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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of the joke, "When you owe the bank a million dollars and can't pay, you have a problem. When you owe the bank a billion dollars and can't pay, the bank has a problem."

The same is true with senior executives. If you fire manager or even a director for sexual harassment you're risk is at one level, if you fire someone who is VP or above then that person has a wide array of ways to 'fight back' that can cause serious harm to the company, so the company has a problem.

Some people cross that threshold of 'company risk' and do something wrong, have it get exposed to the company and then see the company contort itself to make it go away, and they realize they have way more power over the company than the company does over them. I have seen it bring out the worst in people.

It is a complex situation that is difficult to navigate and something I don't think anyone can prepare for.

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Add to this that in the context of Android and Andy Rubin it may be the case that Google paid him $90M because it pretty much owed him $90M no matter what.

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

I've been wondering about Google's competency with senior executives a few weeks ago, when reading the Anthony Levandowski story that was making the rounds. Despite repeated and blatant acts of disloyalty and self dealing, Google kept throwing money at him.

Your comment is not being downvoted despite talking only about one side of the problem. I like HN.

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 actual framing of issues like this as a cost-benefit is much closer to the root problem.

Make these decisions more expensive? Sure. But the deeper problem is doing this kind of financial calculus in the face of monstrous moral behavior.

This is really a partial accounting of the risk. Don't forget to include the risk of reporters finding out about this whole arrangement and doing further damage to an already tarnished company and industry.

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.

> Don't forget to include the risk of reporters finding out about this whole arrangement and doing further damage to an already tarnished company and industry

Perhaps, but 2014 is pre-#MeToo, so those risks wouldn't have been fully appreciated. SV has a long history of being able to use money to sweep sexual misconduct allegations under the rug and the current landscape of these arrangements causing PR problems for companies is a pretty recent development.

Not paying these bonuses would have certainly resulted in a court case and publicity that Google perhaps thought, at the time, would be negative. So they probably rationalized that resolving the situation by a) paying a settlement to the victim, b) ending Rubin's employment and c) not having to go to court and face that bad PR was the prudent approach.

Given how the industry (and country) has changed it's handling of sexual misconduct allegations in the last couple years, it's easy to find fault with the way they handled it, but Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

>Given how the industry (and country) has changed it's handling of sexual misconduct allegations in the last couple years, it's easy to find fault with the way they handled it, but Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

I think the height of metoo power was temporary. When #metoo fades out, reactions will regress to the mean (or a slightly heightened mean).

Blacks rioted all over LA for Rodney King. Then that died off, and police killed unarmed blacks here and there without any major reaction for almost 30 years -- until black lives matter erupted. No this has faded again.

> Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

Worth noting that (as pointed out in the article) the head of Google's lawyers is himself a beneficiary of the very different context he's operating in in 2014. This imagined recommendation/risk assessment isn't made in a vacuum, independent of biases.

> Not paying these bonuses would have certainly resulted in a court case and publicity that Google perhaps thought, at the time, would be negative. So they probably rationalized that resolving the situation by a) paying a settlement to the victim, b) ending Rubin's employment and c) not having to go to court and face that bad PR was the prudent approach.

And we all agree that this 'prudent approach' was objectively terrible, right? Not just in the hindsight of post-#MeToo PR. At the time it was actually wrong and a bad thing to do.

Explaining the reasoning behind unethical behavior does not make it more ethical.

In what ways would a VP or above be able to fight back that a manager or director could not?

Managers and directors at Google-sized companies know nothing of the inner workings and personal lives of the core leadership team of the company. VP and above often do.

Leaving to fork Android at Samsung or some such, for one

Samsung already kind of did that with Tizen and it hasn't really worked out. Same with Amazon. Lack of engineering leadership isn't the main obstacle preventing Samsung and other vendors from successfully forking Android.

Tizen is not a fork of Android. Tizen is about as far away from Android from a technology perspective as you can get with a mobile OS.

This would be kind of like saying iOS was a successful fork of Android, it just doesn't make sense because they really are not the same. One runs native apps, the other runs a JVM. The only similarity is that they are both mobile OSs running Linux.

The ones I can think of:

* They have more money to spend on lawyers.

* They expected windfall from the lawsuit is higher, so law firms would be more inclined to accept the case and spend more resources on it.

* At lower levels, people are given boilerplate contracts written by company lawyers and told to take it or leave it. Apart from things like remuneration, nothing is up for negotiation. These contracts often heavily favour the company and make lawsuits difficult. At higher levels, contracts are genuinely negotiated between the lawyers for both sides.

* It is unlikely that a director could create or move to another company and start successfully poaching their former colleagues. A VP or higher level executive probably could.

As a VP you have visibility into a wide section of the organization, you know where it is strong and where it is weak. As people get more senior they become more loyal to individuals rather than companies, so when a VP leaves, even without trying, they will often pull away other critical employees who follow the person not the company. Then there is the ability to disrupt without getting your hands dirty, an anonymous tip to TechCrunch to "watch this garage at 5AM on Fridays" or "You might want to dig into that unexplained event last October." which can put journalists on the trail of damaging information the company covered up (previously successfully).

If you are mad, and you feel like they have impeded your ability to get re-hired or funded at a later date, then you are more inclined to take some of these actions. If they say, "Look you have to go, but we'll make it comfortable for you and we'll just call it a day." then you might feel more charitable to them and forego starting processes that will cause them pain.

A technique I was told was used on an executive at Sun was to give them a stock grant that would only be "vested" in 5 years. The purpose was to keep it in that person's best interest to insure the Company was not damaged in order to reap the maximum reward down the line. To be clear, they got the stock in 5 years no matter what, it was just in their interest to have it be worth as much as possible at that time.

It also makes it look like it was condoned at higher levels if it gets out and can give ammo for lawsuit settlements at lower levels for other dirt-bags.

This carries weight. Former VP of Eng at Ubeam https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/

"different spanks for different ranks"

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

>The same is true with senior executives. If you fire manager or even a director for sexual harassment you're risk is at one level, if you fire someone who is VP or above then that person has a wide array of ways to 'fight back' that can cause serious harm to the company, so the company has a problem.

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.

If they didn't care, why was he forced to resign?

PR?

Depends on who knew about it, and what it means to them. Once its out, its out. Even if its a friend, he’ll have to accept certain consequences lest you reap greater retribution.

But because its a friend, you can lighten the burden. The golden parachute, not pursuing the case beyond the minimum, not bringing it up in hiring recommendations, etc.

If its already beyond his friend circle, then some kind of punishment is required; but only just enough to get everyone to shut up about it.

It sounds to me like he benefited more from this being made public than if things kept quiet. His new startup received 800 million in investment dollars from Google.

Didn't care personally doesn't mean you wont do what you need to cover the company (and your own ass) from negative future feedback (plus legal trouble) of not doing anything.

They cared about that, but they also cared about their pal (and fellow senior exec) more, so they designed a nice respectable and profitable exit strategy (people can resign for any reason after all, and at the time Google presented it as his own decision, amicable and everything).

Companies fire senior execs all the time. What "protections" do these people have? Sundar could fire them all tomorrow with zero expectation of repercussions.

If by "fire" you mean ask them to resign with a multi-million dollar incentive/severance package, then yes, you are correct. Executives rarely, if ever, get fired

really? You can (ironically) Google it:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+fired&oq=ceo+fired&aqs=c...

If something rarely happens, it's just another way to say that it happens. So I'm not sure why you're arguing like the above poster is saying it never happens.

Not to mention even in the case you're posting it's probably not the same as if you get fired from a job, where maybe security escorts you out immediately and you pick up your last paycheck next week.

And it's not as if the transcription discloses all the details of this event either. Things like severance and whatever contract obligations GE must fulfill that simply don't existing for rank and file employees. Which is kind of the point. Even when the language is the same, being "fired", the actual circumstances and details are usually much much different between executives and low level employees.

> "When you owe the bank a million dollars and can't pay, you have a problem. When you owe the bank a billion dollars and can't pay, the bank has a problem."

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

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