Timnit Gebru firing sounds crazy. What’s up with Google Brain?
Dec 3, 2020
78 Comments
#google #brain
Edit: I thought the way Google claimed her firing was a resignation was crazy.
But now that more details are coming to light, about the research paper being denied publication, it makes this fucked up.
My interpretation of what’s up: employee was terminated for cause, because she didn’t understand they needed to publish a marketing white paper, not a research paper.
But she could not be told that directly and that can’t be the official reason, otherwise it would taint the research veneer on the work of everyone else who understands such rule.
Claiming the termination was a resignation was just a poor attempt of obfuscation.
comments
not be listed as a co-author in a paper?
A side question, who thinks she's using her fame as weapon and we should hear the full story before judging
LeCun: Model recognizes white faces bc it was trained on white faces
Gabru: You're racist and I'm done talking to you
except in dozens of tweets (all of which I read and now have brain cancer)
1. She sent some email with some demands, threatening to quit if they were not met.
2. Her skip level, knowing they would not capitulate to her demands, fired her.
3. They however didn’t call it a firing; they euphemistically said “we accept your resignation, effective immediately.”
4. She assumed Jeff Dean was consulted on her termination but presents no evidence of that.
The questions I have are:
1. What exactly were the demands and were they reasonable things?
2. Google is well within its right to terminate her employment for any non discriminatory reason. Sounds like there was stuff in the email (wasn’t clear if they were referencing a different email) that violated company policy and those are the grounds on which she was terminated.
3. Are there any implications for couching the firing as “accepting your resignation” instead of being more direct about it?