Yes, certainly it is and she undoubtedly knew that, but her job was guiding her employer to make ethical decisions / build an ethical framework. If you expect your ethicists to prioritize having a stable career and avoid potential career-limiting moves, I'm not sure how they're supposed to do their job. I would honestly be skeptical of a self-declared ethicist who's very good at climbing corporate ladders and has never gotten themselves in trouble with those more powerful than them.
Whether she was overly saber-rattling is, I think, not a meaningful discussion. "How could this ethicist have managed to keep her job" is a straightforward and uninteresting question: don't make any waves, don't challenge anyone too senior, make the company look good in public. "Does Google value talented AI ethicists who are genuinely committed to their work and are willing to sacrifice their career over it" is a much more interesting question.
Google found that there was a credible allegation that Andy Rubin raped another employee, and they figured out how to keep him around for years, until word got out, because he was valuable to the company. (And then they gave him a $90M exit package.) Timnit Gebru got fired while she was on vacation for simply being impolitic. That shows how much Google valued her work.
Her real job is in AI activism, not AI academia. She understands that very well, and she understands that an acrimonious parting of ways with Google, combined with obligatory accusations of racist bias, is a reasonable career advancement step in the field of activism (though it may have been distracting and debilitating in the field of academia).
Right. She offered her resignation. Google mishandled it, but obviously, she was ready to be thrown out of the organization. So saying "She could have stayed if only ___" misunderstands the entire situation - she wasn't trying to stay. She was trying to get the world to understand something about Google and how ethical the folks in charge of Google's AI are.
