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Honestly, I get why these policies exist, but sometimes it feels heavy handed to fire somebody for having a consenting relationship at work. After all, when you work long and hard hours often times coworkers are the people you get to know best and your inner circle.
At Microsoft, the Chairman and CEO Bill Gates married the project manager for Microsoft Bob and Encarta, Melinda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
That said, if the other party gets pissed at the end of the relationship and complains, you are gone.
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> Intel is in serious trouble right now. The whole semiconductor industry is in trouble right now, though few seem to feel the weight of the issue. We are looking at just a couple process nodes at best before we reach the end of the road for silicon lithography. Sure, there will be further tweaks on existing techniques which will squeeze out small improvements in power, performance and density. But long gone are the…
Intel i7-3770 Passmark Score (~6yrs old, was ~$320): 9300 [1] AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Passmark Score ( That's a 65% improvement in benchmark performance. So not the "doubling" trend I was used to growing up, but not insignificant. [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-3770+... [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+2700&id...
Sure, there's a policy, but who cares? People need to quit meddling in the affairs of others. If a relationship is consensual what's the issue? If we're spending a significant part of our waking hours at work, it should be a baked in assumption that at some point, some coworkers are going to end up in a romantic relationship together. Hell, the majority of my significant romantic relationships started out as consensu…
I’ve seen these relationships cause major problems. Bob had a relationship with Alice, and now couldn’t fire her because it would look like quid pro quo (not getting into details here). Alice was the worst manager I have ever worked for, and many of her direct reports were quitting without notice (including me). Even though what happened between Alice and Bob was consensual, it made it impossible for Bob to do his jo…
This seems like a problem caused by relationship policy and optics rather than the relationship itself. Doesn't Bob have a manager that can get involved to explicitly get rid of Alice?
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Seems odd to apply it after the fact in this case, though. Perhaps there was an ulterior motive for removing him. Otherwise I would expect Intel to just hide the information in order to protect the financial interests of the company.
> Seems odd to apply it after the fact in this case, though. Barring Minority Report's pre-crime telepaths, I'm not sure how you'd apply this policy before the fact?
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I’ve seen these relationships cause major problems. Bob had a relationship with Alice, and now couldn’t fire her because it would look like quid pro quo (not getting into details here). Alice was the worst manager I have ever worked for, and many of her direct reports were quitting without notice (including me). Even though what happened between Alice and Bob was consensual, it made it impossible for Bob to do his jo…
> Bob had a relationship with Alice, and now couldn’t fire her because it would look like quid pro quo. Alice was the worst manager I have ever worked for This seems like a problem caused by relationship policy and optics rather than the relationship itself. Doesn't Bob have a manager that can get involved to explicitly get rid of Alice?
Yes, that's what I mean when I said, "The issue is not necessarily about whether the relationship itself is ethical, but how it appears to observers and if it affects the organization."
If you need to get Bob's manager, Carol, involved to manage Alice when things go poorly, it means that you should have had Carol managing Alice from the beginning. This is the only way I've ever seen it work well. Alice is under Bob in the org chart but all of her performance reviews are done by Carol, and Carol signs Alice's pay sheets, et cetera. I've seen this particular case happen a few times where Alice is Bob's daughter or where Alice and Bob were married before they came to the organization.
This is not possible when Bob is the CEO.
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Why assume at all?
Same reason you can reasonably refer to a male-looking acquaintance as "he" without enforcing a policy of using "they" until you have the opportunity to ask what gender they identify with. Yes, you will get it wrong ~0.1% of the time, but the cost of slight embarrassment one one/both sides is far less than the cost of using non-standard and confusing communication the remaining 99.9% of the time.
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>No one would take issue if he carried a gun at work You really don't think so? I'm no CEO but I imagine carrying a gun around would at least warrant some public criticism, particularly for a tech CEO in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Why? If you were worth hundreds of millions, wouldn't it make sense to have some means of self defense?
What is the Intel non-fraternization policy? What romantic relationships are banned?