How is that really a big difference? She's gone either way, because they wouldn't let her publish the paper. This way I guess she's more eligible for unemployment, but beyond that?
Well, I mean, for one thing it about $20K difference in salary alone.
> She's gone either way
True.
> because they wouldn't let her publish the paper.
That's...less clearly true in any meaningful sense. The public statements from all the other Google AI people about how the official narrative is inconsistent with general practice on publication review suggests very strongly that the management actions related to the paper were a pretextual component of a constructive termination campaign, and that even when it succeeded in generating something management could at least seize on as a “resignation” the result was insufficiently immediate requiring finding another pretext for immediate termination.
What makes it dishonest? Do you not believe that she stipulated that she'd resign under certain conditions? Do you not believe those conditions then came to exist? Do you not believe that her managers accepted her resignation?
I don't have a strong opinion in the matter (and have no connection to Google), but if she in fact unambiguously offered her resignation conditioned on her paper not being approved to publish and Google accepted her offer, I don't see how she can turn around and claim she was fired.
She didn't offer to resign immediately. Her manager explicitly rejected her actual offer and imposed new terms as punishment for her email to the group.
If the text Jeff Dean wrote below is overwhelmingly true, I'd agree that she resigned rather than was fired. I suspect that it is overwhelmingly true as I'm fairly sure that Google legal would have reviewed it and ensured they didn't say anything falsifiable and likely that this paragraph is entirely true.
> Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.
To me (and I suspect the courts): In the second case, she was fired today prior to her offered last day. In the first case, Google accepted her resignation and just didn’t require her to work through her last day.
