"Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Gebru deserves to be treated this way."
"Dr. Gebru refused to subjugate herself to a system requiring her to belittle her integrity as a researcher and degrade herself below her fellow researchers. Within the next year, let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system that devalued one of the world’s leading scientists, and keep something like this from ever happening again."
In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt. I have nothing but respect for people willing to fall on their sword for the sake of making the world a better place. But if she thought even for a second that she could possibly be a martyr and also keep her job, she's delusional. I have a hard time aligning myself with people who are fighting for the right cause, but have completely lost their touch with reality.
Perhaps she expected to get fired and knew that moving the files was only going to accelerate the inevitable? In that case, she deserved to be celebrated. But if she thought that she was untouchable, and in addition to being a major PITA for her employer also ended up so easily getting caught red-handed for a fireable offense - then I start questioning her judgement and have to wonder if her arguments against Google are equally skewed.
> Dr. Gebru refused to subjugate herself to a system
Like working at a gigantic publicly traded US corporation?
> belittle her integrity as a researcher and degrade herself below her fellow researchers
Funny way of phrasing "paper wasn't good enough yet to pass peer review."
> let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system
Like those who went to elite academic institutions and then went on to make boatloads of money at one of the worlds best known, respected, and profitable companies? Must be nice to have that sort of economic privilege where you can go out of your way to get fired and not to have to worry about losing your home or not being able to pay your bills.
> part of an unjust system that devalued one of the world’s leading scientists
I don't mean to insult her or anything, but one of the _world's leading scientists_? Really? The myopia and self-important of the Valley never fails to baffle me.
> In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt.
Exactly. Who wants to work with someone who craps on everyone around them when they don't get their way? And what company is going to tolerate that sort of behavior out of someone who is supposed to be a leader?
News flash: if even Jeff Dean thinks you're an unbearable asshole, you got some issues.
No, the opposite. Jeff Dean is known for exceptional kindness and humility. He is the kind of person that wouldn't have a problem with a researcher standing up for ethics.
Therefore, the implication is that anybody Jeff Dean cannot bear is an unbearable asshole.
Does Google have a particularly effective PR machine? I think people like Google because of things like search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Android, etc. - not because they are some PR wizard.
They dont :), but unless someone is willing to take the risk themselves and stand up to defend Google, what is reported in the press will then be simply known as "truth". And it is their PR's job to do something about it. Although arguably not doing something about it is also a variable option.
You’re conflating the current person who was fired and did the public callouts with the person who has a Doctorate from Stanford and was fired or resigned because Google wouldn’t let her publish a research paper criticizing large language models. Let’s instead just not trash people we don’t know, and don’t have any firsthand knowledge of their motivation.
To me the story is that it turns out when you fire a fairly accomplished ethicist in a way that people perceive as unethically, a bunch of ethicists they work with don’t take it well - and in this case it looks like they went pretty extreme on it.
> Funny way of phrasing "paper wasn't good enough yet to pass peer review."
Peer review happens after it's submitted, in a blinded review process, by other researchers who don't have a conflict of interest - i.e., people who are at other institutions. It does not happen internally by people hand-picked by management.
You can disagree about the merits if you want, but it's important that we're on the same page about the facts. The review process Jeff Dean got mad about was an internal review process (for IP etc.), not a peer review process. It also was approved in the internal review process, which Jeff Dean confirmed in his letter. He was unhappy that the reviewer chose to review it and approve it within a day (which the reviewer was allowed to) instead of sitting around for two weeks to give management a chance to stick their fingers into the process.
Gebru was a very bright individual who could have gotten a job in academia, but instead chose to work for Google. Part of that arrangement was Google got discretion on what she could print. They wanted her to change what was printed because they believed the paper was unfairly critical of technologies Google had a stake in.
She disagreed, threatened to resign, wrote an unprofessional email and then Google accepted her resignation.
Very bright in some aspects, maybe. But also apparently insensitive, abusive, narcissistic, myopic, and apparently clueless about corporate realities, and either delusional or dishonest with extreme bias in many communications.
Oh, that's not the scandal at all, and I don't know why people think it is.
The scandal is that Google, already one of the most powerful entities in the world, is building an AGI and doesn't even want the slightest veneer of accountability for it. Nobody who isn't on Gebru's old team has any realistic access to know what they're really building. All we know is that the AI keeps outsmarting humans.
And now they've fired the manager in charge of the "AI ethics" team.
What are they doing such that they felt obligated to hire an AI ethics team and then ensure that team could not criticize Google?
If you worked in this field you would know how ridiculous your claims are. Dr Gebru wasn’t trying to stave off the robot apocalypse, she was interrogating biases exhibited by some neural networks due to the data they are trained on and how they are trained, which is something people have been looking at since statistical learning and statistics has existed. And when her colleagues raised reasonable scientific objections to her claims she went on the warpath and started calling her colleagues a bunch of dumb racist and sexist dirt bags. And it is actually fairly well known what Google is working on because they publish most of their work, and anyone in the field can go out and pull up all their research and have a pretty reasonable idea of what they’re working on, there’s not much mystery there. And despite claims to the contrary, the “AI ethics team” isn’t some grand overarching team, they’re a small team in one small part of the Google hierarchy—the leads of the AI Ethics are/were essentially first line managers, which is hardly the grandiose mandate that everyone seems to be attaching to it.
People are attaching far more significance to this whole flap than is remotely reasonable to anyone who works in this area or has any experience in the corporate world.
If the AI ethics team is a small team subservient to the AI practitioners, and they don't have the ability to raise concerns about small and apparently well-known problems, how could they ever hope to raise concerns about big problems?
And whether I work in the field or not is irrelevant (though, as it happens, I was fighting with deep learning GPU drivers just yesterday). The whole problem is the idea that nobody has the right to direct the AI beyond the people who are running the AI, that if practitioners have been "looking at" a specific concern, then it's illegitimate for anyone else to ask questions.
> Peer review happens after it's submitted, in a blinded review process, by other researchers who don't have a conflict of interest - i.e., people who are at other institutions. It does not happen internally by people hand-picked by management.
This is absolutely untrue. Your confusing peer review of journal with peer review prior to submitting to the journal. It’s super common to have papers reviewed prior to submission anywhere, and that review is usually done by peers or even superiors.
She's also not publishing this as just herself, she works for Google and is publishing on their behalf. Of course they have veto power over what she publishes. You take issue with that; quit. Which, I believe she did (she didn't get fired AFAIK)
Yes, there exist review processes by peers, and yes, your institution can choose to exercise veto power. The scientific process of "peer review" is a very specific thing. (My code is not "peer reviewed" in the scientific sense simply because a teammate, a peer, reviewed my pull request.) So saying the paper was not good enough for peer review is misleading.
And yes, Google can veto any paper. That's not the issue. The issue is they chose to use their veto power to block a paper that did not sufficiently praise Google. That means no paper coming out of Google can be trusted, because it's not the output of researchers but also management. Does Spanner work? Maybe there were some negative examples that were deemed too embarrassing to Google and removed.
I don't know, maybe you already acted as if no paper coming out of Google could be trusted, and you were smarter than the rest of is in that regard. But a lot of people act as if their papers are trustworthy and not propaganda (e.g., https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/01/08/spanner-googles-globally... takes the Spanner paper as if it were a legitimate scientific paper). Want to tell them they need to stop?
My organization includes a peer review process before it is submitted to journals. It makes sense because how would an organization be able to do this without peers.
There are multiple types of peer review, not just from formal journals. Your statement of a narrowly scoped peer review being the only kind is incorrect.
I’m not talking about Google specifically, but I imagine any institution creating scientific knowledge will have multiple phases of peer review before the literature.
Separately your logic of “no paper coming out of Google can be trusted” is faulty. It’s not that it can’t be trusted at all, it just can’t be trusted for some things. Peer review outside Google should identify if Spanner has bugs or whatnot. I think it’s safe to say that work of Google should not be estimated to only exist based on what’s published.
So while Google published things should be true since they are reviewed outside of Google, we’ll never know the things not published.
Also this is sort of the point of science right, you shouldn’t blindly trust things based on institution, but need to review critically based on your own experience and expertise.
She was complaining about her peer and co-lead being fired by top management, going around their shared immediate management, dishonestly and in retaliation for internally highlighting problems.
I think the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that she didn't see herself as invulnerable.
> so easily getting caught red-handed
“so easily caught red-handed”? It took 5 weeks from when she was locked out over a supposed automated alarm of a possible unauthorized activity. for her to be fired.
If (and no one not directly involved has any way of knowing this) she was actually “caught red handed” it doesn't seem to have been very easy.
Dr. Gebru and I had just been promoted to “Staff” Research Scientist, which is meaningful in the world of STEM, with the sort of honor associated with becoming tenured. We had thought it meant a certain amount of job security.
I’m assuming the parent comment means she didn’t see herself as invulnerable after Dr. Gebru’s firing. The quote describes their mindset before the firing in order to highlight why she found it unexpected.
"she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt. I have nothing but respect for people willing to fall on their sword for the sake of making the world a better place. "
There is a major implied assumption here that those she was 'calling out' were actually doing bad things.
I sincerely doubt this of Jeff Dean & Co. and a look at this specifics of the Timnit case I don't think make Google look bad.
In summary - she was castigating her managers and peers who were actually acting within reason.
This employee was toxic, furthering more toxicity.
Just because you believe that you're 'doing good' doesn't mean that you are, or those who you disagree with are evil.
This is the big blind spot of (some of) the ostensible promoters of Social Justice: the self absolution and assumption of perfect moral clarity.
Ironically, Google is full of good people, more or less, by virtue of their every day practices, making the world a tiny bit of a better places. (Except for the anti-competitive things of course, but that's more strategic impetus)
There seem to be quite a few people that consider Dr. Gebru to be one of the leading scientists within that specific (sub)field.
I don't know the field well enough to have an opinion on the merits but it seems like a view one might disagree with but would not be surprised to find somebody to hold.
But calling someone "one of the world's leading scientists within their specific subfield" is a much, much weaker claim than calling them "one of the world's leading scientists". People in the latter category win Nobel Prizes, not Twitter fights.
When both people involved share a subfield and the piece is talking about what's fundamentally intra-subfield drama, I'd say there are three possibilities:
1) They meant "within the subfield" but assumed it could be taken from context
2) They meant "within the subfield" but have an overinflated notion of the importance of their subfield
3) They genuinely believe the strongest form of the claim
Which of these possibilities one considers most likely probably depends more on one's prior opinion of the people involved than anything else, and I continue to not really have a prior opinion because this whole situation is a trainwreck and I don't know the background well enough to be able to even start to try and read past the biases of the various people commenting.
>The firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru is not okay, and the way it was done is not okay.
if i remember correctly she made an ultimatum and threatened to resign, and her resignation was accepted. That doesn't look like firing until we call "firing" any resignation when one disagrees with the employer.
To me that intentionally looking sleight of hands with firing/resignation in the Mitchell's doc already undermines trust to whatever point she is making there.
I have no idea why the media (people through this word around, but in this case, it's a lot of major outlets) keeps reporting it as her getting fired when she clearly threatened to resigned as an ultimatum. Maybe Google making it immediate changed things, but saying "fired" is pretty disingenuous.
But it was still an ultimatum. Acting like she was fired out of the blue is dishonest. She threatened to resign unless things changed so good fired her.
> In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt
I think their job was just that: call out the company (and others) on AI ethics issues - I don't see how it comes as a surprise to you that a person in such a role is also concerned about ethics in general, or the ethics of AI ethics at Google, so to speak.
The way I see it, so much about this hassle seems to point towards some fundamental misunderstanding about what their job was - that perhaps they believed, like you say, that their job was to call out the company and others on AI ethics issues, but that the management who formed and funded that team believed that their job was something else - I think that what Google wanted from that team was to do research on applied methods on how to make the models less biased and on process improvements on how to deploy them in a more ethical manner - i.e. to work on technical solutions to mitigate the ethical problems they identify, to enable Google to achieve the same goals through ML but with less ethical "side-effects" so to speak.
For a specific example, I presume Google would be happy if the team produced methods that help facial recognition generalize better to different ethnic groups, or methods that identify what specific gaps in training data should be filled to cover a diverse target audience; but apparently did not consider highlighting problems where the only solution is "don't deploy such models" and social activism goals as their intended job.
So when the push came to shove, this misalignment of goals had to be addressed; either by one or another changing their goals (which seems to have been unacceptable for both Google and Timnit&co) or by firing/quitting.
The unit was full of Academic researchers, who regularly published papers and collaborated with others on papers; the whole kerfuffle started with Google's uncharacteristic request to put a lid on Dr. Timnit Gebru's paper. To me, that doesn't sound like a team that expects, or is expected to just work quietly on internal - likely confidential - projects.
I suspect Google leadership were on board, and wasn't even aware of the misalignment until Dr. Gebru declined to pull a paper that raised questions on a crown-jewels-level, Jeff-Dean-supported AI model that materially impacts Google's finances (and likely some leaders' bonuses too).
Now that Google leadership is aware of the misalignment, I think its actions show the direction they are taking going forward.
Her call outs had nothing to do with AI ethics, though, and centered almost entirely on alleged perceived sexism, racism, shady HR practices with a sprinkle of political correctness on top, with regards to her colleagues firing.
She started slandering her employer on Twitter in front of the whole world, when that conversation should CLEARLY have been private, and she got fired for it.
> “After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.”
I assume this was to release to the press to shame/pressure Google, and wasn't corporate espionage. But what reason do you think she was doing it for?
Dr Gebru was talking with a lawyer before they fired her. Mitchell was likely contributing to the case because she herself was experiencing retaliation from Google. At this point it doesn’t really matter if it goes to the press or ends up in a complaint—- Google’s retaliation here is illegal. You can’t reproach an employee for simply talking to a lawyer and that’s exactly what Jeff Dean and co did.
I am a major pain in the ass at my company. I point out flaws constantly and clearly state what problems exist. But when I do that, I literally don't name names and make general statements such as "Company does not currently have the expertise to solve this issue and are requesting a consultant" while talking about basic issues or "Everyone is leaving because IT is seeing how bad things are and we're at the forefront so all the problems will be hitting the rest of you guys soon." And even then I think if I wasn't in a country with such strong legal employement rights I would so get fired for it. So calling out people by name just seems nuts.
Jeff Dean is getting paid two orders of magnitude more and yet he let the fire burn for several months before things went critical. Everybody in this story is making too much money, but some way way way more than others.
Money isn’t usually enough. I walked away from a job paying more than $1m/yr (to be clear - I am not rich or financially independent, the stock is still illiquid atm and I live in a 400sqft in-law unit). You need satisfaction overall with your environment.
I kept asking myself how much a year of my life was worth and it turns out - unless it’s fucking insane money ($10mil+ liquid) then I can’t suffer through something I disagree with or basically feel like I’m someone’s bitch.
I think eventually to a person it feels like you’re living a dishonest life because you’re working on something you disagree with but you have to shove down those feelings to get paid. It grows resentment. But who knows, I’m really only speaking to my own experience.
None of it's nonsense that I can see; a lot of it is jargon laden and clearly expecting people not have a lot of context people outside of Google wouldn't to understand details beyond the general shape of the point. And it's “poorly written” from the perspective of a formal document as it's fairly stream of consciousness without a lot of editing for structure, but it was a posting to an internal, by most accounts I've seen fairly informal, discussion group, but Google seems to be notorious for (1) having these, (2) encouraging their use for informal internal discussion aimed at improving the environment including critiquing internal cultural problems, and (3) intermittently deciding to treating the fact that people took them seriously about #2 as key factors in termination.
I agree it's poorly written - just like her twitter, and it even sounds nonsensical, but why is it nonsense?
The basic point seems to be that she has been handled differently than others (discrimination), made to wait a lot; and that she has been handled a "final decision" without any explanation, which she tries to present as a big no-no and against any inclusion effort that Google officially virtue signals.
Furthermore her point about how OKRs don't incentivize what officially is Google's policy (diversity, equity/egality, inclusion) seems like a solid point. Ironically Damore's memo tried to make the same "data driven" argument, and that made Google's blessed diversity team look pretty foolish, so he got fired because his style was also poor and nonsensical.
Unless we are talking about a job with inherently long term health risk and/or ilegal activity with prosecution risk I would be willing to put up a year or two in order to secure a life long financial independence. 2M USD is enough to confortable spend the rest of your life doing what you really want to do.
Depends on where you want to live and the lifestyle you want. Personally for me, it’s not enough. I’d need $10mil+ to retire. Even then, I don’t want to retire. I’d prefer to keep learning and growing. I have goals of eventually running a large organization or doing my own startup.
Also, again, you’re literally trading years of your life away.
Of course totally depends on location and lifestyle, but I guess that someone who is quitting a 1M/y is not really optimizing for a expensive lifestyle. In any case, there are a lot of places in EU and USA where you can have high quality of life with a warchest of 2M cash.
And yeah lets clarify that I don't mean retiring when I said you can do what you want, and I was not thinking that you may not have any other income for the remainder of your life. For me is having the freedom to work on what interest you, with people that is interesting and not having to suffer any fools never again in order to make ends meet. We all trade time for money, I would just preffer the condensed version and be done with it.
Interrogating corporate behavior and publicly embarrassing the corporation are two totally different things.
You can employ someone and have them develop and even publicly espouse ethics principles, while also instructing them to keep their criticism of corporate behavior confidential to the corporation.
This is super common in other professions sometimes charged with enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior, including law and accounting. It's not a new idea.
I suppose that depends on whether you think an "Ethical AI" group's job is as window dressing or to actually make an ethical impact.
If the former, then they probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place; PR people are cheaper and more tractable. If the latter, then there's only so long you can ask good people to stay quiet. Enabling ethical failure is also an ethical failure.
Your analogies don't really work, I'm afraid. The job of corporate lawyers isn't to force some sort of ethical or legal standard. It's to give confidential advice so a company can do what it wants without anybody going to jail. Accountants do maintain a standard that is quasi-ethical, but they do it by controlling their own work. Auditors are closer to the Ethical AI relationship, but they're specifically external, so as to avoid the conflicts of interest in Google trying to police itself. And both accountants and auditors drop a dime on people all the time, and even have protection under law for doing so: https://www.accountingtoday.com/whistleblower
> I suppose that depends on whether you think an "Ethical AI" group's job is as window dressing or to actually make an ethical impact.
1. You can make an ethical impact without applying external pressure. Usually through internal channels. That is their expectations when they hire you.
2. Do you really think "apply external pressure via bad publicity on companynwhen necessary leaking internal documents" was in their job responsibilities?
Point 1 depends on the internal channels. If you have never had the experience of management not listening to you, I congratulate you on your luck and/or your youth.
As to point 2, I think that if Google didn't put "make a public stink if necessary" in the job description itself, they should have known it was part of the deal. You can't hire people for their independence and their ethics and then not expect them to be independent and ethical.
I've definitely had management not listen to me. But I wouldn't share that information publicly in order to get them to coerce them into making the right call. And if I did I definitely wouldn't expect to be working there for long.
Should have known that they were hiring people they would later consider trouble makers is a very different goal post than part of the job description.
In which case, you see yourself not as a professional, but as a minion. That's fine, but understand that it works differently for other people.
Consider a doctor, for example. A hospital can hire them and give them orders. But they see themselves as having a duty to the patient and to society. If something isn't right, they will surely say so internally first. But if harm continues, they absolutely will raise a ruckus, up to and including talking publicly.
That's not them being a "trouble maker". That's them being professionals, not bootlickers. Whether or not the hospital administrator puts that in the job description, everybody understands it's part of the deal.
It's weird that use the term and minion and professional in a way such that the farther you go up the org chart the more "minion like and unprofessional" they get. With the CEO probably being the most minion like and least profressional.
Not at all. The CEO isn't doing whatever the powerful tell him. Neither are high-level execs. See Locke and Spender's "Confronting Mangerialism" for a good breakdown of the game they're playing.
Its line workers, and maybe first-level managers that are the most minion-like, the ones who most believe that their job is to follow orders make their boss look good, without regard to impact, value, or ethics.
Forcing the company to comply with legal standards is often literally the job of a corporate attorney in an employment or compliance department.
And the primary concern isn't to avoid "going to jail," it's avoiding civil liability (for employment) or regulatory action (for compliance). Offering guidance on ethical behavior helps to avoid both of those issues.
Whistleblower statutes are an enforcement mechanism that provide cover (and sometimes motivation) to report or disclose ethical violations. But they are more of an escape valve for truly extraordinary situations, as opposed to the day-to-day guidance that professionals provide.
> Forcing the company to comply with legal standards is often literally the job of a corporate attorney in an employment or compliance department.
Compliance departments may include attorneys, but plenty of people aren't. The force comes not because of their attorney-ness, but because they're part of a department tasked with enforcement. Lawyers in general definitely are not at a company to enforce the law.
> And the primary concern isn't to avoid "going to jail,"
Allow me to introduce you to the notion of hyperbole.
I think the one thing both sides can agree on is that there should be whistleblower protections enshrined in law for people reporting ethics breaches. (I'm not going to try and suggest how it should be implemented, that's legitimately difficult)
The heart of the matter is what the ethics experts see as an attempt to suppress criticism of ethical problems with Google's technology. So yes, it's very much an ethics breach.
Whistleblowing need not be only about crime. It can just be about harm. [1] Indeed, with new technologies, regulation often has yet to be written, so whistleblowing can only be about harm.
Dean said in his letter that the paper didn’t address relevant literature related to the subject that the authors weren’t aware of. To me it doesn’t seem that the reason is that it besmirched Google, but that it wasn’t complete.
Also the article wasn’t an ethics breach type of article and internal so I’m not sure what the legal protection would be. I think if the employees had some evidence of illegal activity then they would be protected.
If this paper would be considered an ethics breach then I don’t think there should ever be relevant protections.
You seem to be conflating ethics and legality. The two are only hazily related. And yes, of course the executives who hired ethicists to make the company look good disagree with the ethicists on what constitutes good ethics. But your notion that "No one in this scenario reported an ethics breach" is incorrect. We can't of course know the truth of the matter, because Google insists on keeping relevant facts hidden. But unless clear evidence shows otherwise, I'm going to believe the ethics professionals, not the executives whose identity and financial success are strongly bound up with making their company look good.
> This is super common in other professions sometimes charged with enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior, including law and accounting. It's not a new idea.
It has not worked out well. Making employees keep unethical behaviour on the down-low has resulted in immense, catastrophic harm.
If we are to maintain a healthy society we need a lot more whistleblowing. We need to put work into being better.
> This is super common in other professions sometimes charged with enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior, including law and accounting. It's not a new idea.
I'd be interested in reading about guidelines for people tasked with "enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior" in other industries, do you have any references?
As one of many, many examples, leaders in the employment law field regularly write publicly about fair employment practices (particularly when it comes to discrimination, whether racial, age-related or disability-related), and strive for changes in the law and in employers' practices. At the same time, they also counsel their employers or clients about the rules and about compliance. That's fine.
But a lawyer generally cannot publicly critique their employer/client without permission. Public disclosure of an employer's or client's confidential information without permission violates, for example, ABA model rule 1.6, and is a great way to get yourself disbarred (or at least face disciplinary action).
> Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?
The same reason to hire a token minority in a position of on-paper significance: something to point to for PR purposes. But, with an ethics team, there's also another advantage; if you get strong people who would be contributing to the field anyway and constrain their output to suit your interests, you reduce the degree to which areas you wish to exploit come under ethical scrutiny.
Also, artificial intelligence is dealing with a lot of controversial issues. Things like privacy, data ownership, and discrimination. Government is getting involved. SF banned facial recognition, and both progressives and conservatives are accusing big tech platforms of bias. Having an internal ethics team they can claim is independent would probably be helpful politically.
> Why hire an Ethics team if you won't let them interrogate unethical behavior?
There is a huge difference between balatantly violating company policy, name calling your manager and creating drama online to garner attention and doing your job in professional manner. She knew what she was doing and she staged martyrdom for her Twitter mob audience and activist news media.
It saddens me more is that so many people in this thread can't (or unwilling to) differentiate between doing your job in professional manner and creating drama online. Sigh, it will only get worse.
A few punchlines:
"Every moment where Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia do not take responsibility for their actions is another moment where the company as a whole stands by silently as if to intentionally send the horrifying message that Dr. Gebru deserves to be treated this way."
"Dr. Gebru refused to subjugate herself to a system requiring her to belittle her integrity as a researcher and degrade herself below her fellow researchers. Within the next year, let those of us in positions of privilege and power come to terms with the discomfort of being part of an unjust system that devalued one of the world’s leading scientists, and keep something like this from ever happening again."
In short, she was getting paid handsomely while calling out her bosses by name and taking them through the dirt. I have nothing but respect for people willing to fall on their sword for the sake of making the world a better place. But if she thought even for a second that she could possibly be a martyr and also keep her job, she's delusional. I have a hard time aligning myself with people who are fighting for the right cause, but have completely lost their touch with reality.
Perhaps she expected to get fired and knew that moving the files was only going to accelerate the inevitable? In that case, she deserved to be celebrated. But if she thought that she was untouchable, and in addition to being a major PITA for her employer also ended up so easily getting caught red-handed for a fireable offense - then I start questioning her judgement and have to wonder if her arguments against Google are equally skewed.