She was fired for violating company confidentiality, anything she says otherwise about her gender, race, culture, etc is just a deflection, but it’s probably coming.
Do you think society at large really benefits from employers doing things this way?
If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do?
I am unsure I would be prepared to do what she and Timbru did but that's a long way from the implied cynicism and also frankly abject legalistic kow-towing implicitly in your statement.
"Yea, that whistle blower had it coming, they signed the same contract i did" is pretty sad. Its not this case, sure, but its in the room, alongside sacking union organisers, refusing to approve talks, private illegal nonpoaching deals with Apple, paying your founder millions to cover up their sexualising the workforce,
> If you were in the ethics department of a company, unpacked deep seated entrenched breach of social norms and were blocked from talking about it but still believed in ethics, what would you do?
Whatever you do, just don't try to engage in things that go against the rules of employment (and quite possibly are illegal) like downloading and send confidential documents to third-parties.
Sure, simply said its obvious. Now, idieate into the circumstance. Can you find no path to "i better make sure can prove my side of the story factually" as a thought process?
There is disagreeing with your employer and then flagrantly breaking rules and confidentiality and comparing the two like you are doing here is disingenuous.
No, its not disingenuous. It has to be thought about, sure. I think by the time you're archiving company secrets outside the firewall you mentally left some time ago. What led you there? Is that maybe the interest for me? I don't think she wound up there for entirely base reasons, maybe that's what I'm thinking. Most strict legal compliance answers aren't "wrong" but boy, they feel limited. Hard to change things when it's down to contact terms. Why have smart people, paid to critique if you want to wind up submarining their work?
i feel you generally on this issue, but that last question is easy to answer. a lot of these aren't out of the goodness of our hearts type things but are more CYA if needed, kind of like white collar crime training. "well, we did the best we could - we even had an ethical AI team." also is a nice recruiting bullet.
now, we don't know if this joint was one of those "haha, yeah, we'll get back to ya" things in management's eyes from the start, but it sure looked like its leadership either was not informed or intended to make it actually matter. praise ought to be given there, as this industry seems largely morally bankrupt. however - and i'm not intending to be super negative here - she may have known that her and G weren't gonna work out, and this was just the most spectacular way to set sail.
As a manager someone can disagree with me all they want, whatever i honestly don't care speak your mind. But the moment they start breaking company rules it starts to get into a problematic space, depending on the rule it can mean their judgement can't be trusted anymore and they will have to be let go. Some company rules are to meet legal requirements, and breaking legally required rules is an entirely different ballgame as your opening the company up to lawsuits and legal repercussions. Just because your smart and paid to critique doesn't mean you get to break the law, even if you, I, and the company disagree with it.
As a manager you have structural obligations it would be impossible to ignore. I believe Mitchell will fail to argue illegal termination in law. I am sure google will have a mixed outcome here, some aspects (reinforcement of hr expectations and contract compliance obligations will be net beneficial for everyone) and some (confirmation of how strongly there is a gap between Google's posture, post "dont be evil" and the actual reality) less so.
I've met and worked with a small, couple of handfuls of google people, men and women, all amazingly skilled. Meredith Whittaker was one of them and I think her termination was unnecessary. I do think less of Google as a consequence.
I would agree, when you consciously step over the legal, you accepted the coming dismissal. Entitlement is a label. I think she knows cause exists. She "left" long before and her anger reflects the construction of events which led there. I doubt she really feels entitled, beyond the expectations of respect and recognition somebody in her pay grades would normally expect.
There's room for discussion, certainly. If I hired an accountant to keep me on the straight and narrow and I expensed a dinner I'm not supposed to, I wouldn't want him to go running to Twitter and be like "Hey, everyone! Rene expensed a dinner with this guy abroad! That's a violation of the FCPA! He's a violator, guys! Heeeeeee's a violator!"
Like, if he did that, I'd be pretty incensed honestly. I'd expect him to tell me "Dude, you can't go around taking these guys out to dinner. That's like a bribery violation and shit, homie".
If he had to keep warning me, I could see him feeling that his professional ethics are being called into question, and then I'd expect him to either:
* quit and maybe blow the whistle
* stay and blow the whistle and then I'm gonna retaliate within my legal ability
> There's room for discussion, certainly. If I hired an accountant to keep me on the straight and narrow and I expensed a dinner I'm not supposed to, I wouldn't want him to go running to Twitter
Or emailing your expense report to who knows whom.
Only if the disagreeing was in relation to ethical AI.
As far as I know, she's made this about perceived sexism, racism, and personally attacking hermanagers for failing to step up regarding various topics NOT related to AI ethics. There hasn't been much discussion about actual AI ethics, at least not on her behalf.
Unpacked, uncovered, documented, found. Deep seated, ingrained, established, systematic, breach non aligned, wrong, social societal, norms expectations laws, behaviours,
Please. Don't be that person. What did you think it meant? What specifically. Was without meaning. Not what do you disagree with: to even pose the question, you have to be literate and capable of reading. At this point your question is actually a statement. In other channels I'd say it more bluntly.
Someone asked you a question and you belittled them assuming worst intent. Please don't be THAT person. For one not everyone speaks english as a first language, two while i _think_ i understand what your getting at you picked a very obtuse way to phrase it and even i'm uncertain if i understand, three when speaking to a diverse audience from around the globe who probably are not aware of the language used when speaking about diversity you should default to simple clear explanations and language, not packing it all up into a dense phrase like that.
Google claimed to have higher regard for equity in the workplace and to correcting structural bias at all levels.
The AI ethics people were meeting structural process and behaviour around their own work, which i believe they felt fundamentally contradicts that.
They did not receive support to say it outside the company. Ultimately in at least one case, they probably broke their terms and conditions of employment and have been terminated.
Looking at it from the perspective of what people say they expect from the modern workplace, it wasn't a good alignment. People expect equity. They expect to be able to speak their mind. Within limits people can and do, but some staff have found the informal rules of what you can say about Google were not what they think they wanted.
Fired for cause, and at-will terms of employment are entirely normal. Nobody can seriously say Google broke the law, absent strong evidence. If you hire somebody to occupy a senior role, but constrain their ability to self assert, its a bit contradictory.
What do you think society at large wants, from the entities which now control the vast majority of our private state as individuals?
I’m sorry but as a native speaker your phrasing is awkward and a pain to parse. Unpack isn’t synonym for ‘uncover’ and the rest was equally clumsy. The “if the rules didn’t stop me I’d give you the finger, you imbecile” tact is a little ironic.
What is wrong with you? Why do you talk like that? It's like you take a normal sentence, then swap out some random words until it no longer makes sense.
No, its just how some people mangle English. I didn't go to Oxbridge, but a lot of my workmates in the eighties did and they sometimes wrote very strange sentence structure. An American instance: Prof Dave Mills (certainly in no sense a peer, since he's out of my league, but we did write on the same arpanet and pre great renaming Usenet lists. Also he didn't go to Oxbridge) says this of his own style of writing:
It is an open secret among my correspondents that I on occasion do twitch the English language in mail messages and published works. Paper referees have come to agreement on what they call millsspeak to refer to the subtilities with which I personalize my work. If you read my papers or my mail, you know my resonances. If not, you can calibrate my naughtimeter from children's books
Jon Crowcroft, who is a CS professor in Cambridge, but was a phd student in ucl-cs when I worked there in the eighties: http://paravirtualization.blogspot.com/ also, probably presumptuous to call him a peer: if he keeps going, he may be one both literally, and by appointment. Of the realm that is, not I.
Overall I think I miswrote above. Absent a time machine, it stands.
Obviously, this stuff irritates a lot of people. I apologise, but really at this stage I doubt I'm changing.
Btw, and please forgive me if this is a breach of privacy but HN comment history shows you've accumulated a 25 year deep curated unix command history file. If I had the forethought to have done the same (which btw, is a brilliant idea) it would be older than yours. It most definitely would not be better, and very possibly more narrow in focus. I suspect, the pretensions of written English aside, we're not that different.
What makes it hard for me to read is mainly the comma-placement, which is quite different from the verbal pauses you'd make when reading it, and break up rather than separate the logical parts. I found myself asking "what does it mean to point in rule?" Italics or quotes would have helped.
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