Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a misconduct claim

Re:Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a ... by DoreenMichele on Friday October 26, 2018 @04:33AM (#18307622)

Or maybe it's an attempt to bring nuance to the discussion. Granted, it's kind of ham-handed. But absolutist positions frequently turn out to be draconian.

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.

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Re:Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a ... by wpietri on Friday October 26, 2018 @11:27AM (#18310127)

Yes, most relationships have some sort of power imbalance (although historically that has been drastically decreasing). What makes work relationships different is that it is hard to change jobs.

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.

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Re:Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a ... by nradov on Friday October 26, 2018 @12:18PM (#18310632)

You're right in principle, but the problem is that nuance doesn't scale. In 1987 Microsoft only had about 1800 employees so it was more practical to apply some individual judgment to employee policies. Google had about 38000 employees in 2013, so it was more than an order of magnitude larger. That's a much tougher management problem.

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Re:Google paid Andy Rubin $90M while keeping silent about a ... by DoreenMichele on Friday October 26, 2018 @04:27PM (#18312483)

So, what your telling me is there is a specific circumstance under which we know that it can work to not have absolutist rules. Now, it might be nice to have more hard data suggesting roughly what size of company this can work with, plus other details as to what makes it work.

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...

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