Fair, but I don't think we need to know what happened to asses what is happening now.

I consider that this being discussed in a public sphere a failure regardless of situation as it looks bad on the company no matter what.

If a person feels their only way out is to appeal to the mob then I think the people doing the management have made a misstep. If that person has a history of appealing to the mob then it is still a misstep as that should have been considered when dealing with the issue.

Perhaps they did the calculus and this is the best result, but looking in, it doesn't feel like it.

> My point is that I do not know whether this situation could have been handled better.

Let's follow the timeline and discover a root cause:

    1.  Anonymous feedback being given through HR about a 
        research paper in AI Ethics to be published in an 
        academic forum.

    2.  Manager schedules a meeting where: “it has been 
        decided that you need to retract this paper by next week..."
        without context and without a chance to confront others.

    3.  She puts an ultimatum to her boss that she can't  
        continue to work there with conditions like that limit her
        freedom to speak and research.  Google decides to accept 
        her resignation.

This suggests that:

    A.  People can just go to HR with criticisms of a research paper 
        apparently with the intent to sabotage authors, and HR is 
        apparently fine with being used like this.  Or possibly a manager
        convinced HR that OKR's trump AI Ethics.

    B.  They wanted her to say certain things in an academic forum -- 
        which didn't appear to be IP/Trade Secret related, but for 
        some other reason, which they refused to disclose.  This is 
        in an environment of ethics where papers might become guidelines
        for legislation.
  
    C.  They're not interested in fixing the issues she brought up, 
        because they allowed #1 and #2 to happen above.

It looks like the root cause was A above. Everything after that cascaded from there.

Should HR be involved in "fixing" a paper in AI ethics? Probably not. Just like you wouldn't take your car to HR to get it repaired. They simply don't have the knowledge to do so.

Then Jeff Dean probably has $20 to $30 million wrapped up in Google, so he's going to take their side on the matter publically, unfortunately. Privately he may have been cussing out HR because of forcing him into the situation. We don't know.