Alphabet’s Chief Legal Officer Stepping Down Amid Investigation
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Bill Maris, who founded Google's venture capital arm and reported directly to Drummond before quitting in 2016, tells Axios...
"The news of David Drummond leaving Google today brings to mind a quote from one of my most favorite creatures. 'At an end, your rule is. And not short enough, it was.' I had been asked in the past why I left Google in 2016, and I have never really commented on that. David Drummond is the reason I left Google. I simply could not work with him any longer. It’s that simple. We have very, very different ideas about how to treat people, and this was a long time coming."[1]
[1]https://www.axios.com/alphabet-david-drummond-departure-7572...
I randomly met Dave Drummond once at a coffee shop in Sausalito (I didn't know who he was at the time... he just commented on my Google shirt), and he gave me an inexplicably uncomfortable feeling.
This doesn't sound like it's that. He does, after all, call it 'inexplicable'; literally unable to be interpreted or expanded upon. It was a 'gut' feeling, a combination of all the things you pick up quickly and instinctively, the summation of which is discomfort.
That _also_ doesn't mean the guy is bad, or that it's necessarily fairly representative of him. Just that he gave the OP a feeling of discomfort.
Gut feelings are often surprisingly accurate, sometimes we all pick things up a lot earlier than our consciousness cottons on. But that is no standard to hold in public discourse. There are a bunch of people who give off creepy vibes who are great and a bunch of people who give off positive vibes who are creepy. Binning people like that should ideally be done with evidence or at the very least an argument to give the comment some substance.
We've figured out that good looking people are not more upstanding than ugly people. Truly the next step is to avoid comments like that. Truth is no defence for a comment like that; a comment that says nothing is automatically truthful but also meaningless.
There, see the difference? You said it yourself - as it turns out, being good looking vs. ugly is not meaningful evidence as to whether you're going to treat others fairly. Being actively disdainful of others to the extent that you're giving off huge "creeper" vibes (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps intentionally!) can be evidence of sorts - at least in a very loose, "more likely than not" sense.
Of course, this is not to say that it should be considered anywhere close to OK to spread wild rumors about "the creeper vibes that this creepy guy gave me once", or anything like that - just think about how open this would be to abuse! But OP wasn't doing that, at all. He/she was seeking to confirm the assessment that others had already, independently come up with, and that can be a very good thing.
Somebody saying they ran into him at a coffee shop and got what amounts to a feeling of bad vibes is literally not evidence or conformation of anything about the man's character. It is quite likely to be run of the mill background racism. We know nothing about the commentator, nothing about the situation. And it looks like the standard outcome of racism. Even if it isn't the commentator can do a lot better than that with minimal effort. Now if there were any evidence of any kind proffered that would be a different story. You are fabricating some notion of some sort of 'active ... disdain' here that isn't mentioned in the objectionable comment. If they don't mean unsubstantiated they shouldn't be saying unsubstantiated. They should be substantiating their claim.
The standard should be higher than that comment.
There's pretty conclusive evidence that a lot of people think 'people outside their in-group' give off creepy vibes, yes. It's not a black vs. non-black thing, it's literally that being together with 'familiar' groups of people makes you feel more comfortable than otherwise. And while this can be a source of unwanted 'noise', it can also be quite separate from the more specific feeling about a particular person's attitude. I'm pretty sure that if we asked OP about black males other than this guy, he/she would tell us that no, as a rule, they did not make him/her feel uncomfortable the way he did.
(After all, working at a firm like Google, in this day and age, involves being exposed to people of many diverse backgrounds and being willing to engage with them as peers regardless of how one might initially feel about their group identity. That's a pretty good antidote to ingroup biases!)
I did mention disdain as a possibility because that's perhaps the most common source of those "inexplicable" creeper vibes, and also because OP themselves seems to be drawing a contrast between these and the "friendly" attitude of the person they worked with.
This statement shows a surprising lack of empathy or objectivity or even self-awareness.
Consider that Person A and Person B meet and that Person A gets the creepy vibe from Person B - for no clearly defined reason, it just happens.
Person B increasingly tries to socially interact with Person A and this puts Person A in a tough position because they don't like the creepy vibe that they get from Person B.
Person A continually tries to use social cues to try to deter the interactions from being frequent or even increasing. Person B just doesn't "get the clue", as it were.
It might be unfair or untactful for Person A to use contempt or disdain to get the interactions with Person B to decrease; however, we can probably safely arrive the conclusion that this might be a far more tactful route to use than just calling Person B a creepy cunt to their face, yeah?
The problem with your explicit inference is that Person B never has reason to take pause and consider that it was their creepy vibe that initially caused the situation to occur, much less their continued attempts at increasing interactions that caused it to exacerbate.
If Person B has the "it's never me, it's always them" mentality, then we can presumably arrive that the conclusion that this is ultimately what occurred; however, to arrive at the conclusion that Person A used contempt or disdain against Person B solely because Person A is the creeper entirely detracts and ignores (in a very subjective way) Person A's experience[s] with/around Person B.
Succinctly put: You're ascribing to malice (e.g.: creepiness) where another reason can just easily and just as validly be subjected, without even considering that possibility.
If Person B is an empathetic, objective, self-aware person (i.e. not a Creepy Guy), they're of course not going to do that, They'll figure out that Person A is acting uncomfortable, for whatever reason, and dial back on the interaction as opposed to trying again and again in the same way. Perhaps they'll try a different "tack" if they feel that engaging with Person A is that important to them, but they'll still be way more careful about it than they otherwise would. Simply because it's the sensible, rational thing to do at that point.
As for Person A, the sensible thing to do would be to walk away from the whole thing well before they even get a chance to be made contemptful or disdainful. If they're unable to do even that then, well, there are ways you can call Person B a creeper to their face in a quite polite, respectful, and even plausibly-deniable way (i.e. Person B gets to save face!) and Person A should probably resort to them. That alone would be enough to break the vicious cycle of contempt.
Quite simply, the symmetry you're pointing at here just doesn't exist - being creeped out by someone is not the same as being a creeper yourself! Not even close.
You're being disingenuous in your argument. You're ascribing behaviour with the benefit of hindsight for a particular person (Drummond) and using that as a blanket definition for everyone else in the world that may be rude/disdainful. The equivalence simply doesn't exist and is in no-way emphatically true.
In fact, it's a rather far leap from the charitable position that gave the plausible deniability from the previous statement[s]: "...at least in a very loose, 'more likely than not' sense".
How do you propose to resolve this dichotomy that you're creating? Double-down?
For example, by your definition, wouldn't Gordon Ramsay automatically be a creeper? How about Simon Cowell?
How do you resolve your definition with the dichotomy created by reality demonstrated by their behaviour combined with their lack of being actual creeps (as far as anyone knows)?
I am not saying that the OP or anyone here is being racist. We need to provide more context to these statements if we are going to say these in public. Otherwise, some groups of people will be at the receiving end of these kind of statements more often than the rest of us.
They don't have to justify themselves to you. He saw what he saw, and felt what he felt. if you have any problem with that, that's on you.
Do you know anyone who would hire someone after making a $80MM mistake??
This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c...
I am sure he's made a lot of people money, but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.
Edit: First article I linked to was paywalled, so here is the underlying story: https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...
Not to mention businesses have customers and investors who care about these things.
As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.
So, yes, maybe they did it because they knew I'd be going around using them as an example of altruism in business, 12 years later.
https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai...
>American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United.
>Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success.
>“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”
I know anecdotally My employer constantly gets in trouble during earnings calls from shareholders for doing anything remotely environmentally responsible because it impacts margins. It's pretty clear capital has no intention of being ethical at the cost of profit
Being good at business does not make you a "good person".
Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point.
Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.
Sorry, but this has nothing to do with the point I was making.
If someone screws you over in business, you're going to try to avoid working with that person in the future. That's just common-sense.
Vinod Khosla. Robert Bolton. Samantha Power. Practically every dictator bar Lee Kuan Yew.
If you’re already powerful, the same rules don’t quite apply.
One had a complex relationship at the time that he refuse to believe the kid was his. And he didn't "abandoned" her, he reconciled.
I don't think Jobs was diddling his employees though. Big difference.
That's literally the opposite of what he did in the book, and in subsequent interviews.
Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative...
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.
The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.
Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...
she convinced Obama to back military coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Honduras and Egypt.
The Intercept (no friend of the Clintons!) writes:
A retired U.S. military intelligence officer, who helped with the lobbying and the Honduran colonels’ trip, told me on condition of anonymity that the coup supporters debated “how to manage the U.S.” One group, he said, decided to “start using the true and trusted method and say, ‘Here is the bogeyman, it’s communism.’ And who are their allies? The Republicans.”
A network of former Cold Warriors and Republicans in Congress loudly encouraged Honduras’s de facto regime and criticized the newly elected Obama administration’s handling of the crisis.
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/honduras-coup-us-defense...
By the time Clinton got involved the coup was complete.
The others are the same.
Read the US reaction to the Egyptian coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t.... It's easy to criticise it, but hard to come up with what the reaction should have been. It's worth noting that both parties had fairly similar reactions here.
Does anyone really believe that Clinton and Obama were backing militant Islamists in Syria and Libya? The countries were a mess and they were stuck trying to find a way forward - they didn't (and shouldn't have!) wanted Gaddafi or Assad in power, but both conflicts were multi-sided messes where one group would get taken over by another.
It's Syria that is mostly destroyed and has millions of refugees. Libya is bad but not quite as bad.
I agree with your point that there is degrees of destruction though.
You'll see occasional media content stressing the horrors of Syria, but there's never anything about Libya. That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there.
They both started in 2011. The Syrian conflict maybe winding down, but has started a new phase (in Syrian Kurdistan).
Syria had slave markets too.
The UNHCR data[1][2] shows a lot more refugees from Syria than Libya (don't forget Libya is often used by refugees from other parts of Africa as their outgoing port to Europe, so news reports on refugees arrivals from Libya don't mean the refugees were Libyan).
One source on the Wikipedia article claimed 1/3 of the Libyan population had fled to Tunisia. This seems non-credible: Neither Tunisia nor any refugee agency makes this claim. [3] claims "there are 2 two million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia", but this is still less than half the number of Syrian refugees (over 5 million) and less than the number of registered in Turkey alone (over 3 million).
I think your "That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there" statement is also unfounded - in Syria journalists were targets of both ISIS and the Syrian state, and frequently murdered by either of them.
[1] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria
[2] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2015/03/17...
I mean, as a "Clinton is the worse option" quote, that hasn't aged well this week, has it? Mind you, the entire article is just the same old "Trump is visibly awful and we can work with that" many idiots ran with and were completely wrong about.
Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.
If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.
Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.
I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?
Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.
There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.
It's not about changing the world it's about not dehumanizing everything.
1. Make millions of dollars doing grey area work
2. Grey area work is now identified as black hat work
3. "Thats just the way it is"
It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.
For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.
This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".
To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.
Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)
I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.
I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.
Make me a star Harvey...
This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were.
There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.
I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.
Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.
Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.
She's not exactly squeaky clean either.
Plenty of decent single men out there, she went for the married one with kids.
Not disputing the guy's behaviour seems appalling; so her due diligence on his character and his actual single status appears to have been poor.
Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job?
It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.
Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain.
If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.
ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
The attempts in recent years by a small group of feminists to broaden the definition of non-consensual sex to include "I had sex with that rich guy because he could give me an attractive job but later regretted it" just degrades everything, especially women. It causes people to stop believing them when they say they were coerced by a powerful man. After all, Weinstein's accusers settled, didn't they? And his ex employers picked up the legal bills. Rumoured to be because he had tons of evidence that the complainants had willingly accepted their side of the "deals" and that such arrangements were commonplace throughout the industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying sexual harassment in any way. But it's not "harassment" if it's wanted and consensual, and it's not _automatically_ unethical if the employee is not in his chain of command or even if they are, if they aren't forced into it, and there's no punishment for declining. If they make advances on their own and are merely not turned down (see e.g. Rosenberg, who IIRC wasn't in his chain of command), that's stretching the definition.
>> you could make the case that your career was >> harmed because she's sleeping with the head of Google X
Funny how otherwise "progressive" people automatically assume that the only reason women would sleep with their boss is to advance their careers. The romantic component doesn't factor into it at all.
Thankfully, simply making a case is not enough under US law. You have to prove it as well. Best I can tell Rosenberg did not experience any meteoric career rise. Nor would there be any way to accomplish that without drawing attention: Sergey is not in charge of promotions, committees are.
In fact, as an ex-Googler, I'm not sure Sergey was in charge of _anything_ at Google for the past 15 years. He had his hobby projects, but he was as checked out as a founder can really be. He's literally probably there for the dating pool. :-)
And the role of HR and legal is to minimize the company's risk. Just because the risk doesn't materalize doesn't mean the risk wasn't there. The way sexual harassment claims usually play out (if both parties have competent lawyers) is that the company pays out a significant sum of money and then both sides sign non-disclosure agreements and waivers to further liability. The point isn't to go to trial, the point is that the threat of facing a sympathetic jury incentivizes both parties to work out a settlement.
There was one very obvious aggrieved party in to the Brin/Rosenberg affair in Hugo Barra, Android's VP and spokeperson and Rosenberg's ex-boyfriend who quit to head Xiaomi's international efforts right as the affair broke. Presumably Google gave him a generous severance package to not disparage or sue the company, which is why you haven't heard him disparage or sue the company.
This sounds quite unlikely.
More generally, there's a tremendous civil liability, both personally to the principles involved and the firm, through such activity. A liability which may be entirely independent of the apparent (or actual) consensuality at the time, and which might be filed by non-participants (e.g., other employees perceiving sexual favouratism or discrimination).
A principle function of a corporation is as a risk-externalising, and limiting, legal structure. (This is literally stated in some forms of organisation, as with an LLC: limited liability corporation.) The principle job of management and oversight is to maximise the reward-to-risk ratio.
Company founders openly and documentedly treating the employee pool as their personal coital resource is a risk in the extreme.
>"'Oh my God, this is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen!' That was my concern," she recalled
Yes, it does sound like that. I'd advise all people in leadership to avoid conduct that could be interpreted this way.
Edit: Thank you jacquesm for fixing my freudian slip :)
> He said that it was the “right time for me to make way for the next generation of leaders”
> In his farewell note, Mr. Drummond did not mention any of the claims.
Really? At least mention the full context around your departure. Moreover, he tries to pull this one off:
> “I know this company is in the best of hands, and I am excited for what the future holds for Google, for Alphabet and for me,”
> His departure had been telegraphed in the last few months as he sold off most of his shares in Alphabet, unloading roughly $170 million worth of company stock from November to January.
Come on. Drummond, you're leaving as consequence of the investigation around your misconduct. This is not an opportunity to try to squeeze idolatry out of. Just leave.
Let’s sure hope they investigated Sergey and Larry too, unlike them, at least this guy got married to his office romantic interest.
One of them, at least.
Another one, whom he had a baby with, was allegedly pushed out of the firm.
If the bad part is moving the girlfriend in another department, everybody looks like they've been overly accommodating, honestly. Having the bosses's wife work in the same department is not fair to the other members of the team. "Hey, Bill, who do you think will get the big bonus this time? You or the bosses's wife?". The decision to be together was mutual - acting as if it wasn't is extremely insulting to her. Some consequences are positive and some negative, that's just life, and one is that they couldn't work together anymore.
I can't see anything else. Alleged affairs? Not that many, not while in a committed relationship, and to be perfectly candid, not unusual if they happened. And given the current popularity of poly, possibly accepted by everybody. Definitely not loudly protested at the time.
What did I miss that makes him the devil?
Romance / sex is a pretty primal thing for most people, in many cases limited by available options and / or consequences. It also tends to override the more logical parts of the brain. Having more options opened up, even if causing ethical issues I'm pretty sure will push a good percentage of men over.
I have no idea what that percentage is, but I wouldn't think it is very small. I think if we dig hard enough we'd uncover a lot more of of these cases in many different companies.
It makes no sense at all to invoke the entire of mammalia.
In this rehearsal, the CLO has already been "off script" for many years and the "directors" have told him that he isn't getting his $50m golden parachute this time. Instead, he leaves with nothing and takes an Uber back home. No travel expenses paid.
What happened here instead is years of this being the status quo with people looking the other way that really should not be. Even helping to cover this up; or even actively harassing people pointing out that this wasn't cool. Google is firing people who speak up and rewarding people who abuse their power & privilege.
This person was very gently nudged out the door when he should have obviously been fired years ago. This kind of thing is a no-brainer in modern companies. You fuck around like that and you fail to keep it a secret, that's a career ending event. It's a failure of leadership right there. That leadership is still in place. The problem is still there.
I swear I remember folks publicly noting these relationships.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/alphabets-legal-chief-is-lea...
> Drummond is also a board member of private equity firm KKR & Co. L.P.
KKR is the PE firm well known for destroying the companies they buy, for their benefit ... and not for their LP's benefit. Dastardly.
This is (for obvious reasons) getting multiple submissions. The CNBC article seems the most comprehensive to date: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014115
When I was posting the dupe/prior notes, there'd been about 4-5 submissions within an hour, and it seemed likely the story would continue to draw submissions. A challenge in that case is that no submission gains critical mass.
A challenge of user-submission-based media aggregators.
That being said: David Drummond is a terrible person[0], who only has been there this long because of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's protection, because they are terrible people too[1][2]. The way Google's highest executives have treated women is disgusting and inexcusable. And while Drummond may not be getting an exit package, he sold off $200 million in stock this past year.
Evil is still very, very good business.
[0] https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
[2] https://fossbytes.com/larry-page-andy-rubin-150m-sexual-hara...
This sounds like the worst possible policy I can think of. Get pregnant from your boss, and HR kicks you from the team! How does that help anyone?
It helps the boss, of course.
Supervisors get more money and power from the organization than their subordinates, so it's fair for the organization to have higher expectations for the behavior of the supervisor than the subordinate.
Drummond wasn't the only one engaged in such shenanigans, too - I can think of at least half a dozen executives (including both founders) who engaged in relationships within their reporting chain.
There isn't much anyone can do to prevent disaster after this.
It's not down out of cruelty, it's done out of greed. He's more important, so even though he should absolutely 1000% be the one on the chopping block, she gets forced to sales. Then he uses the financial hardship and promises from him to get her to quit.
How to tidy up a disastrous bit of professional misconduct in just a few easy completely sociopathic steps.
> aware that our relationship was in violation of Google’s new policy which went from “discouraging” direct-reporting-line relationships to outright banning them.
> so I quit Google, signing whatever documents they required because likewise, I wanted to protect him
>aware that our relationship was in violation of Google’s new policy which went from “discouraging” direct-reporting-line relationships to outright banning them
Amazing how senior execs in powerful places selectively lose agency.
> No one was forced out
None of these men will ever actually face consequences. They are all obscenely wealthy and well connected.
Besides that he pressured her into quitting with promises of financial support, then left her with the baby and refused to pay.
I can't even comprehend the type of person who doesn't see the cruelty of this man. She trusted the wrong person, that doesn't justify his behavior.
> so I quit Google, signing whatever documents they required because likewise, I wanted to protect him
She decided to have a child and she decided to raise them. These are choices she made. He decided he doesn't want to take part in raising his son.
It sounds like you want her to get all the pros and him all the cons in this situation. But their decisions have both pros and cons for both of them. Her decision means she gets to have a family/child (at the cost of the work/money needed to raise a child). His decision means he's a bad father who will his son will likely always hate but it has its financial advantages.
> Besides that he pressured her into quitting with promises of financial support, then left her with the baby and refused to pay. > > I can't even comprehend the type of person who doesn't see the cruelty of this man. She trusted the wrong person, that doesn't justify his behavior.
Yes, he's a cruel liar. Probably most people would be if given the opportunity (yes I'm a cynic and I don't believe in natural/native human kindness) but I'm not trying to make excuses for him. From the article he seems like a terrible person. But so what, that's not illegal. In the end what are we trying to achieve by pointing this out?
California doesn't have child support? If he's not in his child's life he's a scumbag but at the very least I'm assuming the child is getting a very generous financial contribution.
Come on now, these are consenting adults. She wasn't a child getting tricked. She was a grown woman who had consensual sex, didn't take birth control or use protection, and choose to take the pregnancy to term.
I wouldn't say "he tricked her into having a baby", but it's not exactly nice to leave someone after a baby was born and not provide any support at all (she had to fight him in the court for child support).
It seems that the execs don't get the same kind of training that line managers get. Or, perhaps, they are protected from the consequences. One set of rules for me, another for you...
For starters, there is a clear abuse of power here with one party being the senior person at the company suggesting that things will be 'ok' when clearly there was a plan all along to create a situation of asymmetry and dependency, followed up with a lot of very mean and manipulative action.
Besides using the child as leverage against the mother there is a clear - and continuous - act in the self interest of the dominant party, more wealthy, still employed and willing to use every dirty tactic in the book and a couple I'd never even seen before against the other.
Utterly revolting and not simply 'two consenting adults in an adult relationship full of bad choices'. That's victim blaming at its worst.
> David and I began an affair shortly after that night and we were together for years.
She made a bad choice in life. She had an affair with a married man that worked in her department, when she knew such a relationship was against company policy. No one said she had to leave the department, only that one of them had to.
Everything that happened after, while terribly cruel, is not anything you dont see frequently when a relationship falls apart that involves children. It's very sad story but I am not victim blaming anyone, they are both at fault. But they both willingly went into this situation with their eyes open knowing full well what the consequences could be.
The fact is, people spend half or more of their waking hours at work. You spend more time with your colleagues than you do your own family in many cases. Relationship are going to happen. We need to learn how to deal with it rather than try to codify rules against it.
"Oh, you left, thanks. Oh, that financial help? I changed my mind about that".
It's possible to be abusive in a myriad of ways.
Why? Seems pretty sound to me.
What makes the latter "inherently coercive" but not the former?
Aren't these just different degrees of fundamentally the same thing?
But employment is transactional. There is an expectation that the agreed upon transaction will be upheld. A request that falls outside of the transaction, e.g. your boss asking you out, does not inherently imply economic coercion (whereas a request within the employment transaction does). But specifics of the context can alter that, i.e. wording of the request or specific context can imply coercion.
Why? Seems pretty sound to me.
Pretty demeaning to a mature woman, smart enough to be hired by Google. Maybe we should have a male guardian sign off on such things? just to be sure?
You don't punish the subordinate. Given his level, he should have been out.
Instead they transferred her from legal to sales and her performance tanked because it was a job she was in no way qualified to do.
He got her to quit (and sign a bunch of forms) promising to support her, then bailed.
He refused child support and after she sued, he started using threats against her kid to fuck with her.
This is a woman who got into a relationship, then realized that not only was the guy a complete psycho but the company had his back because he's the important one.
The rot at google is very real. Top down too.
> so I quit Google, signing whatever documents they required because likewise, I wanted to protect him
Also, she may have made that choice, but also he "got" her to quit - not sure if you've been in a relationship, but both things can be true. Someone can influence you to make a bad choice. The responsibility for that bad choice then exists in both people.
I can't speak to a pattern of bad behavior because I just dont know more than this story and the one she posted about. He absolutely sounds like human garbage, but her story isn't a #metoo story. There was no abuse, no abuse of power, no forcing anything.
> so I quit Google, signing whatever documents they required because likewise, I wanted to protect him.
Which of googles missions is idealistic?
And then he withdrew / refused support, that he'd agreed to, in writing.
Yes, it's not all black and white, but it's close to willfully obtuse to see a timeline of events and then fall back to a definition of "well, he didn't hold a gun to her head/use physical violence so it wasn't really a forced situation".
This is a high level google executive engaging in grossly unprofessional behavior with one of his employees. It's abuse of both power and trust. As far as I'm concerned the judgement and behavior shown by him should make him completely untouchable.
She was an adult that entered in a consenting relationship with a married man (I can guess why), she admitted so much. Google policy or not, is irrelevant since both sides knew the deal.
This guy is clearly a pretty sick sort of predator.
> How dare a married, billionaire cheater not settle down with her but continue to sleep with other women?
He basically got her fired and then bailed on her and their son. He refused to pay child support despite being a millionaire and is basically in an abusive relationship with her still.
It's disgusting. It's the sort of behaviour that should ruin your personal and professional life completely.
Maybe he was the prey. You cannot refuse to pay child support, it's one option you do not have. Play hard ball in response to stuff etc maybe, but you will pay in the end.
She should have named her price upfront. All consensual and he is a d*ck and a moron in a sense, as a billionaire, he could have used his pocket change and made her happy $$ wise. Now he gets bad press.
Yeah maybe. She's the one who wound up being abandoned with a kid though.
> You cannot refuse to pay child support, it's one option you do not have. Play hard ball in response to stuff etc maybe, but you will pay in the end.
Which is what he did. Despite being filthy rich. Then he continued to threaten her visitation rights, screw around with his visitations.
> She should have named her price upfront. All consensual and he is a d*ck and a moron in a sense, as a billionaire, he could have used his pocket change and made her happy $$ wise. Now he gets bad press.
This is the type of comment I was talking about. This just seems dismissive of the cruelty of this situation and deeply lacking in empathy for 3 people in a lousy spot.
I assume you're positing that she tried to start an affair and get pregnant for child support? Nobody really knows, and it would be a "he-said-she-said" issue. What we do know is that unless he was raped (and there was no charge made of that sort and didn't happen), he made his choice and can deal with the consequences. If he didn't want to deal with the consequences then he shouldn't have fathered a bastard.
> She should have named her price upfront.
I'd support changing the law, but as it stands today and stood then, that's prostitution and illegal.
> David would go for months or even years at a time completely ignoring my pleas to see his son — not even so much as a text to us, despite living about a mile away.
I can see not having the desire to be with her and break up the relationship, but abandoning his child and not seeing them for years at a time is downright evil.
It's so strange to hear how Google touts itself to be at the forefront of inclusivity and tolerance, and here their executive acting this way for decades and nobody does anything.
I'll go with "scummy and reprehensible".
And: "deeply at odds with the ethical standards that Google once claimed to stand for (not that we ever took them seriously when they said those things)."
The child doesn't get a choice about being brought into the world, so your desire or intent to produce a child is irrelevant. If you don't want to father a child, don't do anything that could reasonably lead to producing a child. If you father one anyway, that's on you. To deliberately alienate yourself from your child in that way, especially when you have the wealth and resources he does, is evil in my opinion.
This is your false premise. Nothing about fairness requires the law to give someone additional rights to offset someone else’s intrinsic advantages. Neither men nor women have a “legal right to decide against the burden of a child.” If either has a child, they’re on the hook for it. The law doesn’t need to give men an additional legal right to “make up” for the fact that women can terminate a pregnancy by exercising their natural right to control their own pregnancies.
The fact that women, by virtue of their right to control their own bodies, can abort a baby before it is born, doesn’t change the analysis for either. Both are still responsible for a baby that is born. The fact that the woman has additional options to avoid the consequence doesn’t absolve the man of responsibility (both to provide financial support and to be a father). Women may have many reasons for not aborting a baby. (Maybe they even believe it’s morally wrong!) But if you take action that predictably may result in an outcome, you don’t get off the hook because someone else had the power to avert the outcome at a later stage and chose not to. Both people are responsible.
I disagree. Having more options does in fact alter the level of responsibility.
That's on a man no more than it's on a women if she gets pregnant and the previous agreement was that the guy had to use condoms and he didn't. Otherwise what you're saying is "if you don't want to get STDs or have kids never have sex". Luckily that's not how the law works.
How do you square this with your claim in a sister comment of "by virtue of their right to control their own bodies can abort a baby before it is born"
The kid was, in fact, David's idea from the get-go. He lamented at a party to a then-just-coworker about how badly he wanted more children. Of course, whether or not that was just his move to try to get a woman into an affair with him or not, we have no way of knowing.
The second answer is more pragmatic: in practice, it's much easier to simply ask "please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar" [2]. Everyone understands that. If we say "please don't do personal attacks" or "please don't do online shaming" about a major political figure, people mistake that for an expression of political support and object sharply. It's not worth the confusion, and I only have so much energy for explaining that it doesn't mean we're Trump supporters or communists or whatever.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
They can behave themselves equally as well as not-powerful men, but they're just in more of a spotlight.
I have tended to interpret Google in the negative over time, but I have heard the kind of statement I expressed enough times that I honestly am not sure that it isn’t as true as the more negative reads are.