https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-google-f...
Oh, it is so unprofessional to let the wonder of being alive ever interrupt the demands of efficiency and a steady stream of taxes to the IRS. Imagine the nerve of that co-founder who destroyed the startup for unprofessional things like having children! My accountant will make a very stern frown when I tell him.
Please corporate working Americans if you read this: It is okay to have romance in the workplace! Life is too short. All the rest of the world does this and knows it is natural and healthy.
You may not mean to insult but you certainly don't come off as clever.
How did I know you were American?
You didn't.
Seriously though: you are making a lot of fuss about a problem that doesn't exist whilst at the same time pretending that only the US has a workforce sexual harassment problem which I can pretty much guarantee you isn't the case, and which - without even knowing where you live - I guarantee is also a problem where you live, whatever your personal views on the matter, which seem to hover somewhere between 'outright dismissal' and 'romance is so valuable all rules should be forbidden'.
The profits of stock owners, especially those that are 85 have exactly nothing to do with the matter.
The profits for the 85 year old stock owners have everything to do with it, since it is the company leadership who issues these insane policies of trying to forbid their workers from dating. It is one more way that they seek to dehumanize their employees. That anybody actually listens to them is bewildering to me. I haven't met anybody yet who has such low self respect that they would accept an employer doing that to them.
You talked about getting in trouble, but let's step back and we see that who can actually get into legal trouble if they discipline or discriminate against employees on grounds of their private affairs, or try to interfere in the privacy of their employees.
The crime of sexual harassment has nothing to do with this, the subject is dating in the workplace.
So I'll ignore the rest of all that follows from that ridiculous conclusion because it isn't based in fact, nor is it attributed correctly (it's yours, not mine).
These 'insane policies' are issued by just about every workplace anywhere on the globe with more than a handful of employees because those policies seem to work reasonably well in practice whilst accommodating the reality that people will date other people in the workplace.
As for sexual harassment: that happens and more often than not it is exactly in the situation where superiors push subordinates to do more than their job description strictly requires. Likewise for co-workers if superiors don't run a tight ship.
That none of this happens where you happen to work doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And no, the subject is not 'dating in the workplace', the subject is Amazon that is selling a bay area office complex, but if you want to be specific I did mention the word 'superior' in my comment and you seem to have completely ignored it.
"pretending that only the US has a workforce sexual harassment problem"
I haven't touched on sexual harassment. I'm talking about dating and romance in the workplace, and I can assure you that few workplaces globally have any policies against this, including large and very large companies. Principally the largest workplaces of all: the public sector.
American corporate (and American inspired) anti-dating policies are creepy. Not even the Soviets infringed on their workers like that.
If somebody reads our little flame war here, I'd like to tell them: Your boss or company trying to control who you date is as weird as they trying to control what you eat.
But I do honestly think we have different perspective on the roles of bosses and workers in the workplace. For me, it is alien to refer to any boss as a "superior". They lead the daily work, and that's as far as their authority stretches. Referring to them as "superior" would be fit in a military setting, but nowhere else. Is the worker "inferior" then? Calling them "subordinate" is also very alien to me. Where does that kind of language regarding fellow workmates come from?
I've had bosses and I've been a boss. I'd expect my employees to laugh in my face if I tried to tell them what to do outside of job tasks, just as I would laugh in the face of any boss doing the same to me.
Consensual peer level dating is not a problem in the US either. The issue arises when there is a power differential between the 2 partners. And I don’t know what sad little country you live in where one cannot meet anyone outside work, but doing so is not difficult for me in the U.S. at all.
At the worst it can be akin to nepotism which can quickly erode morale and productivity -- (there's no reason to work harder since the "fiance" will get the promotion).
At a previous company a manager dated her direct employee, and working in her team was really an awful experience because of it. Everyone knew it, and nobody could say anything for fear of retribution.
Any given relationship sprouting from coworking isn't terrible, but in aggregate, I think it warrants a decent amount of frowning.
I remember the first large company I worked for. There were married couples there, parents and their kids there, an aunt with her nephew there.
There are a lot of ways to have family at a company.
I always found dating in the workplace kinda alarming, especially when people would date their subordinates.