It wasn't very misleading. Giving an ultimatum on threat of resignation is more or less entails giving your resignation if the company doesn't accept. My understanding is that the conversation more or less went:

Gebru: "Don't make me retract the paper and give me the names of the reviewers or I'll resign."

Google: "We're not doing that. We accept and respect your decision to resign from Google."

Google has a specific process for resigning and writing a resignation letter. Saying "if you don't do this let's talk about my end date" isn't it. When the company decides you're not working there anymore and tells you so, it's a firing. That shouldn't be hard to grasp.

True. But it's also true that giving an ultimatum raises the stakes.

Like it's not asking for o divorce to have an affair, but it does make it a reasonable next step for the other party.

naive is an understatement

Of all the things to argue about how that incident went down, this is the worst.

She sent an email with a list of demands saying if they weren't met, she'd work on an exit date with the company.

The company couldn't meet those demands. By her own words she would be exiting the company, they worked out that exit date with her in that email: right now

The State of California is very clear that the sequence you've outlined is a firing. An employee needs to be the sole one setting the last date for it not to be a firing.

This is just arguing semantics.

It can both be true that she was the initiator of her departure, and legally it's a firing.

Say you hire Troy Hunt to do an audit (security, IG, finance, anything), then repeatedly block them from accessing the information they need.

They then email you saying "I need access to this data to be able to do my job, otherwise there's no point me being here and I should move on to something else"

Another example. You hire a sales person on commission, but then deliberately stall the payment of commissions for cashflow reasons. They say "Look, I'm buying a house in 6 months, so you need to start approving these commissions or I'll need to find another job"

Is your stance that any statement from an employee that a problem with their role is severe enough that they can't do the job they were hired to do, or that the compensation they were promised (whether that is money, career development, publication of papers, etc) is cause for immediate dismissal?

That's not quite comparable though.

More like storming in and demanding "either you give me root access to all systems, and the building to myself, and a promotion, or i quit!"

It's a grey area, and I agree there are cases that are not de facto resignations.

But Gebru's demands were absolutely not of the compromising kind. She was effectively demanding dictator powers.

And if "i can't do my job if i can't run the company". Well... I guess you can't do you job, then, according to yourself.

I just find it strange to focus on the very subjective whether or not the "demands" of an employee are reasonable, rather than the far more objective "Is this an explicit resignation".

To the company, every demand is unreasonable...

And every negotiation/collective bargaining begins with overstated demands, that's hardly unusual.

Sometimes things aren't that grey area in reasonableness and acceptable behavior.

I like my comparison in another comment: Having an affair and getting caught is not literally filing for divorce.

It's not semantics.

They didn't work "out that exit date with her in that email". They told her she was no longer an employee effective immediately. That is a firing, legally and otherwise.

I disagree. "Meet my three impossible demands or I'll quit" is not clearly "not initiating my departure".

Yes, I realize I could have picked from several other examples which demonstrated Google acting in bad faith, but I felt that quote (which I put in parens and was not the main point of my argument) was the most memorable from the whole sad affair.

Jeff Dean just yesterday officially apologized for this situation so clearly he feels he did something wrong, although he doesn’t admit to anything specific. It wouldn’t surprise me if this quote from his email (and the corresponding behavior) would be on the list though.