Contrarian view. Some of these points can individually be refuted. As an outsider, here’s what it looks like:
- you have an employee who (in her letter) hired attorneys to sue you.
- you have an employee who was given an award for impact who openly mocks it and thinks it’s a joke, which detracts from culture
- you have an employee who went on a Twitter tirade and send several pages of information teaching a leading person in your space how to apologize. Humiliating.
- you have a paper of questionable quality that maybe needs more review and maybe doesn’t but at a minimum appears to be BERT related which could impact your business. It’s not unreasonable to want to look at it.
- you have an employee whose tone is very aggressive. It seems reasonable you’d be apprehensive of working with her. It doesn’t seem googles point is to make a model that is biased towards any group, etc, so you should be on the same team?
- you get a volley email which requires information (give me all the conversations you had) which could be used to publicly shame the head of a business unit (Jeff Dean)
- the employee emails, says she’s going on vacation, and then expects you to be waiting for her when you get back
I don’t know. It’s probably mixed. But it seems she’s well respected and given significant leeway. If we strip race and sex from this (if you can do that, perhaps it ruins it, but this is why this is a throwaway): this seems like a very high drama employee. Let’s say there was no hidden bogey man and we take Jeff at his word: more time was needed to give comments on the paper. From there, a) either paper is fine and she submits. Obviously the initial publication space for which she missed the internal review deadline is out, or B) if the paper is not fine and Google makes reasonable points to improve the quality, you incorporate them, then it’s published, or C) if the paper is not fine, but Google is making bogus claims to surpress you because of (in this thought experiment) some racial bias or business model conflict, then you can escalate internally or leave or fight in the media.
The problem is you didn’t let a)/b)/c) play out. By jamming the list serve as a way to influence and over ride the internal system the employee is trying to circumvent the operation practice of the group and it undermines leadership. Note, I’m not claiming she is incorrect in her work being suppressed potentially. I’m just claiming if I was her manager my inner voice mental response would be: “shut the fuck up and stop being such a shit disturber. I was willing to work this out with you, even though you could have followed the normal process everyone else does, but now you created a company internal hurfuffle so I need to loop in MY manager (Jeff) and the last time you interacted with public exposure with someone of that high stature (the Twitter incident) you caused a highly abraisive outcome. Ugh. What do I do? Oh you resigned unless you publicly humiliate my boss? Yeah okay, let’s just accept that, I’m not being paid enough to baby sit you. I’m at Google brain to do ai research, not manage temper tantrums. Ok, so will talk to Jeff, tell the team you resigned to help you save face (which she spun btw, lol) and oh yeah we should probably shut off your devices to avoid more damage. This sucks. Ugh I wish that list serve and email to Jeff didn’t go out. “
That’s a jaded view. You can be potentially (or not) repressed and simultaneously an asshole. Would any of you want to work with someone like her? Who low key threatens your job or attempts to publicly humiliate you if she doesn’t get what she wants?
Note, using a throw away because it’s too scary to post this publicly. Because I can’t judge what the “public consensus” is (and it seems to be changing), I can’t tell if the above is a 1/10 and like lunatic level, or 4/10 and highly offensive, or maybe a 6/10 and just highly insidious (by design). The bigger point is this incident shows how Twitter flames and self censor ship can perhaps make certain topics hard to discuss.
Sorry if this was offensive. But the “HR policy drone” view seems otherwise underrepresented.