Lawyer lawyer lawyer LAWYER lawyer LAWYER

"Sure, if a man makes 2 offers for a "drinks after work?" and the woman refuses"

Turn that around ... if the woman is making the offer and the man refuses, he's likely to still feel flattered but the woman is likely to get the signal and move on.

But ... many men are absolutely clueless and will never get that signal. On the other hand, if the man asks every day but goes no further, is that really sexual harassment or is it just an expression of interest? I can't speak as a woman, but I'd imagine she's thinking "this guy is truly clueless". Does she also get irritated by it over time? Probably?

So I think part of this discussion needs to acknowledge that you can't write HR policy that will satisfy everyone. What you can do is put absolute limits in place, and provide a way for positive feedback - my favorite part of the story is that the woman and man eventually rebuilt trust and had a good working relationship. In my experience, this will never work with some people - it becomes an obsession for them and policy is irrelevant.

contex context CONTEXT CONTEXT

No two situations are the same. If the behavior can be corrected go for the HR route. If the guy seems like a pretentious idiot, then lawyer up. Its the managers job to assess the situation and act accordingly. If its affecting the team, then something has to be done, which course of action he takes is on him to see if anything can be done.

No one here has all the pieces to judge what the guy should have done. We can give advice, or different perspectives but this michele girl is just about as qualified to give advice as this alleged patio11. This blog is less about the actual situation then just trying to up one patio11 it looks like.

I think firing someone is a valid reaction to some things, but also the fired person is unlikely to change in the process. This is just pushing the problem on other people in another company. Again, you might not want to personally sacrifice anything for the betterment of the industry, but it's a good argument to have.

Also, if you suggest only females are getting harassed at work, you are wrong :)

I tend to lean towards patio11's solution simply because the description of the perpetrator made him sound like someone who already failed to grasp the limits of the social contract.

As for patio11's being sketchy, I think I've read everything he's written (starting on the Joel-on-Software forum) and while I don't agree with him on everything, I do believe he's got reasonable ethics and morals. Why use the word sketchy when you simply don't agree with his opinion? And bear in mind it was an opinion based solely on what was written in that Ask HN.

It's actually a social power attack, not a personal one. The "attack" (it's very hard to find any language in the post that could be considered an attack) is that patio11's advice is not great for this specific case. It may look like a personal attack because why would someone post off-site just to comment on another person's comments?

The answer is, social power and the threat of in-group reprisals. If you challenge an extremely popular person's opinion, the in-group will attack you, because you basically just challenged their whole group mentality that this person is implicitly trustworthy and correct no matter what.

However, both of them have potentially bad advice, because they have a very small portion of a much longer story, and they both think they have the solution to something which may be much more complex. patio11's is more "nuclear", while the open mic author's is more "hiring is difficult and the incident may not be as horrible as it sounds so let's see if disciplinary action helps". Neither may apply, depending on all the left-out details.