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?
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 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.
