One, the fact that a rule might have downsides is not proof that it's a bad rule.

Two, if the rule had existed, it's hardly impossible that they would have gotten together later, or found some accommodation.

Three, if they hadn't gotten together, there's no reason to think they both wouldn't have gone on to find happiness with other people.

Four, your suggestion that them not dating means a Bill Gates foundation wouldn't exist is without evidence. At best you could say it might has another name on it.

Five, even if this rule would somehow have caused Gates to just burn his billions instead of doing some good, you haven't grappled at all with the harm that the lack of that rule does to many people who aren't as famous.

Therefore, if we must not consider the resultant behavior separate from the relationship before it, then you are making a moral[0] judgement on the validity of relationships.

Consider the following: being coerced into a relationship and consenting because you fear being fired. That is clearly coercive and wrong because the consent isn't genuine, and I don't think anyone in this thread is arguing is worth being protected. A second situation: two people with mutual attraction who end up dating (like Melinda and Bill Gates) but have a power differential. It sounds like you are saying this is a priori wrong, even if the two consent and neither party feels coerced, or that one is coerced even if they believe sincerely that they are not being coerced.

Even if you don't say it is morally wrong, you still will forbid and prohibit such relationships, adults whom aren't you and who might not have the same value judgements you have. That's why it isn't so clear cut to me and others in this thread.

[0] I say wrong and moral, because this is an argument about morality, fundamentally.

In a word, no. It implies that the class of covered activities is too risky for the company.

Consider company rules about receiving gifts from vendors. Typically, there's some limit, like $25. If you are negotiating a contract with somebody and they give you a $26 pen or even a $100 pen, is that morally wrong? No, unless that's enough for you to improperly favor them. But it's still forbidden, and the danger to the company is significant enough that they still ban it.

I think it's okay to prohibit relationships that have a high likelihood of causing problems for the company, just like it's okay to prohibit (legal, morally-permissible!) behavior that is likely to detriment the company in other ways such as all engineers having root on production boxes.

If it's probably gonna cause problems it doesn't matter if it's legal, or if it's morally permissible under certain moral frameworks: don't do that shit, and it's fine for a company to ask you not to. Having relationships with subordinates is likely gonna cause problems, because most relationships end, and many of those that end will end poorly. All it takes is one lawsuit or even some bad PR to damage the business.

There seems to be no good way to make this point, but most relationships have some power imbalance. Where do we stop? Can you only marry someone your age with similar incomes? Do we encode this into law? Does this become a caste system?

The world seems to be okay with the relationship Bill Gates has. Wouldn't the world be a better place if we wondered how to foster such successes more often instead of designing rules based on an assumption of guilt in essence? Maybe rules that would forbid Gates current marriage aren't as thoroughly thought out and wise as they might seem at first blush.

Designing rules to prevent a worst case scenario sometimes goes very bad places. I have joked it can be a little like me starting a dating profile and putting "No rapists!" at the top of it. This isn't going to accomplish anything good and is likely to go bad places. Good policies need to consider more scenarios than just that worst case scenario we absolutely don't want to see.

Tldr: Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If you decide to go date a rich man on Tinder, you can break up without significant consequence to your income or your career. But if your boss asks you out you may face severe career consequences just for saying no. If you say yes and then break it off, the risks to you go up.

This rule has no assumption of guilt. It's just acknowledging the risk to the company and the people involved.

Most companies are not behemoths. Everything I have ever read indicates most companies qualify for definitions of small to mid sized.

SMEs outnumber large companies by a wide margin and also employ many more people. For example, Australian SMEs make up 97% of all Australian businesses, produced one third of total GDP, and employ 4.7 million people. In Chile, in the commercial year 2014, 98.5% of the firms were classified as SMEs.[1] In Tunisia, the self-employed workers alone account for about 28% of the total non-farm employment and firms with fewer than 100 employees account for about 62% of total employment.[2] In developing countries, smaller (micro) and informal firms, have a larger share than in developed countries. SMEs are also said to be responsible for driving innovation and competition in many economic sectors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...

> At best you could say it might has another name on it.

...does disservice to the influence she had (on Bill & the world) and shortchanges her contribution.

Your point still stands, i.e. that the claims of harm of the policy are post-hoc reasoning and therefore irrelevant its expected utility. But that does not actually conflict with this one particular instance possibly being a lucky coincidence.

I don't understand, doesn't she bear some responsibility in her actions? She chose to date him and also chose to have kids with him. All knowing that he was already married. Why would she do that to another woman?

Edit: Seriously? Does that count as a valid response now on HN?

A: X is bad. We should prohibit all X. Look at Y, which was a case of X.

B: But Z was a case of X too -- is that an acceptable cost?

A: Irrelevant; we're talking about Y.

There's even a famous joke about this fallacy! ctrl-f "changing the subject": https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2002/12/26/15545311.php?sh...

Bill and Melinda Gates's relationship isn't so important to the world that we must allow bosses to date, pressure into a relationship or manipulate subordinates just in case.

Your claim -- that it's an extreme exception and doesn't outweigh the harm of a blanket prohibition -- would be a relevant response (although suboptimal because you're only replying to that one case and not the general phenomenon).

You don’t get to sacrifice 2 people’s liberty who mind their own business and did nothing wrong because someone else in another place and time that they have nothing to do with can’t behave themselves.

If you're Google, and Bill and Melinda in this universe were Google employees, you'd be their employer. And employers can (and almost always do) ask the managers that work for them to not date their subordinates, for clear reasons:

1. It's easy, given power, for managers to abuse it. Even unknowingly. With these kinds of relationships it's very hard to tell if they are/were abusing it, so it's better for the company if they didn't happen in the first place.

2. Companies don't want articles like this written about them in the New York Times.

They're paying you to do your job to promote the company's best interests, part of which is not dating subordinates. If you don't want to do your job you don't have to, and similarly they don't have to pay you.

> You don’t get to sacrifice 2 people’s liberty who mind their own business and did nothing wrong...

You're not sacrificing anyone's liberty to date. Managers at these companies aren't being coerced into working there, and have the liberty to work elsewhere — that's the law in California. Having a rule banning a behavior at a company isn't like having a law banning a behavior in a country, where you usually can't just up and join a different country on a whim if you don't want to be bound by your country's laws. You can up and join another company on a whim because you don't want to be bound by your company's policies.

There are always power differences between males and females, and in the past, dating a superior was often the only way a female could transcend the class they were born into. Hypergamy is a real, observed social phenomenon, and it bothers me that people are hand wringing over a problem that may not even exist in the first place. Hypocrisy runs deep in this country, especially for the self-appointed moral police.

Also, hypergamy doesn't require that the two parties work at the same company, so it doesn't seem relevant to this discussion.

It’s not my company's business as to who I am allowed to date or engage in a consensual relationship with. It literally has nothing to do with them.

For example:

If you date someone who works for you, and you have multiple subordinates (as most managers do), and you rate / evaluate those subordinates (as most managers do), and you rate your partner higher than another subordinate, you are opening the company up to legal action that you discriminated against the other subordinate due to your relationship. That costs the company money to defend and more more if they lose, so they have every "business" to tell you not to.

There are many more examples.

If I could have my way, we'd ask ourselves why do managers have so much sway and power over our lives in the first place, that their bad moods and habits can literally kill us? If people cannot be trusted to be managers when normal human emotions and interactions occur, then why are they managers in the first place and why do they have so much power over us?

The Atlantic [1] spends some time with this study, and here are some takeaways. Attractiveness is measured from 0 to 1.

* The headline: People are "hypergamous" (what a terrible word), aiming about 0.25 above their own position

* Women are most attractive (0.62) when young, with sharp falloff; men are most attractive (0.53) in mid-life, with middling falloff

* "Men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages."

* Different metropolitan areas have different dating patterns

Humans are weird.

[0] http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-d...

When Brin cheated on his wife with his assistant, she wasn't forced to change jobs.

As It Should Be. ;)

Maybe Bill wouldn't be charitable at all if he hadn't met Melinda but I'd like to think he would've been into philanthropy either way.

We can cure malaria without having millions of women sexually harassed at work.

Or more directly, your response does not speak to the argument.

sigh It implies no such thing except under the most uncharitable of interpretations. Here, I'll spell it out: one exception with a positive outcome does not offset the millions of women who have been harassed by their boss. IOW, "hey, baby, we could be the next Billinda!", just no.

This is not remotely the case.

Most office romances are just two people dating - and that's it.

It's the possibility that something might go awry that's problematic, not the situation itself.

Gates is not 'one example' - it's the norm.

Wherever you work, there are surely people dating/married to one another, it's almost normative.

I believe you've lost the thread of the conversation if you feel it involves just "office romances". We can part ways here.

It's common, and it does not imply some kind of harassment or coercion.

That Andy Rubin may apparently be bad guy does not invalidate people's right to have such relationships, nor does it make them inherently immoral.