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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

As a manager, if you have a clueless 20-year old making an inappropriate proposition to one of your reports, and you hear about it, you are legally obligated to deal with the situation. It could mean reprimands, demotions, pay cuts, and re-assignment. It could mean termination.

Harassment happens in every single company.

The difference between companies is whether or not management takes the problem seriously.

I assure you, batch-firing 20 people for sexual harassment out of 6,700 is not normal. It means that there has been a consistent pattern of management not dealing with harassment - which was exposed upon review.

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>As a manager, if you have a clueless 20-year old making an inappropriate proposition to one of your reports, and you hear about it, you are legally obligated to deal with the situation. It could mean reprimands, demotions, pay cuts, and re-assignment. It could mean termination.

Sure. I don't disagree with that, even the termination. But I hate the idea of now treating these individuals as modern equivalent of 'untouchables'. OP used incredibly ugly words to describe people he has no clue about, and implicitly advocated for not hiring them.

>I assure you, batch-firing 20 people for sexual harassment out of 6,700 is not normal.

12,000. It's a big company.

>t means that there has been a consistent pattern of management not dealing with harassment

Except we don't know what it means, do we. It could be that they fired a bunch of people to make a PR statement. Or not.

12k is quite small I have worked in big companies where we had more engineers in our single division that Google has employees.

> As a manager, if you have a clueless 20-year old making an inappropriate proposition to one of your reports...

This is the hypothetical example people often give; but that is probably the easiest imaginable case. Fowler's report is regarding a manager who'd been with the company for several years -- not twenty years old unless they started in their teens -- who was a hardened and repeat offender. That seems to be more inline with what actually happens.

Clueless people can be corrected. What we're talking about here is very different.

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