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Executive accused of harassment at Alphabet 'X' unit is out
- astrodust 8y agoThey've got an awful lot of house-cleaning to do, this is just the start.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- caseysoftware 8y agoAll their posturing and positioning lately is looking more and more like over compensating. Cut out this sort of crap first.
- rdtsc 8y agoThat's always how it works. To make sure everything stays hidden for years it has to be combined with a robust yet superficial call for antiharrasment. Lots of blogs and talks about it. This is not unlike say Harvey Weinstein showing up at the Women's March.
- Joakal 8y agoSomeone gave a clear way to prevent abuse: prohibit sexual/etc relationships with subordinates. Well, except for couples that were already in one. A lot of places have this rule. Why doesn't Google adopt this rule?
- nradov 8y agoThat's a good start but insufficient. In large, complex matrix organizations someone at a high level has a lot of power over others even if they aren't formally his subordinates.
- HiroshiSan 8y agoOne consequence of this naming and shaming type editorial is that you end up with paragraphs like these: "In the Times story, DeVaul allegedly invited hardware engineer Star Simpson, who was interviewing to work at Google, to the art and culture festival Burning Man, telling her he and his wife were polyamorous. Simpson attended the festival in hopes it would improve her chances of getting hired — she brought her mother with her and “professional attire,” according to the Times. Yet DeVaul encouraged her to remove her clothing and asked to give her a massage."
- bitwize 8y agoWow, small world.I think this is the same girl who was arrested as a suspected terrorist a few years back because as far as the BoPo is concerned, exposed circuit board + blinking lights = bomb.
- geezerjay 8y agoFor those of us wondering, here's a link: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Student_arrested_over_%22art%22_shirt_with_exposed_wiring_at_Boston_Airport https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Student_arrested_over_%22art%22...
- jkaplowitz 8y agoThanks! Do you have a link to how her case turned out? That article stops after her not guilty plea and her release on bond.
- geezerjay 8y ago> Thanks! Do you have a link to how her case turned out? Honestly, I know nothing of the case. I've just googled the name and was surprised by the number of search hits, and the wikinews article was among the first search results.
- Terretta 8y agoIn her words on the record, "... the deal made with the D.A. was to perform 50 hours of community service, to not be arrested in Massachusetts, for an entire year, and that I had to issue a public apology to Boston." https://boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one-yea.html https://boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one-yea.html
- thrower123 8y ago> In the Times story, DeVaul allegedly invited hardware engineer Star Simpson, who was interviewing to work at Google, to the art and culture festival Burning Man, telling her he and his wife were polyamorous. Simpson attended the festival in hopes it would improve her chances of getting hired — she brought her mother with her and “professional attire,” according to the Times. Yet DeVaul encouraged her to remove her clothing and asked to give her a massage. > Later on, Simpson learned that she did not get the job, and that DeVaul knew this when she chose to attend Burning Man. > he thought Simpson had been aware that she did not get the job when she attended the festival. This is all kinds of weird, and I am not sure how I feel about any of it. It seems like a failure to communicate all around, with some information asymmetry muddying the waters. On one hand, what the hell are you discussing your sexual relationship with your wife to an interviewee for? How does that come up in an interview process? On the other hand, Burning Man is not a place one goes to for professional reasons. Unless you've been under a rock, you know what Burning Man is, and what goes on there.
- HiroshiSan 8y agoThanks for expressing this, this is a long the same vein as what I was thinking with my comment below. There is just so much missing information in this one paragraph that it just becomes absurd.
- sp332 8y agoIt's missing information because the readers don't need to make a decision, and no one involved wants their private lives pried in to any further. It's fine.
- packetslave 8y agoI don't recall the source, but I believe Star Simpson had attended Burning Man multiple times prior to the incident. Whatever the reasoning behind this situation, it wasn't because she didn't know what the festival was all about.
- empath75 8y ago
- skh 8y agoDo no evil apparently does not extend to doing the right thing. It should not take publicity to force companies/people to do the right thing.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoIt was "Don't be evil." and they dropped it a while ago. At least they're being honest by omission.
- delroth 8y agoOpen https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html and ^F "evil". You should verify your facts before repeating provably false information.
- tedsanders 8y agoI mean, it is a verified fact that they dropped it from the code of conduct.[1,2] My understanding is that, consistent with your link, they added it back later. [1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do... [2] http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/ http://time.com/4060575/alphabet-google-dont-be-evil/
- delroth 8y agoYour sources disagree with your statement. In [1]: > The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto [2] is not about Google and explicitly says: > Google, which will going forward be a subsidiary of Alphabet, is retaining the creedo however.
- tedsanders 8y agoThank you for the correction. I see now that Google dropped the 'Don't be evil' clause from their code of conduct, but left in one instance of the phrase itself.
- relaunched 8y agoIt seems like many leaders fall down when it comes to protecting the company. It seems like leaders may fail to understand that no one person makes or breaks a company, not a great company anyway. There are many more people willing and able to step up, then their are opportunities to step up into - no matter what the job is. I find it impossible to believe that lawyers are giving sub-optimal advice. Generally, it's probably situations where lawyers say "x is the best practice", leaders say, "what else do you have" and they end up with some sort of compromising, risk-accepting solution - a la any number of Google recent announcements or any other number of companies that bury things until it makes the headlines.
- natch 8y agoIf the allegations about Rubin are true, whoever greenlighted Rubin's exit package should also resign.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoExit package that big? You'd be looking at the CEO and the Chairman. Fat chance. :-/
- natch 8y agoAnd some board members possibly. In any case whoever it is has lost any respectability.
- hopefulengineer 8y agoYou have to love silicon valley hypocrisy, so many of these companies criticizing certain politicians over unproven allegations while being guilty of worse. Dave McClure, Chris Sacca and his BFF Kalanick, eric schmidt, sergey brinn. I was led to believe they all had such upstanding moral fiber. Ironically, if they had kept their mouths shut a lot of women wouldn't have come forward to expose their hypocrisy
- jhall1468 8y agoCan we not conflate sexual harassment with inappropriate relationships at work? Schmidt and Brinn both have their demons, but their personal lives aren't at issue here, particularly when they don't involve violating the law. That is not the same thing as sexual harassment.
- hopefulengineer 8y agoBrinn was well known for having sex with female employees, seems like a thin line when there's such a power disparity. Based on insiders it seems like having sex with Sergey was a pretty sure way to get a promotion https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-some-strange-ideas-about-his-female-employees-according-to-a-new-book/ https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...
- jhall1468 8y agoWow what a smoking gun. A chef and HR head from circa 2000 claim the dude screwed a bunch of employees so why not just make the enormous leap that it IS true, so you can start attacking the power disparity straw man. And that doesn't change the fact that obvious nonconsensual sexual advances are not the same thing as dating at work in a relationship with a superior. Inappropriate as it may be, it certainly isn't illegal, now is it?
- randyrand 8y agoThis line of reasoning is pretty poor. You don't need to be someone's boss in order to have a huge ability to harm someone's life. All of us are capable of doing great harm to others - we just choose not to. Saying "she can't consent because he could harm her" is like saying I can't deny giving my neighbor some milk because if I upset him he has the power to break all of the windows on my house. Since when do we focus on these hypotheticals? Since when do we always assume malice? We trust that people are good, prosecute the bad ones (both breaking windows and firing over sexual denial are illegal), and allow neighbors to ask for milk because 99% of the time no windows get broken in the event we say no. Sure, the analogy might be a bit contrived. But I think it still does a good job of demonstrating how ridiculous this line of reasoning when applied outside of the sexual harassment thought bubble.
- FireBeyond 8y ago> Alphabet CEO Larry Page, who was aware of the allegations and the investigation’s findings, did not disclose publicly Rubin’s reason for leaving, saying in a statement at the time, “I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next.” Maybe Google could invest in his next venture, like they did with Andy Rubin...
- GeekyBear 8y agoThe problem for Google is that the company has condoned these sorts of inappropriate behaviors right from the start and from the very highest levels of the company. >Here Fisher quotes Google’s first executive chef, Charlie Ayers, and Heather Cairns, the company’s first HR manager: Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around. Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging. Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is. Heather Cairns: Oh my God: This is a sexual harassment claim waiting to happen! That was my concern. https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-some-strange-ideas-about-his-female-employees-according-to-a-new-book/ https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...
- cududa 8y agoInteresting this is the top comment when in the thread discussing the original article and abuse it was basically a series of hits against Ms. Simpson (the accuser in this instance)
- roenxi 8y agoThere are interesting questions about how bad this is compared to executive shenanigans in other major corporations. There are going to be men who just like money and power, but there are also going to be stereotypical men who seek out money and power to translate into creating sexual opportunity. Presumably Google is not going to have an unusually skewed executive either way.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago> The problem for Google is that the company has condoned . . . That is a problem, but it is not the problem. The problem is developing good practices for handling harassment situations going forward. We can fret over what has been done, but we can only change the future.
- georgeburdell 8y agoThe hubris displayed by Google and other tech companies in their response to sexual harassment claims suggests to me that they have become poorly run. They have benefitted from an enormous bull market and so bad or wasteful behavior has been ex post facto rationalized as correct or inconsequential. In this time, the cost of keeping an alleged harasser on the payroll is nearly infinite. A good recession will clean house. Maybe it’s just me, but I get the impression from these articles that Google et al. has been an auspicious hidey hole for well-pedigreed sexual deviants.
- munificent 8y agoBias up front: I work at Google. I obviously don't speak for the company here. We are definitely hearing a lot about this stuff from Google and other tech companies lately. I don't know what we can reliably infer from the absence of that kind of news what that says about other industries. My intuition is that workplace sexual harassment has been rife in all aspects of human endeavor since the dawn of time. The "boss screwing the secretary" trope isn't exactly a new one. It may be that we're seeing a combination of things: 1. Thanks to the #metoo movement, people who get harassed now have enough power to actually be able to stand up and cause the person they accuse to face some scrutiny. Before, it was just swept under the rug. "Boys will be boys", "that's what you get for dressing like that", "you should have known better to stay late at work with him", etc. 2. The very rapid rise of tech as a cultural dominator makes them a prime actor in our moral narratives. The average person sees a handful of giant tech companies dramatically changing the way we all live, and they naturally want to know if they are a force for good or evil. Those kinds of journalistic narratives sell. For all we know, sexual harassment could be 10x worse in the insurance industry but we won't know because who wants to read articles about the insurance industry? 3. There's also the obvious bias that if something happens too much, it ceases to be news. "Newsworthiness" is a combination of significance and novelty. The former is where good investigative journalism can show the scope of a sweeping hidden problem. The latter is the old "dog bites man" isn't news but "man bites dog" is. It's easy to mistake the latter for the former and assume that something being reported indicates a trend, when really it indicates the exact opposite. So, it may be that things really are worse at Google than at other places, but I don't know if we can rely on the presence of news articles to judge that.
- dang 8y agoUrl changed from https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/30/18045230/alphabet-google-rich-devaul-resigns-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin-investigation https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/30/18045230/alphabet-google..., which points to this.