You misspelled "penis".
> A manager fucking his direct report(s) is extremely common
Let's just legalize rape by "valuable" people, it's fiiiiine
Y'know, this is why people don't like techbros. It's shit like this.
A manager having a relationship with a subordinate is unethical, but let's not call it outright rape, OK? There is a difference.
A manager fucking his subordinate is coercion at the very least due to the power imbalance.
This is not a consensual relationship for the same reason that sex with a "willing" person held at gunpoint isn't (even if there is no explicit verbal threat).
Whether it crosses a criminal threshold of sexual harassment or sexual assault , depends on the jurisdiction and cirumstance. In any case, it is not OK.
It is immaterial whether coercion of this sort is "not outright" rape.
Parent commenter's logic that justifies it because the CEO "has value" applies to "outright" rape as well.
This is what I have issue with.
You cannot just assert that a relationship is non-consensual without knowing anything about the relationship concerned.
No, because you didn't say anything about what the boss does in this situation.
The ethical thing for the boss to do is to decline having a relationship with a subordinate because of its potential to become coercive.
Same goes for a 13-year-old instigating a relationship with a 30-year-old.
What the 13 year old does is irrelevant. The 30 year old is the person with the power.
The coercive force here is the corporation that seeks to insert itself into its employees personal lives.
I cannot imagine avoiding a relationship in service to a corporation that has no hesitation to dispense with me whenever it is convenient. The relationship between employee and employer is entirely transactional and so has lesser priority than any interpersonal relationships that might develop.
The board can’t trust Huang if he lies repeatedly and breaks company code of conduct.
A lot of it is just silently ignored if found out.
It seems you have little argument here.
But anything except a pre-existing relationship is fraught with peril: implied coercion and/or quid pro quos are just some of the problems that can exist. There are darn good reasons why that sort of thing is widely forbidden.
This should be obvious to everyone, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated, apparently.
Favoritism certainly can happen in other situations, of course. Heck, "the GM's girlfriend" is a (negative) trope in tabletop RPG groups for a reason, or spouses favoring each other in competitive board games. And those are situations where (usually) no money is involved, and it's just for fun. Add money to the situation and it can be a dangerous mix. If someone really must end up being a supervisor over his own spouse plus other people, best to have someone neutral double-checking his decisions. It's easy to be blind to one's own conflicts of interest.
But like, people favorite their own friends or long time colleagues too, even outside romantic relationships. It is not graded school.
And it's wrong. At its worst it's rape-by-coercion, trying to hide behind a thin layer of plausible deniability. It's not a circular argument at all: the behavior is bad for objective reasons, and that's why it's forbidden. In more favorable cases (where there's no coercion involved) it's still trading something of monetary value for sexual favors, which makes it a form of "prostitution lite". Again, there are objective, non-circular reasons for it to be forbidden.
If there were anything inherently wrong with it, you would have to ban most family businesses. Just because some forms of something are undesirable, and a corporation out of laziness/practicalities enacts a general policy to ban all forms of it; that does not make the entire thing morally reprehensible automatically.
I'm getting pretty tired of the grandstanding going on around this issue. There are lots of "acceptable" reasons why this situation may be happening -- it all depends on who is defining "acceptable".
If it's NVIDIA corporate counsel, the definition is going to be different than some moralizing blowhard on social media. For one thing, the lawyer probably doesn't give a shit about his relationship with his wife, and cares exclusively about legal liability to the company.
The one thing that none of us can do is apply our personal moral standards to strangers.
Surely there are cases around the world where an employee and his/her boss fell in love, married and that was the end of it.
Is it...? I feel like there's a lot more to unpack here. What if the thing a person fell in love with was that somebody just had more power (over them)?
I'd argue that people should fall in love on equal grounds, so the personality of a partner matters more than the perceived status of power.
There are wrong kinds of love that should either be discussed openly, or, if unsure, privately in therapy. Why not?
There are only two options, either A) to pretend that it doesn't happen, or B) to acknowledge that it does.
The idea that corporate policy could ever control what goes on people's bedrooms is of course absurd, that's just option A.
What you’re not seeing is that the infractions you describe are just drops in a bucket. This guy created billions of dollars and is responsible for the revolution in ML we see today. It is through his foresight that ML is even possible at the scale we see today. He changed the world. He is one of the core people sitting in the center of a global paradigm shift that will change our lives as we know it. You thought this ai stuff was just chat bots? Now it’s writing our software and dismantling academia piece by piece. It’s obvious what’s coming next.
What should be ALSO fucking obvious is that kind of change makes fucking a couple employees and some random honey pot from China basically NOTHING in comparison. It doesn’t fucking matter if there’s some unfairness or some kind of bullshit conflict of interest or favoritism in the company because that shit is MINOR.
You said sometimes obvious things need to be restated implying that it needs to be restated for me specifically. Let me fucking straight with you. YOU are the one fucking blind to the obvious. Wake up.
I guarantee you the board doesn’t give a fuck about any of this shit. They were just waiting for an opportune time to oust him. It was the same for bill clinton. God ousting him for favoritism when favoritism basically exists for almost every company out there? Seriously?
No, the engineers he employed did. They will continue to do so after his departure.
There are too many bad CEOs, so the CEOs who are not bad, like the CEOs of NVIDIA and AMD, must still be praised, and the success of their companies was conditioned by them not being bad CEOs.
Or perhaps I'm misreading you. You did, after all, open with saying that you agree with my comment that you're replying to. So if your only point is "the board didn't care, that was an excuse to get rid of him" and you're not excusing his behavior, then sure, I agree with that statement. His behavior was an open secret among the company, after all; they had to have known, but were willing to ignore it when it was convenient to them. Which is immoral of them, let me add. I agree with you that that's what they did. I do NOT agree (and I hope you're not saying) that it was ethical or moral of them to ignore it until it became publicly known.
However, if he is fired, that is more a punishment for the company than for him, because he is extremely rich and at the age of retirement, so he does not work because he needs to, but just because he enjoys it.
A real punishment for him would be to lose without compensation a part of his NVIDIA shares.
If it is ever proven that he broke any export control law, then a punishment for that is a decision for the judicial system.
It is not remotely common, and is grounds for firing at every single job I've ever held.