6 ms·

So what? I've never understood why a company should get to decide whom someone has a relationship with.

sokoloff 7y ago
> I've never understood why a company should get to decide whom someone has a relationship with. 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.
- kome 7y ago
  yeah, but corporate policy is not real policy: google can fire him... but this really deserve media attention? it's their private life.
  - RReivax 7y ago
    Thank you !
  - save_ferris 7y ago
    It's worth noting that he's still at Google, which means that Google knows about this behavior and accept it from one of their top executives. 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.
  - laumars 7y ago
    I think the media attention is for the other detail after that. Such as withholding child care money and other treatment of women. The headline is only a part of the story.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >That seems like a sensible corporate policy 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?
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    > You can also move the manager or the subordinate to another team 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).
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      And is exactly what occurred in this case - the female subordinate was moved out of her role in legal to a role in sales.
  - gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
    I feel like looking at the inverse makes more sense. In this arena companies ideally don't want to meddle in the private lives of their employees. 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.
- nbanks 7y ago
  I know of a pastor who asked a woman in his congregation to go to a different church for a while so he could date her because he wasn't allowed to date parishioners. After they married, she came back to his church again. It's entirely possible to date a subordinate by asking him/her to transfer so they're not your subordinate any more.
thewarrior 7y ago
What if your colleague was having an affair with your boss ? 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
- cousin_it 7y ago
  It seems tricky to argue that affairs between bosses and subordinates are destructive to tech companies, in a world where Bill Gates married a subordinate and Larry Page had an affair with one. I think the fight against "inappropriate" behavior at work is in large part driven by busybodies.
  - thewarrior 7y ago
    I think relationships between people who report to each other are problematic. Affairs, marriages , relationships doesn’t matter. The rest don’t cause as many problems.
    - tomatocracy 7y ago
      They can be more problematic because they can lead to perceptions of unfair or biased treatment at work. That doesn't mean they are problematic in most cases though. 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.
      - betterunix2 7y ago
        Let's say Alice is having an affair with subordinate Bob. One day Bob has a big screw up with something Alice assigned him, and Alice needs to reprimand him for it (that is part of being a person's supervisor). There is no uninvolved third party to call in here -- that is Alice's job as Bob's boss. One way or another their romantic relationship will impact their professional relationship in this situation -- either Alice will be too gentle with Bob, and everyone will perceive favoritism, or Alice will be too harsh with Bob and risk damaging their personal relationship. Very few people would be able to respond appropriately here -- in either the supervisor or subordinate position (and both need to do so).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
paul7986 7y ago
Men with power can no longer use their power to attractive woman in 2019 and on. It is against the new societal norm. 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.
- chapium 7y ago
  This argument is flawed. "Men with power" have all sorts of ways to meet other women that they don't work with. Other comments in this thread cover the reasons why it is reasonable for google to have an hr policy for this.
MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Sometimes boundaries need a little tighter than they should be for adults because sometimes people can’t handle the responsibility of behaving like an adult, and the employer has to clean up the mess. See, e.g. Google’s ban on political discussions. See also this lady.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jstummbillig 7y ago
It is a measure to limit personal freedom in exchange for protection against coercion at the workplace. Does it work? Apparently not in this case. Do I agree? Who cares. Do I get the idea? Well, yes. Seems pretty straight forward.
tyingq 7y ago
Says he's the "top lawyer", followed by an example affair with...a Google lawyer. A relationship with someone that ultimately reports up the chain to you has obvious issues.
Aeolun 7y ago
The company doesn’t decide anything about relationships. It’s just deciding who is employed or not.
wil421 7y ago
The CEOs from HP, Lockheed, Intel, Boeing and a bunch of other not as well know companies have been fired for an affair. 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.
pjc50 7y ago
Employer-employee relations are inherently coercive if one party has the ability to negatively affect the employment of the other. Note "ability" - it's still an unequal power structure even if you can't find evidence of it actually being used for such. 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.
jerf 7y ago
An observer of human relationships can easily observe that romantic relationships tend to turn off the rational part of the human brain, which is not great for corporate work. 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.
dyeje 7y ago
You don't see any potential issues with a boss dating one of their reports?
sdinsn 7y ago
They don't decide. Google can't stop someone from having a relationship with someone else- but they can stop either one or both from being employed at Google.

> I've never understood why a company should get to decide whom someone has a relationship with. 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.

kome 7y ago
yeah, but corporate policy is not real policy: google can fire him... but this really deserve media attention? it's their private life.
- RReivax 7y ago
  Thank you !
- save_ferris 7y ago
  It's worth noting that he's still at Google, which means that Google knows about this behavior and accept it from one of their top executives. 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.
- laumars 7y ago
  I think the media attention is for the other detail after that. Such as withholding child care money and other treatment of women. The headline is only a part of the story.
macspoofing 7y ago
>That seems like a sensible corporate policy 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?
- sokoloff 7y ago
  > You can also move the manager or the subordinate to another team 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).
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    And is exactly what occurred in this case - the female subordinate was moved out of her role in legal to a role in sales.
- gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
  I feel like looking at the inverse makes more sense. In this arena companies ideally don't want to meddle in the private lives of their employees. 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.
nbanks 7y ago
I know of a pastor who asked a woman in his congregation to go to a different church for a while so he could date her because he wasn't allowed to date parishioners. After they married, she came back to his church again. It's entirely possible to date a subordinate by asking him/her to transfer so they're not your subordinate any more.

thewarrior 7y ago

What if your colleague was having an affair with your boss ? 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

cousin_it 7y ago
It seems tricky to argue that affairs between bosses and subordinates are destructive to tech companies, in a world where Bill Gates married a subordinate and Larry Page had an affair with one. I think the fight against "inappropriate" behavior at work is in large part driven by busybodies.
- thewarrior 7y ago
  I think relationships between people who report to each other are problematic. Affairs, marriages , relationships doesn’t matter. The rest don’t cause as many problems.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    They can be more problematic because they can lead to perceptions of unfair or biased treatment at work. That doesn't mean they are problematic in most cases though. 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.
    - betterunix2 7y ago
      Let's say Alice is having an affair with subordinate Bob. One day Bob has a big screw up with something Alice assigned him, and Alice needs to reprimand him for it (that is part of being a person's supervisor). There is no uninvolved third party to call in here -- that is Alice's job as Bob's boss. One way or another their romantic relationship will impact their professional relationship in this situation -- either Alice will be too gentle with Bob, and everyone will perceive favoritism, or Alice will be too harsh with Bob and risk damaging their personal relationship. Very few people would be able to respond appropriately here -- in either the supervisor or subordinate position (and both need to do so).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

paul7986 7y ago

Men with power can no longer use their power to attractive woman in 2019 and on. It is against the new societal norm. 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.

chapium 7y ago
This argument is flawed. "Men with power" have all sorts of ways to meet other women that they don't work with. Other comments in this thread cover the reasons why it is reasonable for google to have an hr policy for this.

MaupitiBlue 7y ago

Sometimes boundaries need a little tighter than they should be for adults because sometimes people can’t handle the responsibility of behaving like an adult, and the employer has to clean up the mess. See, e.g. Google’s ban on political discussions. See also this lady.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jstummbillig 7y ago

It is a measure to limit personal freedom in exchange for protection against coercion at the workplace. Does it work? Apparently not in this case. Do I agree? Who cares. Do I get the idea? Well, yes. Seems pretty straight forward.

tyingq 7y ago

Says he's the "top lawyer", followed by an example affair with...a Google lawyer. A relationship with someone that ultimately reports up the chain to you has obvious issues.

Aeolun 7y ago

The company doesn’t decide anything about relationships. It’s just deciding who is employed or not.

wil421 7y ago

The CEOs from HP, Lockheed, Intel, Boeing and a bunch of other not as well know companies have been fired for an affair. 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.

pjc50 7y ago

Employer-employee relations are inherently coercive if one party has the ability to negatively affect the employment of the other. Note "ability" - it's still an unequal power structure even if you can't find evidence of it actually being used for such. 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.

jerf 7y ago

An observer of human relationships can easily observe that romantic relationships tend to turn off the rational part of the human brain, which is not great for corporate work. 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.

dyeje 7y ago

You don't see any potential issues with a boss dating one of their reports?

sdinsn 7y ago

They don't decide. Google can't stop someone from having a relationship with someone else- but they can stop either one or both from being employed at Google.