Google has sacked dozens over sexual harassment since 2016
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
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.
You seem to be misconstruing a "tendency" for an "absolute blanket on all"
You're right. You used the word "loserS"
> 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.
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?
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.
Perhaps I missed that?
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.
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.
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.
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?
I would also object to that last paragraph for similar reasons that others in this thread have brought up.
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.
Add any sort of power dynamic to that mix and...
no need to guess. the second quarter results for alphabet inc says 89,058 employees.
https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q2_alphabet_earnings_releas...
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.
Imagine how much wealth Android has generated for Google.
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. :(
> 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.
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.
The causes in for-cause termination generally have to be listed.
Here's a sample clause: http://www.elinfonet.com/prov/14
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).
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.
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.
This is kind of like figuring out that coal provides good energy output and then someone saying you "created the industrial revolution".
https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/13/investing/yahoo-marissa-may...
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.
Uh, so which is it? Did Mayer:
A) Change yahoo’s trajectory from positive to negative, thus “running it into the ground”
B) Yahoo was running into the ground when she took over
For the crime of failing to turn around the cluster fuck that was 2012 yahoo, I guess Mayer is forever destined to be HN’s punching bag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference...
I completely agree with what you're saying, but also in her case those shares might be worthless given the circumstances.
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.
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.
But the article itself paints the opposite picture.
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.
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 hn@ycombinator.com.
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.
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.
It possibly makes the potential for harassment greater, but it's not necessarily harassment to have a relationship with a subordinate.
My employers profit interest is such a relatively small concern. Love can be what make life worth living. Love should trump that IMO.
It amazes me that someone would argue that you should prevent a relationship because of an employers best interest.
Im glad people like Sergey can look past that.
What does this even mean?
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&ei=KJXTW4...
sure they might get fired, that won’t stop them.
Yea, the company should probably be in charge of who you get to associate with.
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.
I mean heck, Bill Gates met Melinda when she was a Microsoft employee and they've now been married 20+ years.
With regard to affairs, it’s more of a moral issue than a legal one.
It’s possible to harass someone unintentionally.
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?
Etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Might be a good case for remote workforces.
(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)
I think it's more like, damn life is lonely and I have a hard time finding a partner. I'm not in school anymore and I don't meet anyone else.
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.
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.
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.
This is normal, legal and by itself it is not harassment.
I hope that never changes.
The Onion covered this of course, curiously using Mountain View in their story:
https://www.theonion.com/waitstaff-tired-of-sleeping-with-ea...
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.
Edit: Missed that this was since 2016, makes sacrificial lamb theory less likely.