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Comment by themaninthedark | Hacker News Reader

Someone says they will quit noon tomorrow if you don't meet their demands. You will not meet their demands. You tell them not to bother coming in tomorrow and disable their security badge, did you fire them?

They made the decision they did not want to work for you as had been previously agreed. You only changed the timetable.

To put this another way, if I tell my company that I will be quitting in 2 weeks and they tell me not to bother coming back to the office, did they fire me? I would not say they did.

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So this gets into nuance and I will preface this with, we don't know what her email specifically said.

If you give your company a date for the cessation of your employment, that is giving notice. If you say I "will resign if", is saying that you will do something in the unspecified future.

So if you give your two weeks notice you have formally turned in your resignation. In your example I would agree that they just changed the timetable. If you haven't given your notice, and they terminate your employment citing an email you sent, you have been fired.

By all accounts she didn't submit her resignation, she simply said that she would. Sometimes situations like that result in the person getting cold feet, or the two parties working out a compromise. Maybe things would've always ended up the same way, but either way Google didn't wait for her to actually resign.

From what I've gathered the contents of the email were largely like "Either we do XYZ or we can work towards setting a date where I leave the company." So it is open to interpretation and vague enough that both sides can get their interpretation in. The way I phrase it to myself is that she was fired for threatening to resign. IE, that relationship wasn't good to begin with and this was just the last straw that pushed them to severing it. I suspect that people who try to claim she was fired/that she resigned don't focus enough on the broader context where that relationship was bad in the first place. This doesn't seem like it was something out of the blue, this has definitely been going on for a bit, so given that, which party took it over the line to breaking up their employment relationship seems like a detail rather than an important fact.

I'd agree that the relationship looked like it was all but unsalvageable. The thing I don't understand is why Google insists she resigned rather than just owning that the ended things early.

Saying she resigned sounds better I guess and is at least plausible to enough people that maybe they thought it better to characterize it that way.

But like you said, it's not really the crux of the whole situation. At least not IMO.

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