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The 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 hav

The 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 ago
Bias 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.
- rayiner 8y ago
  These are all good points. Certainly, there are tons of examples of sexual harassment in other industries. I'll submit, however, that tech is a bit outside the mainstream on this. While sexual harassment happens for example at law firms, nobody in the legal profession (and I suspect, most of "sanitized corporate America") would try to defend with a straight face the practice of relationships between supervisors and underlings, as is typical here on HN.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    In the legal profession which is prestige driven, relationship based, artificially supply constrained and very lucrative, you would fear for your career over most else especially if you're lower on the totem pole. This creates a perverse set of incentives to hide all misbehavior even if you're a victim of it. So I don't know where you're getting this idea that lawyers would automatically defend themselves in those kinds of situations when the incentives are heavily weighted towards ignoring the situations and moving on. As a software engineer in the tech industry though (especially at a place like Google), you can tell your employer to fuck off and you can find a new high-paying job tomorrow.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying that "lawyers would automatically defend themselves" if they were harassed. Harassment gets buried in the legal profession for the same reasons it gets buried everywhere. My point is that the Overton window is in a different place: whether it's okay for supervisors to date underlings, with all the problems that causes, is a settled debate in law as well as most of the rest of corporate America (it's not). Tech seems out of the mainstream to me in still entertaining the idea that it's okay.
      - askafriend 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification, because that's not what I got from your original comment. I actually didn't consider it from that perspective e.g. it's a settled debate in other professions but a seemingly recurring debate in tech. That's an interesting point you raise and I think it's a valid one.
Edmond 8y ago
I think you can extend to most technology, they are generally poorly run enterprises. When money comes easy as is currently the case, bad leadership is not as obvious to recognize.

munificent 8y ago

Bias 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.

rayiner 8y ago
These are all good points. Certainly, there are tons of examples of sexual harassment in other industries. I'll submit, however, that tech is a bit outside the mainstream on this. While sexual harassment happens for example at law firms, nobody in the legal profession (and I suspect, most of "sanitized corporate America") would try to defend with a straight face the practice of relationships between supervisors and underlings, as is typical here on HN.
- askafriend 8y ago
  In the legal profession which is prestige driven, relationship based, artificially supply constrained and very lucrative, you would fear for your career over most else especially if you're lower on the totem pole. This creates a perverse set of incentives to hide all misbehavior even if you're a victim of it. So I don't know where you're getting this idea that lawyers would automatically defend themselves in those kinds of situations when the incentives are heavily weighted towards ignoring the situations and moving on. As a software engineer in the tech industry though (especially at a place like Google), you can tell your employer to fuck off and you can find a new high-paying job tomorrow.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying that "lawyers would automatically defend themselves" if they were harassed. Harassment gets buried in the legal profession for the same reasons it gets buried everywhere. My point is that the Overton window is in a different place: whether it's okay for supervisors to date underlings, with all the problems that causes, is a settled debate in law as well as most of the rest of corporate America (it's not). Tech seems out of the mainstream to me in still entertaining the idea that it's okay.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      Thanks for the clarification, because that's not what I got from your original comment. I actually didn't consider it from that perspective e.g. it's a settled debate in other professions but a seemingly recurring debate in tech. That's an interesting point you raise and I think it's a valid one.

Edmond 8y ago

I think you can extend to most technology, they are generally poorly run enterprises. When money comes easy as is currently the case, bad leadership is not as obvious to recognize.