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The problem wasn't that she was a coworker. It was that she was a subordinate. Nobody cares if two engineers hook up, but it's a Very Bad Thing if your boss st
by amyjess 8y ago
The problem wasn't that she was a coworker. It was that she was a subordinate.
Nobody cares if two engineers hook up, but it's a Very Bad Thing if your boss starts putting the moves on you. Relationships where one person holds real-world power over another are prone to exploitation and violation of consent.
- InTheArena 8y agoSee Clinton, William Jefferson... or Trump, Donald.... oh wait.
- poster123 8y agoIt's a good thing if you are attracted to the boss. How do we know that the happiness such consensual relationships bring to employees does not outweigh the unhappiness of potential sexual harassment, averaged over all workers?
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y agoLeaving aside the supposition of utilitarianism, we don't know. We can only make educated guesses.
- danohuiginn 8y agoThen one or both of them can quit their job, or get moved somewhere where neither reports to the other.
- geofft 8y agoThey can't outweigh each other, otherwise you get versions of the utility monster problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster If person A doesn't want to have sex with person B and person B would be inordinately happy to have sex with person A, just about all ethical systems would say they shouldn't have sex. If person A has money in savings and is clinically depressed and person B wants to take that money and go on a vacation that would make them very happy, just about all ethical systems would say, no, that's stealing. One of the things functional societies do is to limit the amount that certain people can make themselves happy as a mechanism of limiting the amount to which other people get hurt. Banning workplace relationships because of their serious potential for hurt seems like a straightforward case of this.
- poster123 8y agoIt is possible that a ban on boss-employee relationships reduces the average utility of employees (excluding the utility of bosses), if the happiness of employees from good relationships outweighs the unhappiness from bad ones. Maybe one could do a survey of whether employees in companies with non-fraternization policies are happier than those without such policies.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>One of the things functional societies do is to limit the amount that certain people can make themselves happy as a mechanism of limiting the amount to which other people get hurt. Banning workplace relationships because of their serious potential for hurt seems like a straightforward case of this. Nobody the debate is not between "some restrictions" and "no restriction", the latter is very much a straw man. We are debating where in particular the line should be drawn. For any given behavior X there are trade offs across the entire spectrum from full restriction of X to no restriction of X and the latter extreme is almost always far from ideal but much better than the former extreme.
- xexers 8y ago> it's a Very Bad Thing It's happened probably 10s of thousands of times in the past few decades... and some of those couples are now happily married. I personally know of a boss who married his secretary and a professor who married a student. I think the words "Very Bad Thing" are a little excessive. It's risky behavior.
- Gargoyle 8y agoSee Bill and Melinda Gates, for one example.
- xexers 8y agoAnd Jeff Bezos https://www.cheatsheet.com/health-fitness/scandalous-office-love-affair-brought-jeff-bezos-wife-together.html/?a=viewall https://www.cheatsheet.com/health-fitness/scandalous-office-...
- coldtea 8y ago10s of thousands? Think hundreds of thousands...
- berbec 8y agoI hired the woman who would become my wife.
- kanox 8y agoClearly you should both be fired.
- ghein 8y agoAll relationships at work are a bad idea. They're dangerous to the firm and bad for the people's involved careers. Best rule for everyone is no relationships between co-workers and if one happens both people are fired.
- collyw 8y agoConsidering that 1/3 of all relationships met at work, your suggestion sounds pretty ridiculous.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- msisk6 8y agoAwhile back one of my co-workers got involved with a contractor. Apparently the relationship went "bad" at some point and one of the parties decided to get HR involved. Both were fired immediately.
- rimliu 8y agoBut do not forget to mention that "we are like family here".
- lagadu 8y agoThat is mind-boggingly ridiculous: the concept that a company would have any sort of opinion on who I have sex with. US work culture sometimes feels so incredibly alien when seen from the outside.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y agoIt's alien when you're on the inside too.
- sizzzzlerz 8y agoWe had a married couple working at the company, both engineers and neither reporting to the other. The husband was promoted to a managerial position where his wife would now become a report, not direct, but still in his chain-of-command. That is against company policy so they were given some options to resolve this. The wife ended up with a lateral transfer into another division.
- kanox 8y ago> Nobody cares if two engineers hook up It matters because if one of those people gets promoted it can break the policy.