"David C. Drummond, who joined as general counsel in 2002, had an extramarital relationship with Jennifer Blakely, a senior contract manager in the legal department who reported to one of his deputies, she and other Google employees said. They began dating in 2004, discussed having children and had a son in 2007,"

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?

The dynamics of Drummond's marriage are literally none of our business. You have no idea what Blakely "did" or "didn't" do to "another woman". How Google handles like this, though, is absolutely open to analysis and criticism.

This is silly. We can't discuss Google's handling of a situation without digging into the situation itself.

No part of Google's handling of this has anything to do with Drummond's marriage, obviously.

"We're not talking about <implication of my position that makes it look bad>, so it doesn't matter. We're talking about <implication of my position that makes it look good>."

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...

No, we're talking about how dredging up an exception to the rule where things worked out for two people is not a a very good argument that it's actually fine most of the time and bosses won't victimize subordinates under the right circumstances.

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.

That wasn't tptacek's response, which was effectively "we don't have to worry about implications that make the policy look bad if we're not talking about them".

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).

There’s just one problem. Who the hell are you (or anyone else) to tell Bill or Melinda who they should date?

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.

> Who the hell are you (or anyone else) to tell Bill or Melinda who they should date?

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.

We are literally commenting on a story about David Drummond, so no, that's not a real rebuttal.

And "we're not talking about that" is literally an invalid response to pointing out a negative implication of a proposed policy. Do you disagree?

It's difficult to differentiate, though. How do you know what relationship is coercive or isn't? Were you there at the time?

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.

If the situation is avoided, then there's no need to differentiate. That's the best part about the "don't" policy. There are plenty of people out there.

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

> If the situation is avoided, then there's no need to differentiate. That's the best part about the "don't" policy. There are plenty of people out there.

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.

Sorry, but that is a very simplistic way of seeing it.

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.

Alright, so in the first place, this is attacking the problems in American work (and work the world over) from the wrong vantage point. What if you merely like one of your workers more than the others and you rate them higher than the others? That should be just as insidious but because it doesn't involve sex, somehow that's not as bad, it's just "life". Almost everyone in HN has experienced this sort of toxic manager at some point in our careers and we've for some reason normalized it just like the rampant sexual harassment.

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?

Two reasons mainly. First and less charitably, managers and executives are a self-perpetuating phenomenon. They’d have to be the ones to slit their own throats, and they won’t. The second and more depressing reason is at the core of much human misery from politics to business: it’s better than the known and proven alternatives in most cases. Like what passes for democracy these days, it’s a lamentable mess, but still preferable to the proven alternatives on offer.

This is just plain wrong. A romantic relationship between a subordinate and superior is definitely the employer's business. If you want to date a subordinate one of you needs to quit or hide it and accept the consequences if it is ever discovered.

It's not the company making the decision; it's oneself. Of course, you're free to make your own decisions, but I personally use the "don't" policy.

My read of "hypergamy is a real observed phenomenon" is that it is mostly a way of dismissing concerns when they pertain to women employees.

Here, have some empirical evidence. [0]

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...

I wasn't actually asking for more evidence. I was criticizing the invocation of "hypergamy" as something relevant to the story we're commenting on.

The guy who used it was discussing the difficulty of ascertaining whether or not power-imbalances between people in a relationship implies coercion. Women's general preference towards dating up is obviously a factor, so to ascribe a dismissive attitude to anybody who mentions it is uncharitable to say the least.

The only difference is that Gates was CEO and owner so no one good force his subordinate to change jobs.

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

Did you not read what the OP said? He demonstrated why that “simple rule” may have unintended consequences, and the Bill and Melinda comparison was applicable, not silly. We are talking about all relationships in which the male is a superior on the org chart.