Google’s top lawyer allegedly had affairs with multiple employees
theverge.com
theverge.com
How does one get away with not paying child support and not having wages garnished? I thought the courts were very aggressive in enforcing child support.
Interesting, he was also charged by the SEC in 2005 for failing to register $80M in employee stock options prior to Google's IPO[0]
I imagine Google's top lawyer is rather better at that. Also, I suspect we're not hearing an equal balance of stories about unpaid child support.
Being a Google lawyer (over even Google's "top lawyer") has little to do with being a good lawyer, rather everything to do with connections and ticking the boxes (Stanford grad and minority).
After all the guy failed to register $80M of Google Stock Options with the SEC, thats not some slight or minor oversight or error, but evidence the lawyer was not competent for the position.
You see it every day with general counsel at tech companies, Facebook is kind of notorious for FB Shareholder lawsuits against Zuckerburg as a result of poor legal work from their army of Harvard trained lawyers. Search the Director compensation lawsuits and its clear Zuck has the power to do the things he is doing (as he has majority voting rights as shareholder, is chairman of the board, and CEO) but the FB general counsel seems to regularly authorize corporate actions "wearing the wrong hat" (i.e. Zuck authorizes something as shareholder when it should have been as CEO, or as CEO when it should have been Shareholder, etc...), which is about as basic as corporate laws go.
Odds are she never went to court to get court ordered child support, and any support he was paying was simply a result of personal agreement between the two.
She could at anytime file for breach of contract (supported either by written agreement of support, or at minimum inferred agreement by showing any texts/email/prior payments to support her claim) and/or petition the courts for an order of child support.
The second sentence in the article says "The relationship violated Google’s policies which ban relationships between managers and their subordinates."
That seems like a sensible corporate policy for a number of reasons as just one example where there's a corporate interest.
it's their private life.
In the age of #MeToo, companies are getting called out for inconsistently handling these types of situations. No doubt Google would probably quickly terminate lower-level employees who transgressed in the same way.
What the heck? Hell no, it's not a 'sensible corporate policy'. It completely counteracts human nature. People will get into relationships. People who spend most of their time at work, will meet other people at work. A big faceless corp shouldn't dictate personal relationships.
A sensible policy would ask that the couple disclose their relationship to HR so provisions can be made so that others under the manager don't feel like the subordinate in the relationship is getting preferential treatment. You can do that and have policies for that. You can also move the manager or the subordinate to another team.
Why are we OK with these corporations meddling in the private lives of their ADULT employees? Why are there calls for more meddling by certain segments of activists?
This is the common solution, at which point there is no longer a relationship between a manager and a subordinate (so no need to change the policy).
The company doesn't want to be your relationship counselor. One of the more foolproof ways to make sure you don't bring that to work is that you don't start it at work.
What if your colleague is now promoted and people allege that it was unfair ?
What if they break up and end up ruining the working of the whole team ?
What if your boss was abusing you and you go to complain to HR and the HR person is having an affair with your boss ?
What if your colleague consented to having an affair but felt coerced because the boss had a lot of power over them ?
Would you allow such a thing to be rampant in your own company ? It’s understandable why companies would want to discourage it at the minimum.
Also the issues in the article are quite serious and go beyond having an affair
There are other ways to deal with that though short of banning or moving people, eg adding additional scrutiny of decisions by an uninvolved third party and having objective decision making criteria for career related points (promotions, bonuses, pay rises, firings etc) where possible.
There is also the question of how a romantic relationship can impact a professional relationship. A manager needs to be able to reprimand their subordinates, and sometimes even fire them. Romantic relationships complicate those situations. It works the other way too -- sometimes romantic relationships need to end, and that might spill over into the workplace (see e.g. the reporting on [edited for correctness] Sergey's affair).
It should be blindingly obvious that managers and their subordinates should not have romantic relationships. There are countless problems, and almost no upside for any of the people involved.
Unfair? What isn't?
>What if your boss was abusing you and you go to complain to HR and the HR person is having an affair with your boss ?
HR exists solely to create a paper trail that helps the company should you sue them. If you expect them to do anything beyond that, you are just setting yourself up for a disappointment.
You could replace affair with a friendship in all of your examples and it wouldn't change anything. Does it suck when promotions are handed out to friends rather than based on merit? Sure, but it doesn't mean we should ban socializing with colleagues.
I think it's right that there should be some protection against that.
Beyond that, favoritism from romance tends to be much stronger and far less rational than favoritism from friendship. Indeed, work friendships are even often formed on the basis of a mutual recognition of competence. Romantic friendships are usually based on factors utterly unrelated to performance at work.
Stupid unless it's used with force and or the powerless clearly says or does things that says no I'm not interested and the one in power uses it to threaten to get fired(all flat out illegal and wrong). Im reading a lot of stories lately about clearly consensual relationships that end and the other party are mad so they jump on this bandwagon called revenge.
Does it work? Apparently not in this case. Do I agree? Who cares. Do I get the idea? Well, yes. Seems pretty straight forward.
A relationship with someone that ultimately reports up the chain to you has obvious issues.
If I worked for an executive that was having an affair I’d want them fired.
It tells a lot about a company that allowed Manangers to date employees. According to the article they allowed it and then outright banned it later.
It's also unfair on all the other employees who aren't the favourite.
And not having such a policy makes it much harder to investigate the far more common non-consensual sexual harassment that happens.
Who wants to be on the team whose boss just had a violently bad romantic ending with the boss two levels up, and now all your shiny computers are being taken away in favor of beat up netbooks, your office assignment has been mysteriously moved from the third-floor corner area to the janitor's closet in the basement, and every single person in the organization is now getting the worst possible ratings in their reviews?
On the flip side, it may have been a lot more fun six months earlier when your adequate machines were replaced by awesome machines and you were moved out of the windowless second story room into the bright shiny third-floor corner, and you got a new beer tap and all-new office chairs and desks.
But neither case is actually good for the company; both are deviations from the business-rational allocation of resources. And the bad case has an almost unbounded downside; entire departments can be destroyed by infighting if this happens at the executive level.
Companies can pick who has a relationship with whom because they pick up the bill. They have a ton of skin in the game; in some situations it turns out the company had more skin in the "relationship" than the participants did, when the resulting blowout costs the company hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
Note that in practice, relationships aren't banned but managed. It isn't necessarily a problem for even two employees who are in a bad relative position to become involved, because it's not like the company can really stop that. It is just necessary to move them around in a way to ensure that nobody is tempted to use the company in unethical ways in their relationship or to damage the company in either direction because of the relationship.
Honestly, it's usually good even for the participants. Having multiple relationships in effect between two people is awkward at the best of times, like when you're in high school working the grocery store checkout and your teacher comes through, and suddenly you're trying to work out the social implications of the set intersection of "grocery customer" and "my school teacher, outside of school" social roles on the fly. When those two relationships are as powerful and complicated as "employment" and "romantic" relationship, just the sheer social/emotional stress of navigating that can be complicated and draining even for two well-intentioned individuals.
Its always a massive failure of all involved, on many levels. Hard to have true sympathy for anybody but that poor kid which didn't deserve this
But banning them is nonsense. It's meaningless. How about a proactive rule that defines the outcome: e.g. if you have a relationship with a superior in your department, then you are switched to a different department.
Now everybody understand the playing field, and can choose, and some of the undesirable outcomes are minimized.
And part of the justifications for these rules is to prevent Involuntary relationships. "Fuck me if you want a raise next year."
Its considered a bigger risk to the company, to disrupt the executive suite than the rank-and-file.
That was an example process. Come up with one! None are perfect. But I know certainly, that a company with a pragmatic process will be in business longer than an ivory-tower non-process (Ban work relationships! Punish employees routinely!)
Good luck with that.
I know a few couples with long and happy marriages that initially came out of manager-subordinate relationship.
If you don't disclose a relationship with a subordinate, you should be held accountable for that.
It seems big companies are more like a kingdom than a democracy where powerful men have harem consisting of their own employees.
Google polices are private rules for internal arbitration, with no relevance outside of google. Why are we even talking about that?