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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Melinda Gates worked at Microsoft when she met Bill. Should he be publicly tarred and feathered like this? By your logic, he abused his authority and he should not have dated or married his wife because he held power over her - he could have immediately fired her if she had rejected his advances.

So where do we draw the line, and why isn't Bill on the firing line in the same way these others are?

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That was still a risky move. The key (literally, one of the elements of sexual harassment) is whether the advance is welcome. I'm guessing that Bill used a lower-risk way of finding that out than sending a text message after a job interview.

You are right, the line is whether the other party welcomed the advance. A lot of very smart people are not socially mature enough to even guess what will happen. Something worked once so they repeat it, over and over again.

Companies should prohibit all internal fraternizing and fire anyone who is caught breaking the rules.

VCs and anyone involved in hiring should have even stricter guidelines. If you are an investor, relationships with anyone who owns another company should be off limits. If you are involved in the hiring process in any way, once the company you work for is disclosed, any potential relationships with that party should be off limits.

Tech has been singled out due to the current news cycle narrative. Many other industries are extremely hostile; expect to see plenty more stories in the future. The biases may not all be gender, but could be things such as seniority, ethnicity. Nepotism and general corruption is rampant in other areas. This is not a US problem, this is a global.

>Companies should prohibit all internal fraternizing and fire anyone who is caught breaking the rules.

If you did that, you would have a difficult time hiring people. There are reasons that most large tech companies don't place an outright ban on it. People don't like being told what to do, and people that spend lots of time working with one another sometimes fall for each other. Tech employees aren't (yet) robots.

I for one don't know any details about what happened between Bill and Melinda. Do you? Maybe they slowly became friends over time and just got closer and closer after they adjust had developed a trusting, non-sexual relationship. If we however would learn that Bill made some remark about feeling sexualy attracted to her the first day they meet then that's a different story and we should be appalled. But we don't know. It certainly is a delicate problem.

There is a reason Captain Picard never plays poker with the rest of the crew.

> There is a reason Captain Picard never plays poker with the rest of the crew.

That's more likely because Captain Picard shares a romantic relationship with Dr. Crusher [1] -- despite him being Dr. Crusher's boss, and Picard's involvement on the death of her husband.

Life is complicated.

ps: to their defense, this happened over many years, so very different than Dave McClure's situation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Crusher#Family

Well, one simple heuristic is to wait for the party NOT in power to initiate the relationship.

If this entrepreneur who got hit on had propositioned McClure instead, I don't think people would have minded that.

That's still a questionable situation. If a subordinate asks out a superior, how does the superior know if they're actually interested, or are just hoping for preferential treatment? And even beyond that, peers of the subordinate, once they find out about the relationship (and of course, they will find out), may be uncomfortable with a peer of theirs having the ability -- whether real or perceived -- to bend the boss' ear to that degree.

Yes, it would be questionable, but not in the same sense as the situations being discussed here.

In general, workplace romance (even among 'equals') is fraught with these complications.

Many people drive drunk and don't run anyone over. That doesn't mean driving drunk should be socially accepted.

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