Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a misconduct claim

I would have read it differently if she had gone "burning-man" mode, as I'd be tempted to do if invited on a whim like this. I'd always intended to try anyway, so having a guaranteed champion there (and maybe a camp? Unclear if crashing at the camp was implied in the invitation), would make it a fun thing to do. But the conservative clothes makes it seem like she was treating this as a step in the interview process.

Why was DeVaul talking about his personal romantic/sexual life in an interview? How stupid of him. What a dumb gamble, even if he was trying to get laid, the risk/reward just doesn't make sense in the context.

The irony is that this mandatory sexual harassment training was signed into law by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger a couple of years after he had been fornicating with his house maid.

BUT... professional clothes at burning man? The charitable view is that she's making that up and feigning indignation. The uncharitable view is that she's clueless and did absolutely no research about burning man whatsoever.

I think she probably realized, that's why she brought her mom and conservative clothes.

Sometimes one way to win is to play along and lead your opponent into a trap.

Granted the trap didn't work as https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdevaul is still a director at X. Propositioning people and telling them about your open relationships during an interview process then inviting them to a drug infused festival should lead to not being a director anywhere in my opinion but maybe I am old-fashioned.

I was a couple years ahead of Star in school and know she was a long time fan of burning man, even going while in undergrad. No way this guy was the first person to tell her about it as this article implies. (but doesn’t explicitly state) Maybe meeting a fellow burner is what brought out his extra creepy side but that’s no excuse.

She was probably going to be there anyway. She might make plans with a weeks notice but really doubt a mom living in another state would have.

though also Star is a amazing famous person in her own right! She deserves more attention than Mr. DoucheVaul

Often used incorrectly. That’s not at all what polyamory is.

Oh, commas and sentence structure, so important.

One says Burning Man was the next week, entirely possible because she thought it was talking about the job (leaving aside -that- naivete), and makes him a liar, in that he couldn't have "believed that she had been informed that she didn't get the job" if he invited her during the interview.

The other says the invitation came the next week.

That guy shows up in academic settings and touches and communicates inappropriately and unwantedly with women, especially at MIT. I've personally witnessed this at something as routine as a party with alcohol. His entire mindset is twisted. He saw Star Simpson as a vulnerable target. She wasn't the only person!

His reckoning is long overdue, and I have no fucking clue why people at GoogleX keep him around.

This is the tip of the god damned iceberg. Google is a powder keg of abuse. If they weren't so rich, paying people off as handsomely as they do, it would have come to head years ago.

Tickets for burning man go on sale 6 months before, cost $1000 and become sold out in 30 minutes. It's a festival in the middle of the desert that you have to go pretty prepared if you want to last more than half a day (coolers, water, van, etc).

How did someone find tickets for 2 people a week before, drove to the desert with their mother because they honestly thought it was an interview test.

EDIT: Maybe she was going to be at burning man with her mom eitherway. She just decided to get some more business oriented clothes for when she would hang with her new work mates. That makes sense. But now it makes zero sense for the article to mention the burning man story.

I think it speaks to how difficult it is for women to sort whether this is really a networking opportunity or not. A lot of networking that's obviously networking when done between two hetero men could be construed as a proposition for a woman. Where does she draw the line?

It may be another of these situations: https://quillette.com/2018/10/17/the-scandal-at-ubc-keeps-gr....

Having watched friends go through similar trials over bogus accusations that stem from a wide array of causes, I'm leery of the way many of these stories are reported.

This... reads differently now.

They could have fired him without compensation for breaking the law, and then used the money to defend themselves in the resulting lawsuit. Duh.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but coercing people to have sex they do not want is a criminal offense.

The story suggests that he could have been fired without much if any kind of severance package. But besides the worry that such a senior person would file a termination lawsuit, there was the problem that Google's board had given him a $150M stock grant a few weeks after Google investigated the complaint. It's not clear whether the board knew of the investigation before rewarding him, but that sum apparently served as a reference point when settling the matter:

> The $150 million stock grant gave Mr. Rubin an enormous bargaining chip when he started negotiating his exit package about a month later. That is because an executive’s stock compensation — and how much of it they would leave behind — is often taken into consideration during settlement talks.

Bosses should know not to have sexual or romantic relationships with people who work for them. We all know how one has to be careful what one says to one's boss. And we all no how hard it can be to say no to a boss or boss's boss about anything. It puts the junior person in an impossible situation.

But it's just as bad from the employer's perspective. Suddenly two people who are supposed to be putting the company's interests first have a strong conflict of interest. And when the relationship ends (as most do) you have a whole different set of unnecessary potential conflicts in the workplace.

Google should have punished Rubin for sexual misconduct, and sue him instead of praise and pay him.

You don't invite them to Burning man, you don't have business meetings in your house late at night, you don't tell someone your his slave, you don't offer to swing with your wife (from a different post I read), seriously.

The HN demographic is skewed by a lot of young people who work for companies that are managed more like college dorms than real businesses. I think this gives some people a distorted perspective about what's realistic.

To be clear I'm not proposing a blanket ban on all workplace relationships everywhere. But if some employers choose to go that route it's not necessarily bad or unrealistic.

> using a position of authority to coerce someone into a relationship of any kind

Is not a necessity for

> people from dating within the work place

> while also ensuring that predators aren't allowed to abuse the people around them

People in high positions can take actions to prevent conflict of interests like when any legitimate President places their assets into a blind trust.

There is absolutely nothing stopping people in positions of power in companies from doing the same and to avoid dating anyone they have power over.

> but I'm not sure what else they could have done.

They could make it clean house, add a zero tolerance policy and make it clear they don't allow people to be in personal relationships with those they have power over, perhaps as defined by being their superior in the org chart.

This goes beyond that - there were rules about reporting such relationships, presumably so HR could look out for the less advantaged party, but those rules were ignored. And this doesn’t sound like simple ‘dating a coworker’ - guy was a sleazy scumbag:

FTA - ‘The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”’

It's actually pretty simple.

The problem isn't co-workers dating. The problem is people in a position of power dating someone that reports to them.

There's a handful of of options here.

1) Don't do it

2) If it is actually legitimate and not coerced, you reassign one of them to a separate team and completely remove them from the reporting chain and any impact on the other's career.

3) If it is actually legitimate and not coerced, one of them resigns.

4) If it is coerced, you fire the shit out of the person in power.

If it's two people that are not in each other's reporting chain and one isn't subordinate to the other, or there isn't some other reason one could have an outsized impact on the other's career, it's generally not the same sort of issue.

If they fire him and didn’t pay him a dime, he could walk into Samsung or Apple and take all his domain knowledge with him and get paid that $100mm to make a competitor’s products better.

Isn't it usually the company or person who shouts loudly about virtue that end up being the least virtuous? Whether it is the most vocal anti-gay republican who is caught having sex with a man in an airport bathroom or the most vocal pro-woman and anti-racist democrat DA who is found to have assaulted his "brown slave".

This is why I roll my eyes whenever someone talks in a virtuous evangelical manner. It usually hides a guilty conscious. ( Ahem, cough such as Tim Cook's recent media blitz about privacy )

> Now, due to the cover-up this looks awful. I just don't understand it.

Maybe rubin knows a thing or two about the co-founders or top execs in the company. The reason why execs get glorious golden parachutes isn't because they were such hard working people, it's because they know too much and you want them to be quiet and beholden to you.

Keep in mind that it isn't a secret in the tech industry ( especially silicon valley ) that people use their position for sex. Many times it's reciprocal. One side gets sex, the other side gets cushy jobs/advancement/etc.

Maybe Rubin knews $90 million worth of secrets?

Dude. Those are facade. Its the PR and marketing which makes you think so.

at 200k/yr on the low end, to 500k/yr on the high end (excluding outliers), let's call it 300k/yr average. That's 500 engineers costing 150m per year. So, yeah I think it comes close and probably exceeds.

Aggregate? Surely yes.

$150 million / 10 years / $200k per dev = 75 developers. I'm pretty sure more than 75 people work on Android, so yeah, a lot more than $150 million has been paid out.

Precisely the reason why something called "corporate debt restructuring" was invented.

This may reflect poorly on Google's competency in negotiating in the past and their willingness to accept blame for poor negotiation.

But, yeah, Google pretending that Andy Rubin left a hero is Google pretending they are (still, if ever) a hero too

But risk assessment is really besides the point anyway. It's not difficult to see the correct course of action here and that Google as a company failed to take it.

Part of the solution to the problem you described is to make such company behavior more costly. If the outcry from today's story was significant, the company would have to calculate such cost into their decision. "Look Andy, we know you know lot of our secrets, but if we pay you millions and call you a hero it could cost us much more."

This would in turn have effect on companies calculating whether to try to hide dirty laundry or come clean, knowing they have little leverage on disgraced VPs.

The stories from Sun back in the '80s though…

It's not just that (e.g. the thread of negative consequences).

It also, who would have been doing the punishment?

Other senior executives. Who were friends with Andy, went to the same parties and clubs, spend time together etc.

Despite token lip service, they wouldn't care about a misconduct claim from someone below their league.

They wouldn't care about such a complain against one of their own. Some would just trust his version of things, and others would think the only issue is him getting called for doing it (whereas if he did it without getting called for it, it would be fine).

In fact, they might have laughed it off with Andy too, either in "that person is telling bs", or in "hey bro, you overdid it there, better lay low". (And the fact that the person making the accusation might indeed be lying, or at least that has been the case sometimes, makes it even easier to brush it off).

Also, if you don't pay fellow exec for getting caught in such things, the same thing might be done to you, if you get in a similar situation (or another kind of disfavor). Better to support the fellow senior exec, to receive the same support yourself.

I'm reminded of this South Park clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN57UhWy8_g

>What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013, according to two company executives with knowledge of the episode. Google investigated and concluded her claim was credible, said the people, who spoke on the condition that they not be named, citing confidentiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was notified, they said, and Mr. Page asked for his resignation.

> 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. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

The difference today is that Google is a solid Ad-tech company and is just like any other massive advertising company, rife with politics and an army of anonymous employees just grinding away each day.

The similarities between these stories and Madmen is striking.

Why do you say xxx countries? It is not as if we don't have this type of thing happening in our own country.

Not surprising however, given their extraordinary monopoly power and what that type of power always seems to lead to. The people that run Alphabet have been operating in a power bubble the likes of which few ever experience in a business environment. Larry Page being missing in action[1], detached, is just another of the many symptoms of that power bubble. As many others have noted here, this sort of widespread abuse and the culture that protects it, starts at the top. It's time for much of Alphabet's leadership to be removed. Or given that the share structure makes that very difficult to accomplish, an attempt at least should be made to permanently alter the corporate structure so the culture can be changed for the better. Enough investor pressure would probably yield positive results.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/larry-pag...

Now make the assumption that a group of human beings were doing the right things at the right time in the right place to become mega rich, and then apply the same rules.

People aren't terribly different from one another on the fundamental level- the only different things are circumstances which determine 1) the number of restrictions, and conversely 2) the number of privileges.

The only valuable question is how to minimize this human dynamic as the size of the group grows, because leaving a 5-person group behind to find something different is a lot easier and a lot less consequential than leaving a 5000-person group.

1) They did not have enough evidence to fight in court - the article claims Google thought the accusations were "credible", but not necessarily proven. This could easily be a disaster for Google which can easily go away with some money and a resignation.

2) Even if they had enough evidence, the damage to their public image from this would be substantial, which could be costlier than the "payout".

3) The majority of controlling shareholders(Brin, Page, Schmidt) want to remain on good terms with Rubin and are willing to sacrifice the money to do so, thus fulfilling the responsibility to the shareholders angle.

How would you ban this type of behavior?

"When you have 1 million dollars, that money belongs to you. When you have 10 million dollars, that belongs to your family. When you have 100 million, your community, and when you have a billion dollars, that's society's money."

We just don't hear that much about all the people who got some of it then lost/gave up a bunch of it. The ones who happen to maintain for long periods of time stand out.

And yes I agree it's good for most of us to not get there- both for the good of others and for the good of ourselves.

So mostly ignored as long as it doesn't happen systemically or to too large a fraction of the population?

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. cf Bloomberg.

Edit: not sure why this is being downmodded (not complaining about it, just curious). Is it somehow not completely fine for consenting adults to have whatever kinks they want?

Rubin deserves to be punished for sexual harassment. Kink shaming is unnecessary.

Was that sent to a co-worker or not? Was that an argument for or against "being owned"? Was that sarcasm or in earnest? Was that a quote from a book?

None of that is clear without context!

Every company that's large enough has a few people participating in unintentional, or highly intentional harassment.

What you should judge companies on, is how they deal with it - especially when the perpetrator is not some middle-manager, but a rockstar.

https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

Larry Page (Sundar's boss) has been involved in this and other coverups of executive misconduct, having made the decision to give people like Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal large severances and allow them to "move on" to other things.

Sergey Brin (also Sundar's boss) stated that the whole purpose of having female employees at Google was so he could sleep with them. While working on Google Glass, he had an affair with a member of the Glass team that was fairly publicized at the time.

Eric Schmidt (recently chairman of Alphabet's board, over Google) put his mistress on payroll once as a consultant. Supposedly, he was the "adult in the room" of this organization.

David Drummond (chief legal officer of Alphabet, also over Google) had an affair with an underling, and only admitted it in accordance with company policy after she had his kids. She lost her job because of it.

It's likely the only way to clean house at Alphabet/Google is to break it up and sell it off, ideally in a manner that doesn't make the very people responsible for these transgressions even more rich.