I don’t think we can declare these to be ‘missteps’ given her role. Perhaps Google is simply not capable of being ethical, and is going to fire people who challenge that. What would not be a ‘misstep’ under these circumstances?
My comment was about the 1200 workers who condemned the firing.
There have been similar recent public statements such as MS workers about use of AI for the pentagon, FB employees on content, etc..
Simply I mean the best way to support a wrongfully ousted ethicist would be to leave yourself, rather than keep getting paid by the execs who wronged her.
The work of AI ethics - especially in the vein of Timnit Gebru - is essential. My statement, was one of support for her.
>Simply I mean the best way to support a wrongfully ousted ethicist would be to leave yourself
What are you basing this on? I can think of at least one example where this pressure actually worked (caused google management to reverse course). ICE contracts, I think?
Your strategy would seem to be more in Google management's favor - clearing out all the people who might kick up a fuss when they try to engage in unethical behavior.
It’s just another example of the “participation culture” that modern parenting and social media have made commonplace. Who needs to do anything real when you can just upvote or retweet? You get the same sort of participation trophy that you’ve been taught to aim for since childhood.
This is such a bad-faith, shallow take. Ascribing the act of bringing awareness to “participation trophies” is nonsense.
I also disagree with the parent. Bringing change is almost always easiest from within. “Don’t like it? Leave.” stances aim to do more to attack the person involved than it does to take a critical look at whatever problem it is that’s being discussed.
It is not "don't like it? leave.", it is "stop working for immoral organizations". Would you consider a guard of a concentration camp ethical if they "condemned" the actions of the government but continued to support them via their work? I wouldn't.
It's a moral problem. If the organization you work for is immoral, by knowingly continuing to work for them you are materially cooperating in the evil they are doing and are morally culpable yourself. Sure, you can refuse to materially cooperate, but then they will fire you anyhow, as we see here.
What’s the opposite of “participation culture”? Not participating?
I feel like signing a letter of protest is doing something “real”. It’s communicating to leadership of the company that you have concerns about what has transpired. It’s not nothing.
Parent post is probably referring to the relatively new phenomena of issuing "participation prizes" instead of prizes for winning, this insulating the participants who "lost" from the stigma associated with being a "loser".
The peak of this behavior led to a small war between coal miners and a sheriff and a small airforce that bombed the strikers that only ended when Warren Harding threatened to send in the military.
They ultimately lost but what happened there led to the sympathetic growth of the AFL and CIO and ultimately to the New Deal and the rise of the middle class.
They say history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. I wouldn't be surprised if the next series of pitched struggles between American owners and labor result in extreme violence also, before giving way to a system that is slightly more egalitarian.
If you just saw someone get terminated at your employer, and you considered it unfair, wouldn't you fear that speaking up might get you disfavor, perhaps due to whatever element resulted in the earlier unfairness?
Personally, I've been a scaredy-cat about this. I actually didn't go to a different FAANG a couple years ago, partly because I anticipated a dilemma: the company had been in the news for some alleged unfairness, and I decided that I could easily imagine being there, and trapped between wanting to speak up on behalf of a fellow employee facing a similar unfairness in the future, and suspecting that I would be terminated if I did. Had I already been there (rather than merely anticipating the situation with a hypothetical) I don't know whether I'd speak up. (Personally, given past battle scars, I'd probably make quiet and delicate internal inquiries, trying to find a sympathetic person in a position to look into and correct or mitigate what seemed to be unfair, while being clear that I'm still a team player.)
So, I do think speaking up in a big-corporate environment, in the public manner these people have done, would tend to come with some personal risk in most companies. When people do it (perhaps) despite a perception of personal risk to themselves in doing so, we should pause and consider what they are saying.
Also, I don't blame people for not anticipating this situation to which they're objecting (based on the information available I've seen at this point). If the concern had instead been "I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find the amassing of intimate personal information of Internet users going on here!", then I'd wonder how they couldn't have realized that before going to that company, but I don't think that's the concern.
I'm not taking a position on the concern itself, since the information I have so far is incomplete and complicated -- only suggesting that, when people are saying something at some personal risk, those people and what they're saying shouldn't be dismissed offhand.
They're often meant to be somewhat hollow. The referenced letter (https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-geb...) uses dramatic language to issue pretty anodyne demands: Brain leadership should meet with her former team and explain what went wrong, Google should publicly explain what it was they found objectionable in her paper, and Google Research should confirm they're committed to research integrity and academic freedom. Someone could easily sign this letter without thinking Google's a bad company at all.
The public sphere is very heavily slanted. Few people dare come out under their own name and condemn the bullying behavior of Timnit, for fear of being subjected to that very bullying, which has drastic real life consequences. The letter demands to push the conversation into the public sphere, where one sided Twitter and media pressure can be fully applied. One has to be very naive and sheltered to sign such a letter.
Why not try this first though? You complain, and if complaints aren't met you then quit. It's kind of childish, in a way, to not voice problems you have until you just up and quit one day. It's much more professional to at least try and communicate.
To say the least those employees are misguided. Gebru was hired to research AI, yes she spent all her time being an activist. A pretty lousy one too. Case in point: 1. Her paper's claim on CO2 emission was not scientific in any way (projecting 100% of utilization of hundreds of desktop GPUs, really? Looking at emission without looking at how much would be saved or what other benefits are, really?). 2. Her paper claims that lacking support of all languages in BERT marginalizes minorities, which was similar to how Trofim Lysenko politicizing and moralizing biological science in Soviet. 3. See the quote blow. If this is not activism, I don't know what is. The only remaining questions are, why would Google AI hire her in the first place, and why should she work in a research org? Note it's perfectly for her to work in Google or any other company so choose the companies. I just thought people do real research in a research org.
Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.
To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.
The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth."
The problem with this view, though, is imagine if you're in that situation, and you leave, only to be replaced with someone with more amoral views. It's the opposite of a solution imo.
I really hope someone at Google's PR department is paying attention to comparisons like these, and that they realize there are consequences to allowing Google's brand to get dragged through the mud by their relentless antisocial behavior.
Google went from being a tech darling where their "Don't be evil" motto was taken seriously to "Google employees are like Nazis".
Hope someone in authority at Google is doing some serious soul searching as to why this might be.
> they are looking to assuage their conscious through statements like these
Statements like these still put pressure on Google. It's possible to care enough to say something, without caring enough to go beyond talk, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's all performative.
Or more likely, the corps realize that the walkouts are an ineffective form of virtue signaling and it would be a PR nightmare to do anything about them, so might as well let them happen since they really mean very little.
Walkouts are close enough to strikes that it would be pretty dangerous for a Google executive to try and stop them. (I think some of them may actually be strikes by law - I don't know the exact legal definition.)
If their goal is to promote savory behavior, isn't it beneficial to have an internal voice trying to guide the company's direction?
There is no shortage of engineers who would happily take a job at Google. If the folks raising concerns decided to all leave, isn't the net result that Google would operate much as it does today (maybe a little bit slower to get products to market) but without any internal check on its behavior?
And since the issue under dispute here is AI ethics, shouldn't we the non-Googlers want to make sure people willing to voice concern about unethical behavior remain at Google?
"shouldn't we the non-Googlers want to make sure people willing to voice concern about unethical behavior remain at Google?"
That depends on whether they're actually effective. If their concerns are ignored and they're not able to effect change, then their presence at the company is useless as far as moving Google in an ethical direction is concerned.
If they were serious about the strength of collective action, they could unionize. That due process would have protected a fired employee more than any petition.
I absolutely hate my workplace. But I've hated most of the other workplaces I've been at. My ideal situation would be to work at NASA, but I've heard some questionable things about that workplace too. Point is, unless you run the show, you have little control over the culture and something will always suck because humans are individuals and not all of us like conforming. So, I just suck it up and work so I can live. Maybe one day I can do my own thing and establish the culture, but I have to be willing to sacrifice and do what it takes to build a successful business. My guess is that if I do that I might just end up becoming the very thing I hate. It's easy to be morally superior when I have nothing on the line.
No, but I'm not at the point where I'm signing an open letter to condemn my employer for something. However if you are at that point, you may at least consider that you should be working elsewhere.
Why? If the workers can apply pressure and get their employer to change whatever objectionable behavior it's doing, why shouldn't they?
Why shouldn't workplaces be more democratic? We got rid of kings everywhere else, why should we keep them around just because they're signing our paychecks?
I'm in total agreement with you. My response was a criticism of those who sit idly by and collect their massive paycheck, and perhaps signing an open letter from time to time to sleep better at night. It's just paying lip service to the cause.
Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage. It’s unlikely Gebru would have been fired under these circumstances if she had a union contract.
I hope this does encourage more workers in this industry to unionize.
It's unfortunate that people aren't sufficiently concerned that their employer holds a significant amount of power over them - or at least, not enough that they'll do anything much about it - even if they do happen to have a job that pays higher than average.
> Or they could just actually unionize instead of this reactive outrage.
Some of the employees involved are in management (as was Gebru), so they don't have that right, nor would that protect people in positions similar to Gebru's.
Is she really a manager? In factories the foreman was considered part of the Union rank and file. PMs and other developer leadership could be integrated into a union.
Basically if you can be promoted up into a position it can be a union job. If you need a business degree to do it though then it’s non union.
I don't know exactly what her job responsibilities were, but it's not the case as a rule that any position you can be promoted to is a union job. Anyone who has independent authority to "hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees, or responsibly to direct them, or to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action" is by law a supervisor, and they can't join an NLRA-protected union because supervisors aren't protected by the NLRA. As far as I know, all Google managers have the power to assign, reward, and discipline their reports.
> In factories the foreman was considered part of the Union rank and file.
She's not a foreman.
> Basically if you can be promoted up into a position it can be a union job.
That's not how the NLRA works; in plenty of workplaces people can, even if they rarely do, promote without limit and most management positions don't require business degrees, but that doesn't make all those positions NLRA-protected.
Google is an company that demands extraordinarily high ideological conformance from its workers. Unfortunately for Google it new longer controls the exact specification of what is and is not acceptable thought at Google, and much like the French revolution it’s being pushed into directions that is management may or may not agree with.
What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance.
"What should be a fairly reasonable question – is this person a good employee or not is immediately contaminated by questions they have nothing to do with job performance."
There are all sorts of non-performance considerations that are important, not just at Google, but at pretty much every other company.
One of those considerations is ethics. Another is legality. Another is public relations.
Which of these do you think companies should ignore?
Ideological conformance. Google has a particular world view that insists that privacy is not a human right, that certain political positions are verboten and unions are bad.
The article repeatedly mentions Gebru's race and sex and includes it for the only Google employee quoted. Why does that matter? Is she more reliable because of her skin colour? Is he less reliable because of his genitals?
The cynic in me feels like I'm being subtly trolled. Or maybe I'm just oversensitive? :)
It's typical SJW narrative. People are tired of it, it's like the boy who cried wolf story. Hopefully at some point people will just learn to ignore these "woke" SJWs as they have their tantrums.
It just seems to be conflating so many things: personal racism against her (which I see no evidence of) and institutional racism (which is some of what she researches but then her and his race are irrelevant). That plus sexism. Plus academic freedom and employee-employer relations and PR.
In the end, it's a mess of nothings, rather and 1 solid something imho...
This article is from a couple of days ago. The story the article is about has been posted to HN several times and I think that there are may be some relevant updates to the story since this article was published if you wish to dive in:
As a scientist, at the very least I would also need to know how many workers applaud the firing, and how many are actively uninterested, otherwise quoting that number is entirely without meaning.
Having read the paper (https://gofile.io/d/WfcxoF), I can't take the idea that Google wanted to suppress it seriously (as the article argues).
In the paper, another paper is summarized describing the environmental costs of training large models. It is then argued that global warming will disproportionately affect marginalized people. This constitutes "environmental racism" because the main beneficiaries of these models are rich white people whereas the people bearing the costs are poor people who live near the equator. In my mind, this is two-points-make-a-line thinking.
The rest of the paper is more interesting. It argues that machine learning is conservative in that it "reinforces hegemonic language". I think this is true. Models are trained using data, data is what exists rather than what we would like to exist. If you're unhappy with what exists (as Gebru is, terribly), this represents a problem. Two of her solutions are "curating" data (censoring data) and "working with panels of experiential experts through the Diverse Voices methodology" (constituting powerful groups made up of her ideological allies). I think these solutions are dead-ends. It seems to me that we have to make peace with the conservatism inherent in these models (and maybe all models).
The paper also argues (I think rightly) that problems will materialize "should humans encounter seemingly coherent language model output and take it for the words of some person or organization who have accountability for what is said". In other words, we grant other humans responsibility for what they say and do but what about models that can mimic humans very accurately? A similar problem exists today when a Google or Youtube account is erroneously locked by some algorithm. There's a sense that, really, no one is responsible for this outcome because an algorithm did it. Even if the owner manages to get his account restored, there's no clear way to assign responsibility for the mistake. Perhaps this problem will become even worse if we start to see algorithms powered by models that are near-indistinguishable from people.
Anyway, the paper doesn't seem controversial to me. It seems clear that Gebru's strident tone and personal style were the cause of her firing/resignation. Jeff Dean's claim that the paper was rejected for not citing other papers may be false. The truth seems much simpler: based on her own public communications, Gebru felt she was the subject of "harassment" and "dehumanization" but those grievances seem to be hyperbole, and the personal injury that she felt became an excuse for her to treat her coworkers poorly. In other words, she didn't drop her twitter persona at work.
Remember the last time Google tried to make the algorithm less biased only after some egregious cases of comparing Africans to gorillas have been found.
Judging from the comments from some of her ex-colleagues, she was not exactly an easy person to deal with:
> The GPT-3 thread you describe was my first exposure to Timnit. Watching that thread unfold left me feeling upset, frustrated, and disappointed.
> I was so excited in anticipation of other Googler's reactions and insights about GPT-3, but that thread got immediately derailed by Timnit into claims of racism, not being listened to, dehumanization, that the whole forum became icy and dead after that.
I'm still trying to gather more insight into what actually happened here. But you have to know upper management calculated there'd be blowback for firing someone of her stature, position, background, race, gender, etc. They did it anyway. That to me says that keeping her around was worse than the storm they knew they'd generate by firing her.
More like, you support the decision, but your immediate boss doesn't, so they start looking for reasons to get rid of you that don't have any official connection to your stance. I remember a while back seeing leaked documents from Google where some managers shared an unofficial blacklist of employees to never promote and try to get rid of because of their political views.
Why are we conjuring hypothetical situations in which you are oppressed, instead of condemning the concrete case where Jeff Dean looked for flimsy reasons to get rid of Timnit Gebru?
It does though. For instance, were any articles framed as [More than X Google workers condemn firing of James Damore], despite that actually being the case? The media, universities and other elite institutions always support the "SJW cultural domination" stance on all these issues and the discussion is always framed from that perspective.
You'll find similar framings such as [More than X GitHub workers condemn GitHub's deals with ICE]. You'll never find [More than X GitHub workers condemn removal of meritocracy rug], despite that also being the case. You may not like me pointing this out, but that's how it happens. It's not cognitive dissonance to see that that's how these things go.
People are afraid of being labeled a bigot and having their careers ruined because they have a nuanced opinion about an issue related to identity politics.
The cognitive dissonance is that a huge number of highly respected people in the field, and coworkers, said "yeah, this was racist bullshit", and the actual paper in question has been seen by a lot of people by now.
But if you are committed to the stance that racism doesn't exist and this is all a grand SJW conspiracy then you have to grasp at straws to ignore the overwhelming number of experts disagreeing with you.
I don't believe in experts. They have no power to change my mind about any social issue whatsoever. So them saying "this is racist" means nothing to me. There is no cognitive dissonance. You're projecting it into me because you think I think like you, that I care about what experts have to say, when I don't.
It was a technical question about the predictive power of language models, the biases encoded in them and the results of their use in a large system like all of Google's connected products.
But I guess to your particular faith-based ideology the mention of race makes it a "social issue"? Anyway I'm sorry I misclassified you and in the process insulted your religious beliefs. That wasn't my intention.
Thank you for your apology. My religion is very important to me and it really bothers me when people think I care about experts. Universities and other buildings of high density intellectual activity should be thoroughly demolished with tanks & tractors (and without the people in them, of course), the charade has gone on for too long.
Gebru and her supporters say that she was fired in part because she's a black woman and the racist Google culture rejected her. If they don't want others to frame it as a "political correctness gone mad" thing, they should drop the race baiting.
I get that Timnit Gebru is well respected in the field of AI ethics, and that the demand via HR that she retract the paper without discussion or appeal at the 11th hour sounds super shady
That email blast though. It made it so much worse for her position.
This article read like her paper was on bias. But isn't the paper on the environmental effects of large models? The article reads like Google tried to slience her on something racial.
She offered to resign on a particular schedule to work out things with her team if they insisted on retracting the paper. They terminated her employment immediately, while she was on vacation, because of an email she sent to the ERG about it, and they didn't even inform her direct manager.
Whatever they accepted, it wasn't the resignation she offered.
(And even if they had done so, I expect the folks here to remain unhappy about the circumstances that lead up to her offering her resignation. It's not a thing you do if things are going well.)
It is not out of the ordinary at all for companies to walk people out on the day of resignation. The company is not required or even expected to abide by whatever schedule is presented to them.
> It is not out of the ordinary at all for companies to walk people out on the day of resignation.
I've observed a few cases of this as a bystander. Generally, the employee escorted out had accepted a job offer from a competitor -- and that doesn't appear to be the case here.
If the employee says "I'm giving you 1 month formal notice of resignation", and the company responds with "effective immediately you are terminated without pay or benefits", at that point it's not a resignation any more, it's a termination.
In most countries (which are not "at will"), I believe if the employee had not breached their contract they could claim wrongful termination in this scenario and likely be awarded the pay they would have received for the missing notice period.
This doesn't mean the company is obliged to keep the employee on premises, on the network, active etc. It is not uncommon to ask the employee to leave the premises, have security walk them out, disconnect from the network etc out of security/IP/morale/whatever concerns. But they would still be either technically employed and paid while the notice worked out or paid in lieu of notice.
Employers just need to pay you whatever period is written in your contract (which may be longer or shorter than 1 month). Which may very well be what happened here - nobody claimed she's no longer paid a dime, just that she no longer has access to Google resources.
You can't just say "i'm giving you 1 month of formal notice of resignation" and expect the company to be bound to that month... otherwise, to take it to extremes, what's stopping you from giving them a 20years formal notice of resignation?
In the US, in most states, 'at will' employment often means zero notice is required from either side. A contract can specify otherwise, as can other things (such as a company HR procedure).
> You can't just say "i'm giving you 1 month of formal notice of resignation" and expect the company to be bound to that month... otherwise, to take it to extremes, what's stopping you from giving them a 20years formal notice of resignation?
You actually can say that if you want.
What stops 20 years notice from having any effect is that the company can terminate you anyway in the normal way before that. I.e. they can still make you redundant, fire you, assess your performance etc in all of the usual ways, or in 'at will' locations just let you go without a reason. They will still be subject to discrimination law etc if they fail to comply with all the usual constraints on terminating employments, but nothing about your 20 year notice prevents them from following the normal rules at any time.
ps. I really meant to say "giving 1 month formal notice in accordance with my contract of employment", but I realised in the US people don't always have any notice in their contract (due to 'at will') so I removed the part about being in accordance with it.
Ignore employment as a special case for a moment. In general, for any contract (implied or not), parties can give each other advance notice of something that is going to take effect in future, as if they told the other party on the future date of the effect; the effect will not occur until that date. The other party in the contract can't just decide the effect has taken place earlier. You can also give conditions. In a sense, notice of this kind is just a courtesy, an advance warning if you like.
I believe in US 'at will' terms, Timnit effectively gave notice that she was going to resign at a specified future date under certain conditions. Timing had not actually resigned at the point at which Google is said to have terminated the employment. That makes it a termination.
I was mostly disagreeing with "wrongful termination" - a "conditional resignation" is a good reason for termination, and there's nothing wrongful to terminate the employment earlier than his proposed terms as long as you respect the contract (pay for the notice period, to the extent that such period exists).
This is completely untrue, at least with 'at will' employments. Once you resign, you quit.
Working for any additional length of time after that often occurs if it is in both parties best interests. If it isn't though, the relationship is usually terminated immediately after resignation.
But when you say you are going to resign at a future date, especially when you say you are going to resign at a future date only if certain conditions occur but will not resign if they don't... then you haven't resigned yet.
That's not special to employments. Similar applies to contracts in general, where a party tells the other party that at some future date, and/or under some condition, they are committing to exercise some clause in the contract. It's almost as if the message is a courtesy notice, an advance warning, of what the first party is going to do. They haven't done it.
In 'at will' locations the effect is much the same as quitting the same day because the company has the power to 'let you go' without giving a reason anyway - although the company must still comply with the contract, discrimination law, its normal operating procedure etc.
But even though the effect is much the same as quitting immediately - you are let go and employment ends - for anything where the difference between 'resigned' and 'terminated' matters, for example rights to government support, or loss-of-job insurance payouts, the company deciding to terminate early is a 'termination'.
> But when you say you are going to resign at a future date, especially when you say you are going to resign at a future date only if certain conditions occur but will not resign if they don't... then you haven't resigned yet
Maybe if you want to play semantics, sure. In the eyes of the employer though, you have effectively resigned.
I don't get why people keep mentioning how things are in other countries. We all know the US is bad for employee rights, why bring up how it is in other countries?
Because people are debating whether it is a resignation (where the employee is in control of events), or a termination ("firing", where the company is in control of events).
Although US has 'at will' in most states, in many respects the way employment issues are judged in the US is similar to elsewhere. So the perspective elsewhere on what counts as termination seems relevant.
You're free to disagree, but that's why it's brought into the conversation.
I think it's good to remind people how terrible the US is when it comes to worker rights. Many people don't realize just how bad they've got it over there.
> they could claim wrongful termination in this scenario and likely be awarded the pay they would have received for the missing notice period.
Correct.
That's what happens in Italy for example and I believe in large parts of Europe (I know for sure France, Germany, Sweden and Spain)
The missing pay is granted anyway, but with a wrongful termination the employer will most likely obtain a fair compensation.
A couple decades ago I was awarded a year of salary + the 3 months of notice we agreed upon when I was hired, for a wrongful termination after an acquisition.
If you're a Google employee I have to say it seems like you guys a pampered beyond believe. Someone publically tells people not to work on something for the company and doesn't get fired for that but gets shown the door after demanding confidental information or else and you guys are unhappy? Stay at Google, because most companies would have had you out the door if you sent a public email telling people to stop working.
This is just not how employment works, really anywhere in the world. The company is well within it's right to ask you to leave earlier to protect it's IP.
If he used his real name then you'd threaten him? talk shit about him on twitter? stalk him on fb? use this comment in order to discredit his other things?
You don't like people with different opinions, don't you?
Her job was AI ethics research. Also, she did get it reviewed and it was accepted, as Jeff Dean's letter confirms. Management just changed their mind and decided the review procedure wasn't enough because they realized they didn't want someone taking their AI ethics job seriously.
Why would she not work there, no company is perfect. Plus working there provides her with a particularly good insight when it comes to criticizing Google.
This is why so many of us look down on the US and their ease of firing people that don't buy into the groupthink.
Wanting to know which coworkers are raising feedback in a process that does not provide for anonymous feedback in the first place is not "doxxing" them.
(EDIT: Note that this particular process was not a peer review process - academic peer review is done by people from another institution, and selected by the venue after submitting a paper. This was a pre-submission internal review process which has never been billed as academic peer review.)
Peer review for academic papers is typically anonymous. She would have been familiar with the process. In the end, the editor (in this case the manager) takes responsibility for the decision.
Generally you get some explanation with peer review, to revise and submit. It's a process of revisions and improvements. As far as I've read, not only did the authors not receive any such actionable feedback, but actually a demand to retract. In her shoes, I would think many of us would want to know who is the one behind a decision like that. Someone is putting a roadblock in the standard process and normal execution of my job.
> process that does not provide for anonymous feedback
What makes you say this? Ultimately, the process is determined by Google. She had managers say she couldn't get that information. Why wouldn't that be the end of the conversation with regards to their identities?
The process is determined by Google, yes, but there is a written, established process, which management did not abide by.
Now it is technically true that management does not have to abide by it and can redefine the process at any time, but that doesn't mean saying "The established process is not an anonymous feedback process, what is going on" is doxxing anyone.
Last week at work I was told that a particular internal product was being wound down and was not considered strategic in 2021 planning, and I asked who expressed that desire because my team has a particular technical need for it and I think there are ways to run it more efficiently, and I wanted to have a conversation with them and find an answer that's good for the business. I would have been confused if I was told "I can't tell you that." Was I trying to dox someone?
Given her history and ultimatum, the chances of her doxxing them publicly was high. Given her public response since her resignation, Google's caution in releasing that information appears justified to me.
1200 employees going on strike will literally have no negative impact on Google's bottom line, at least not unless they do it for a long time period. A lot of the money that comes in is basically automatic, it's being produced by ad sells and stuff like that. You'd need a massive subset of the company's staff to go on strike (not just 1200) before that would have any impact on whether the money-making machine continues to function. In a case like this walkouts or strikes by the tech workers have more of a symbolic purpose + impact on future deadlines/releases than a direct impact on revenue.
Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.
> Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.
It's the threat of being able to strike and potentially cause that much damage to the business that makes it powerful.
No-one really wants to strike, actually going through with it is the final step when the company fails to meet the workers' demands - no point in making a threat if you don't demonstrate it when the circumstances arise, it's toothless otherwise.
Unfortunately, it's clearly more complex than that. To be fair, it seems that she has made it about that to an extent and media ran with it. We haven't heard from google or her superiors. It's clear they didn't agree but to what extent? And why did she need to publicly quit? Again, she quit. She wasn't asked to leave or resign. She volunteered to do so because she had a moral disagreement with the company. And that's fair. We don't really know if she was treated fairly or unfairly just her claims of what happened.
"Old men's club" is real and need a shakeup. However, the elite clubs hurt both genders, not just one of them. It is not balanced by an equally forceful swing the other direction, but by emphasis on mutual respect for diversity of people. Sometimes measures need to be put in place to get the ball rolling, but they should be temporary.
Anybody may be susceptible to such ideology and short-circuited bias. However, technical people are often so focused on their details, we are probably even more vulnerable to this than most.
"Condemn firing" is a misleadingly narrow headline that focuses undue attention on the resign/fire question. The important part of the story is not the HR machinations of her departure, but what caused the situation to escalate to that point. The letter itself makes this clear -- its condemnations and demands go way beyond Gebru's employment:
> Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing
The letter goes on:
> In late November, five weeks after the piece had been internally reviewed and approved for publication through standard processes, Google leadership made the decision to censor it, without warning or cause.
The demands are also not about the firing itself:
> explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership
At that point she was on her way out, one way or another; most employers would rather not work with people like this.