It very much does not evaporate.

Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand.

Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.

I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

(The subthread below contains the refutations, so I won't copy them here. I left a reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966286, but you might want to climb it upwards to see why this is mistaken. Suffice to say, her paper passed the internal review, and was subjected to a second review that wasn't policy at the time.)

Nothing I said above was refuted or mistaken. You claim that her paper was internally reviewed twice and you chose to ignore evidence to the contrary.

And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit’s own responsibility in the situation.

Right, Timbit sent a public letter of resignation, and Google accepted. Nothing more nothing less.

Can a private company not accept a letter of resignation? Would that be a violation of the 13th amendment?

If it's in violation of your contract they can reject your resignation, but most people are At Will employees which means either side can terminate employment.

This is generally false. You can’t be forced to work and a specific performance judgement is unlikely. If you resign and had a contract you can’t work elsewhere, may need to pay damages. But slavery, indentures etc mostly illegal these days

If the terms of the resignation contradict terms in the employment agreement, I would think so. As long as the employment agreement is legal itself.

Duh, yes of course, good point! Not sure what I was thinking.

Do you have sources other than quoting yourself on HN? I'd like to read them

> I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events

I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.