Understanding the circumstances and consequences of taking a position, and not being naive, is almost definitionally the job of a leader. Technical wizards who are clueless n00bs should be individual contributors, not the head of Google Brain.
And I actually mean the question seriously and thoughtfully, although the downvote barrage wants to take it as flame bait. Jeff’s calibration towards firings is unquestionably different than the rest of industry, but how different? And how much training / preparation did he really have? Important questions for any org head. The thing here is a lot of current and past Googlers seem to agree Jeff messed up. I’d like to understand why through the lens of evaluating what bar we set for the people-managing skills for engineering leaders industry-wide.
In 2020 if you can't figure out that a white man firing a black woman for something related to race and AI is going to be a big problem for you as the head of AI for perhaps the world's most potent AI juggernaut facing increasing calls for regulatory scrutiny you really have no fucking clue what you are doing. Overall the entire situation needed to be handled far more carefully even if the outcomes were the same. He thought that because he was the boss he could do whatever the hell he wanted to, and the fact of the matter is that there are forces more powerful than him.
