48 employees over a 2 year span is nothing. How many employees has Google had in that time? It is probably at least 100,000. We are talking about less than 0.05% of the workforce. I don't know what percentage of the general workforce has committed sexual harassment (I have seem the victim rate as high as 20%), but 0.05% is insanely low. Either Google employees commit sexual harassment at an incredibly low rate or they are punished for it at an incredibly low rate. My money is on the latter.
We are talking about a time frame that starts in 2016. Therefore anyone who worked for Google during that span should count and not just current employees.
0.05% is not insanely low for something as specific as sexual harassment.
If 1 in 2000 is insanely low, how much would 'low' be, and how much would 'average' be? No environment should deal with whatever you think the average amount of sexual harassment is.
You are comparing perp w/ victim stats. You are also comparing female victimization rates w/ Google's population (only 30% female, even less in higher levels where most of these 48 get dismissed from). I also think there are ~90K employees.
One dude can harass lots of women (as is usually the case). These 48 could have very easily been responsible for 20+ incidents each. And there are probably many more perps who have gone unpunished.
That said, male Google employees are probably less likely to sexually harass. They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).
Edit: I shouldn't have used a word like masculine, whose definition is largely debated. I meant masculine in the hormonal sense.
> They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).
Not a fan of you making this up based on perceived stereotypes and then using it to justify an argument. I do agree that these numbers are complicated and require analysis on data that we probably don't have access to.
Enough (of both genders) were creepy and assuming/entitled while I was there in 2010. Being more beta, they tended to have difficulty getting laid unless rich and were more open to using/abusing any pull they were perceived to have.
I'm curious why you think I am making this up. Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job.
I don't think it is a ridiculous notion that your average Googler will be nerdier or smarter than the average man. And I hope that just because "low-testosterone" is used as an insult by alt-right losers, you don't associate me with that group or characterize my comment as troll-y.
> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression.
Testosterone is correlated to higher levels of aggression similar to how estrogen is correlated to emotional instability. It leads to false and rather crappy conclusions which misrepresent what hormones actually does to the human mind.
Modern research on testosterone show that higher levels increase the response that a man or woman has when their social status is challenged. If social status is maintained in a group through violence and aggression then those correlate to testosterone, but you can as easily have a company where productivity is the primary trait for social status and then testosterone levels will correlate to productivity when someone have their social status challenged.
From a biological perspective, this has a very basic reason. Testosterone goes up when the chance for procreation is high and it can be seen as a modulating effect that encourage the individual to hold on to the current beneficial social status. Aggression in itself is not an effective strategy for that goal and is only relevant if the local culture reward aggression.
I think it's a hasty jump to make assumptions about the biology of people based on their job description. Plenty of engineers I work with exercise regularly. I'm curious, do you have any links to research correlating sedentary jobs and testosterone levels?
You are just digging your grave deeper here. Don't assume high testosterone = must be a blue collar worker or sumpin. That's basically classist BS.
Pushing code because it is one of the highest paid professions in the world right now and exercises real power could be construed as aggressive as hell on the face of it. There's a reason people bitch about "brogrammer" culture. Even if you ignore that, desk jockeys aren't all sedentary losers. Plenty are buff and pursue Manly Man (TM) activities in their off hours, like sports, martial arts, etc.
> They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).
and
> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job.
> I don't think it is a ridiculous notion that your average Googler will be nerdier or smarter than the average man. And I hope that just because "low-testosterone" is used as an insult by alt-right losers, you don't associate me with that group or characterize my comment as troll-y.
At no point did OP say:
> Don't assume high testosterone = must be a blue collar worker or sumpin.
Your statement isn't even the inverse of OP's statement. The only one that said that is you.
> Testosterone is linked with higher levels of aggression. Anyone who is employed to write code and work with computers works a sedentary job
How is it unreasonable to infer from this that "Obviously, high testosterone guys must work physical jobs" (often called blue collar jobs)? What jobs should I infer are the opposite of sedentary?
How is it reasonable TO infer that? If the claim is that sedentary jobs lower testosterone, it does not follow that non-sedentary jobs raise testosterone. If A => B, the statement NOT A => NOT B is not necessarily true. That's just rudimentary logic.
My question is "What's the opposite of a sedentary job? Is it or is it not a physical job, AKA a blue collar job?"
I do not see where OP said sedentary jobs lower testosterone. I do not see any statement clarifying the exact nature of the presumed relationship between testosterone levels and job type.
You are the only one who has associated a sedentary job with being a loser or a blue class job with high testosterone. I'd appreciate if you didn't put words in my mouth.
You seem to be misconstruing a "tendency" for an "absolute blanket on all"
Google has quite a few ripped masculine employees doing dev work in Mountain View... They have to stay in good shape if only for their brains to continue working at the highest level...
Yeah sry if I came off aggressive man. Everyone in this thread misinterpreting what I said probably reflects more on ME than them. I need to get better at writing...
I take it that you didn't mean to, but you effectively trolled this thread by tossing flamebait into an inflammatory topic. Please don't do that in the future.
Dude, how did you get "right-wingers are losers and there are none at Google" from "low-test is an insult used by ALT-right losers"? I wasn't talking about political leaning of Google employees at all.
I seriously gotta get better with my words lol. Everyone in this thread seems to be getting a different meaning out of what I said.
I see that several of your comments were taken backwards and sideways, and I extend my sympathy.
Your mistake is not your wording, which is perfectly clear, it's the erroneous choice of the topic article to engage, as that defines both the audience and the discourse manner.
> That said, male Google employees are probably less likely to sexually harass. They tend to be more nerdy, introverted, and less masculine(lower testosterone, less aggressive).
Citation for either point that Google employees are "less masculine" (whatever that means) or that being "less masculine" has something to do with being less likely to sexually harass?
Your statement is similarly nuanced and accurate to those made by James Damore, although obviously not as thoroughly documented. Not meant as a slight or a compliment, just making an observation.
Is your argument here that Google punishes a high percentage of sexual harassers but only after they have accrued 20+ victims? Is that meant as a defense of Google?
I would also object to that last paragraph for similar reasons that others in this thread have brought up.
Wow I really hope I did not come off as defending sexual harassers in any way. I think many might have thought this because of my last paragraph which seems troll-like. I can assure you I don't defend that behavior and am not trolling.
I am simply saying that your statistical analysis was flawed, because perpetrators can have multiple victims, and you had suggested, statistically, that one man fired means one woman harassed in one instance.
Also given low rates of sexual assault reporting, it is likely that by the time a report is made, and even more-so investigated, that the perp has been involved in multiple instances of sexual harassment.
I didn’t say you were defending harassers, but it seemed like you were downplaying this as a sign of a problem for Google. Either way, the stats are so low that you either need a large number or unpunished harassers or harassers need to victimize a large number of people before they are caught.
> The letter was in response to a New York Times report that Android creator Andy Rubin received a $90m exit package despite facing misconduct allegations.
Woah, holy shit, a $90M exit package? It's like Bighead in the Silicon Valley TV show, except 4.5x more. The writers for that show picked a crazy number and reality comes along and over-quadruples it. Granted, Bighead did not create Android, or anything, in the TV show. But an severance package of that size is still absolutely ridiculous.
I have a suspicion that corporate executives are Veblen goods [1], which makes their price/wage behavior somewhat economically counterintuitive. When a company's board hires a new CEO, the primary return to the individual director who puts forth the candidate is in social status. They want to be seen as having made a bold, risky move, and having the social connections to pull it off and get their candidate approved. (The idea that the board acts to maximize shareholder value is a legal fiction only; people make decisions, not laws, and unless the shareholders can bring a successful shareholder lawsuit the individual people will make the decision that maximizes their own personal utility.) That means that the more a candidate already makes, and the higher their profile in the business world, the more they can command in compensation. On the way out, all participants are again motivated by status - a lengthy wrongful termination lawsuit damages the reputations of everyone involved, and so all parties have an incentive to spend more shareholder money to avoid it.
The executive that's considered to be most responsible for all the corruption in Well's Fargo received a 125M$ retirement package. The world is just generally amazingly unjust.
I'm agnostic on whether or not Marissa had any fault in Yahoo's demise. I worked with her at Google and actually have a fair amount of respect for her as an executive.
However, as Steve Jobs once said [1], somewhere between janitor and VP reasons cease to matter, and results are all that matter. And the fact is that she was hired to turn around Yahoo as an operating web property, but by the time Verizon bought it, Wall Street was valuing Yahoo's operations (less its Alibaba holdings, which Jerry Yang bought in 2005) as negative.
I'm pointing out that there's a certain irony that even when executives get fired for not doing the job that they're supposed to do, they still get paid nearly as much as if they had actually done that job. A board that's actually trying to maximize shareholder value might pay a lot for an executive, but would structure their compensation deal so they only get that payout if they actually succeed at the job they're hired to do.
Why not, even if Marissa Mayer managed to moderately slow the decline of a major company, the fact that it still collapsed certainly isn't the sort of deliverable that justifies 260M$.
I believe Yahoo was in real trouble when Marissa Mayer was hired and there are some decisions she made that were clearly wrong in hindsight. I don't feel qualified to judge her performance in detail but 260M$ is a glowing endorsement which seems entirely disconnected from the reality of what happened during her tenure.
There is an article out there that talks about her repeatedly being hours late for meetings with major CEOs. There were lots of other negatives. It made her sound like a first class train wreck.
If the article is factual she was compensated $260M for turning in a performance that could have gotten a minimum wage grocery bagger fired several times each month.
This is just a demonstration of the different worlds we live in. There are countless examples of CEOs getting sacked for gross mismanagement and then rehired in a new executive role. Unlike other time periods it's easier (not easy) for people to enter that strata of society but once you're in it seems like you're set for life and the worst that can happen is you get setup with a cushy job with generous paycheck to basically not cause any more trouble.
She arguably had a small chance of success; it was probably the posing as a picture-perfect CEO and bringing her clueless friends to highest levels of the company while scaling down employee-friendly policies that made her more enemies that she deserved.
Your forgetting option C which is what everyone is pissed about:
C) getting paid $260M to take over Yahoo as it was "running into the ground" despite her not turning it around from "running into the ground".
Why should they pay her $260M for not changing the overall outcome of the company? They could have hired just about anyone for a miniscule fraction of the price and seen the same outcome.
How long is the recipient required to hold them before they can be sold?
If you receive a large pile of stock/options which you can immediately begin selling off then the long term prospects for the company are largely irrelevant to you.
It's in stock, but so is the $90M that Andy Rubin received.
Also, IIRC the Yahoo purchase was a stock swap for Verizon shares. Those are publicly traded, so she can always liquidate her holdings at whatever the current VZ price is.
Sure, but if you're terminated for cause you shouldn't receive anything. The $90 million was for Google to keep the story quiet and to keep Rubin from working for a competitor.
"Sure, but if you're terminated for cause you shouldn't receive anything."
This assumes that, for example, when he became an SVP, he was still on any sort of standard employee agreement.
That is highly unlikely.
Almost all execs at that level in that large a company would have a specially negotiated agreement. Most still end up with something even if terminated for cause.
Almost all their exits would be specifically negotiated mutual separation agreements.
(I'm not defending the above, obviously, just explaining what i expect is the case based on experience)
Also worth pointing out: don't know when he was made SVP/etc, but it probably predates any pushes to change any of this in tech. :(
I did a key-person contract negotiation after my last company was sold, and I over-spent on legal for it (20/20 hindsight everything would have worked out peachy for me had I just blind-signed what the acquirer gave me) and it was not my experience that compensation after termination for cause was a market ask. My lawyer, for whom I was very small fish indeed, suggested that I could probably ask for anything I wanted short of any kind of severance or acceleration on termination for cause.
You know more about the market in the Valley than I do, but I am surprised to hear the suggestion that anyone at the SVP level would have negotiated severance on for-cause termination.
(The point you made subsequently, about him maybe having locked in some amount of comp in exchange for non-compete, makes more sense.)
Again you know this stuff way more than I do. I'm just sort of probing here.
You will see that for example, these sample clauses (which are not uncommon) say nothing about morals except conviction of a crime of moral turpitude.
Sometimes they say stuff about code of conduct violations, etc.
But that's a fuzzier area (particularly since most companies revise their codes of conduct constantly).
> Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms.
However I don't know if that's just opinion or based on some set of facts about his situation.
My wife works in HR (not at Google, but in tech and other industries), and has handled things like executive compensation/retention/etc. She has done many of these types of situations over the years.
She was doubtful they would have been able to pay him nothing.
I've also seen a bunch fly by on the legal side over the years, and most (but not all) that i've seen would have paid out something in a case like this.
Best guess as to the 90 million was that it was not about this, but stock payout in exchange for not competing with google for a while or something.
> Sure, but if you're terminated for cause you shouldn't receive anything.
I disagree. It all depends on what the cause is. Regarding sexual harassment which today means any woman can accuse you of that and no questions is asked and you'll get sacked is not a valid reason for not getting any money imo.
> Sure, but if you're terminated for cause you shouldn't receive anything.
But Rubin probably wasn't terminated for cause, but nudged to resign.
> The $90 million was for Google to keep the story quiet and to keep Rubin from working for a competitor.
The $90 million was probably to prevent a protracted legal battle Google wasn't guaranteed to win; senior executives typically have fairly strong exit guarantees in individual contracts; people talk about it being hard to fire people under union contracts, but doing so under executive contracts (without paying the pre-negotiated severance and adhering to the likely-present mutual non-disparagement clause) is at least as difficult.
How would they attract a similarly capable person in the future if they withdrew generous compensation? It's like when secret service withdraws protection offer after they received the information they were after; they wouldn't ever recruit anyone in that area again.
Not at all. Reread it please. It's about attracting highest technical/management caliber employees able to create $XBn projects from the scratch. If you showcase that you dispose of such employees after they finished their job with no reward because of tangential factors, other people might not want to join you in the future, because who knows what actually happened, if there e.g. wasn't a team inside collecting potentially damaging information about their employees to be used when company wanted to save money after their usefulness expired, or if somebody wasn't playing another Game of Thrones, manipulating easily impressionable people and their opinions to keep the money. Who can tell what exactly the truth was? E.g. it's highly unlikely just one side is right if two people end up in the same hotel room alone; believing that would insult intelligence of everyone...
This is not about Essentials (flop) but about Android (huge success). Would you like to be paid for your most successful project based off your worst one? Of course without Google Andy would not be successful, but the same could have been the other way round - without Andy Google might not have had Android and Nokia would be still popular smartphone king...
Being terminated for cause shouldn't retroactively makes you un-earn money. If for the sake of argument the money was for developing android, then he would deserve both the pile of money and punishment for wrongdoing.
Yeah the headline is super misleading. Implies it's recent and all at once, like they'd be ignoring sexual harassment and decided to finally crack down.
But the article itself paints the opposite picture.
Yep, definitely click-bait to make it seem like a sweep that just happened. Recommending the following headline instead: "Google has fired 48 employees since 2016 due to sexual harassment".
Can you guys add a misleading title flag which prepends the title with something like [Misleading title] so that users know it does not fully summarize the content of the article? Another article [0] got flagged unjustly in my opinion (unflagged a day later due to my edit I think) because the content was still interesting despite the misleading title.
Some type of title vote mechanism with user input sounds even better but I don't know if you guys have the manpower to implement something like that.
I don't think we'd write software to do that (how would it recognize misleading titles?), and when intervening manually we can simply edit the title to not be misleading. That's what the site guidelines ask submitters to do, and what moderators do when we become aware of the problem.
When users have flagged an otherwise good article because of a bad title, we often turn off flags once the title has been fixed.
If you notice a misleading title that hasn't been edited, you can always let us know at [email protected].
Yes, but by the time you turn off flags for the article in cases like this, it is already to late because your time based de-ranking algorithm has delisted it off the front pages. That's why a flag that simple prepends the title without delisting it would be good.
> Carolina Milanesi tweeted: "In a normal world this would mean Rubin is done, but tech has not just been forgiving, some tech sees little wrong with this"
Actually in a normal world, there's forgiveness and moving on from minor misconduct events.
There's no reason to blacklist someone from ever working again because they had consensual sex with someone they shouldn't have had sex with.
As far as we know, there wasn't an official complaint against Rubin, and everything was consensual. That's not a "you're done" crime by any means. That's just normal life, sex, relationships, etc.
These twitter nobodies who tweet their final judgements about men who do things they don't approve of, it's like they never watched that old TV show Sex in the City.
Life is not perfect. We fumble around with relationships, sex, affairs, and after hours personal and private behavior. If nobody gets hurt, don't bother tweeting your community service mens-morality announcements, it only makes you look out of touch with actual real life.
> Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies in San Francisco, tweeted: "In a normal world this would mean Rubin is done, but tech has not just been forgiving, some tech sees little wrong with this.
I work at a pretty large tech company, the number of trainings I have had to go through regarding sexual harassment (especially lately) is impressive. I suspect that such standards may not be as common in small and mid sized companies? I think it is going to take pressure from the VC/funding side to draw clear lines in the sand that even the small guys need to abide by harassment rules.
One of the benefits of contracting/consulting is not going to those. Just sign something saying you can be fired for it and you're good to go (well, and don't do that stuff, too).
It's interesting how the title of the BBC article (and as a matter of fact, this Hacker News post's own title), "Google sacks dozens over sexual harassment", makes it sound like something that just happened, versus stats over the past 2 years that have just been reported as part of a response to a New York Times article.
When is Sergey going to be sacked? Wasn't he in some sort of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, leading to a separation from his wife, now YouTube CEO?
Sure: the difference is the latter is only consent by one. But in order to “have an affair” one side have to make a move. Simplyfying: If you are ugly and you make move the other party can sack you in HR department as sexual harraser. HOWEVER if you hot and they like you, it may endup as an affair. so no harrasment filed ;)
I doubt anyone ever got sacked for asking a coworker out on a date and getting rejected, if that is what you mean by "making a move" (and not something more sinister, of course).
Obviously I'm not trying to imply that having affairs is good or desirable... but there's a clear distinction between an affair, which is consensual, and sexual harassment, which is non consensual.
The personal drama resulting from an affair is exactly that: personal, and it shouldn't be grounds for termination. On the other hand, sexual harassment is a threat to workspace safety and should obviously be dealt with swiftly.
OK, I agree with the personal/professional split point you touched. Though there is a significant power imbalance, often people are attracted to power/their powerful superiors, and that is a direct threat to workplace stability, maybe even safety, though not as directly as unwanted advances. Still, even if you categorize this as "wanted advances" due to the aforementioned attraction to superior for whatever complex reason, it could be viewed as both a hack in progress from the superior to the person they find attractive and also as a way for the subordinate to improve their standing within the company without any merit. That might be even more demoralizing to a large group of employees than a single instance of a sexual harassment to a single person and termination would be absolutely justified.
I think you're being way too cynical. No doubt there exists "gold diggers" who will try to seduce their way up the dominance hierarchy, but that is a different topic. And even then, I fail to see how the unfair promotion of a "gold digger" would be more dangerous than having a manager sexually abusing his subordinates.
I mean heck, Bill Gates met Melinda when she was a Microsoft employee and they've now been married 20+ years.
It's tricky. Normally you're not supposed to establish intimate relationship at the workplace if there is a clear power difference between the parties. Similarly to how teacher-student relationships are frowned upon (even if both parties are adults). The problem is simple to understand.
I'm hardly saying you should prevent a relationship. I'm saying that you've got to pick one: Either both people can pursue a romantic relationship, or they can retain their manager/subordinate working relationship. It's up to them to decide which one they'd rather have.
They are frowned upon because the power imbalance creates difficulty in giving consent (and high school teachers usually means statutory rape issues). Same reason for doctor/patient and many other situations where power imbalance exists.
Even if the relationship starts all well and mutual, it can go sour. Then power dynamic come into play and the institution suffers. The only way to guarantee a safe environment is to prohibit these relationships.
The rich and powerful have always been living the indulging life since the beginning of time. I guess people have just misplaced their faith in seeking the moral compass from Google and its execs.
Could you please stop creating accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle? Regardless of what you're battling for or against, this is poisonous to what HN exists for, so we have to ban accounts that do it. This is in the site guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As usual, you are merely picking views you do not like. Your participation in ideological battles is far more gratuitous than any commenter on HN because you are the censor. The front page has more politically charged articles this year than ever - and people who reply honestly are punished if they disagree with your openly one-sided argumentation. I have several email records to prove others feel the same way and have tried to reason with HN admins directly about this - to no avail.
Banned accounts cover the spectrum, so if what you're saying is true, we must dislike all the views.
Or we could just be moderating according to the guidelines, like we say. I'm confident the bulk of the community agrees with that. If they didn't, we'd never hear the end of it, where in fact the only accounts making these complaints are the few most ideologically strident ones.
The problem is when this happens on the job. Then, you have a number of problems.
Was it genuinely consenting or did the more powerful person pressure the underling into a relationship? Did the underling really earn their promotion or did they get it because they are sleeping with the boss? Can the underling end the relationship and keep their job or would they have to first line up employment elsewhere?
...because the rest was told to be good, nice, to play by the rules, defer pleasure and will never reap benefits, will get more work as a reward for good work, might not keep being alive until retirement etc. while those who bypassed those rules have access to whatever/whomever they want (almost) due to natural attraction to power innate to many (often attractive) people. A hyperbolic alternative would be end of civilization, i.e. direct, literally cut-throat conflicts between all groups for anything interesting. Wise rulers in the past mastered the art of discretion so that the regular folks weren't aware and could keep dreaming; now that's almost impossible so seeking a moral guidance from more-less openly immoral leaders is futile and pointless.
It's hard to distinguish from someone being attracted to not losing their job and feeling pressured into a relationship.
What you described in a vacuum is not wrong. Outside of a vacuum it makes the "pin the tail on the sociopath" game harder. Sociopaths and good meaning people are fighting a battle on the fields of eglatarianism right now.
Good people and sociopaths are on either side of the trench. There's good people fighting each other even though they're both trying to go through life taking the path of least evil. The sociopaths are saying crazy things they don't even mean because it attracts a fief. As a side effect, this emboldens each side because they're laser focused on the crazy coming from their opponents. The fight will go on longer than it needs to because the issues are muddied by the distracting crazy. This confuses people and makes them lose sight of empowering the good and stymieing the bad.
If history is a guide, a new "common sense" will arise that attempts to further protect the innocent and further stymie abusers. Somehow in order to make this bargain a bunch of evil people will get rich. Crazy how it always works.
The article doesn't say wether the sacking was a new policy as of 2016. The real question is if they sacked just as many (well,... just as often) during the time of Andy Rubin.
I was at Google for quite a few years "during the time of Andy Rubin" and know of at least two terminations for harassment and at least two for having sex at work. There are also cases that could and should have been handled better, but it wasn't all bad.
The title of the piece is extremely misleading... this didn't happen today; it's since 2016. Were that not the case, I'd completely agree with you here.
> In Silicon Valley, it is widely known that Mr. Page had dated Marissa Mayer, one of the company’s first engineers who later became chief executive of Yahoo. (Both were single.) Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, once retained a mistress to work as a company consultant, according to four people with knowledge of the relationship. And Mr. Brin, who along with Mr. Page owns the majority of voting shares in Google’s parent, Alphabet, had a consensual extramarital affair with an employee in 2014, said three employees with knowledge of the relationship.
> David C. Drummond, who joined as general counsel in 2002, had an extramarital relationship with Jennifer Blakely, a senior contract manager in the legal department who reported to one of his deputies, she and other Google employees said. They began dating in 2004, discussed having children and had a son in 2007, after which Mr. Drummond disclosed their relationship to the company, she said.
I was once talking to a retired guy who told me starting companies is hard because "your employees won't stop having sex with each other and your customers are never satisfied." Seems to be true for not only the employees, but also the founders of these companies and, if that weren't enough, it often strays into sexual harassment. It is good that Google is apparently taking a harder line on this, but they should've done more sooner.
> your employees won't stop having sex with each other
Haven't there been studies indicating that our environment and physical proximity to a person greatly factors into our sexual attraction?
It is a little paradoxical that companies try to bring everyone together after work for fun and bonding but then discourage workplace relationships. Many lasting relationships I know of share some type of polarity or power dynamic, so it's not too surprising how the recipe is there for consensual intimacy. Harassment, goes without saying, but even consensual relationships with business power dynamics can be a legal and ethical disaster for the parties involved and the business.
I think the parent is implying that, given how hard it is to stop employees from having sex with each other, it seems that employees want to have sex with each other, so remote work is in this sense a downside.
I agree with that assessment, which I think is a pretty toxic view to have. Everyone is going to work to do work, get paid and go home. Two coworkers might be open to a relationship, but if someone is walking in with the assumption that work is a good way to find a partner then their presence is just going to degrade the working environment for everyone else.
(And yes we're all just human and such and such but we've got social contracts around maintaining a decorum so what you feel doesn't have to be openly expressed)
From what I've gathered people who create these kinds of relationships at work don't have much of a life outside of work. That narrative makes sense for the founder role, you'd constantly be working and obsessing about the success of your company. It also makes sense as a startup employee, you put in serious time and energy when a company begins.
If you don't have friends or social functions outside of "going to work" I guess it's inevitable that you'll date a coworker.
But I think that's an issue, if you're a founder without much relationship ties outside of work then will it influence you to hire more people you think you might develop a relationship with?
This is a really _really_ grey area since it's nice to work with people you enjoy interacting with, so that does seem like a valid hiring motive, but it's unacceptable to filter potential hires by people you'd enjoy going on a date with.
Basically, in summary, it's pretty hellishly complicated and if you can avoid workplace romance you'll probably be happier for it.
It is very difficult for relationships in a workplace to not involve some sort of power differential. I'm speaking specifically of your working group so if the context is a programmer dating a researcher in a 20k employee company the tie between you might be so distant to basically be irrelevant, but in most other cases a soured relationship can always cause problems to employees and employers.
It's normal for a small fraction to have sexual relationships with each other, not for enough of them to be doing so to make it surface as a problem in starting a company.
Sundar's letter unsatisfactory here. Isn't the real scandal that the company weighed the risk of terminating Rubin without compensation and decided not to.
If I were a Google employee I'd be wondering when it will be expedient for Google to do the right thing in cases of gross misconduct, and when they'll take a calculated risk like they did here. I'm guessing the 13 execs sacked probably didn't have ~$100m compensation packages at stake.
It's dangerous to assume that the mere presence of a power differential implies abuse of power. Women are naturally attracted to men in power in part because of their power - moreso than men are attracted to women in power because of their power - and consensual relationships often arise in the context of this differential. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for pointing out this basic aspect of mammalian female reproductive strategy, but the truth is what it is.
Of course companies don't like doing things on an ad hoc basis so I completely understand why they want to institute blanket rules that prohibit all supervisor - employee relationships, however people often forget that just because a rule exists does not mean that all instances of that rule being broken imply genuine wrongdoing.
You're being downvoted because your comment is irrelevant. They aren't banning that kind of relationship, and he was forced out after a woman complained about his coercive behavior, not an assumption of abuse.
As it was mentioned in the article this looks to be a direct response to the NYT article. It’s easy to pretend to care after everyone has found out. I’d be curious to know the details of the allegations against the 48 to gauge whether they were sacrificial lambs at the altar of public relations.
Edit: Missed that this was since 2016, makes sacrificial lamb theory less likely.
