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Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

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Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#421

Post by unglaublich »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #162
grapehut wrote: post #72

These stories leave a bad taste in my mouth. It hasn't yet gone to court, so the guys allegations could be really be anything from the God's honest truth all the way to a complete fabrication. Yet there is a huge amount of irreparable damage by public stories like this. I was once personally on the receiving end of a complete false sexual harassment allegation from a coworker almost at random (someone I had almost no…

The ugly truth is — false sexual harassment complaint is one those things in life you keep hoping and praying it never happens to you. But if it does you’re screwed one way or the other. The stigma that it “automatically” brings just doesn’t go away. It just doesn’t. You forever become “that” person. And I really don’t know how it can be fixed. That’s just how it is.

There's an impressive movie about such a situation: "The Hunt" (2012).

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#422

Post by PedroBatista »

peterfirefly wrote: post #229
yutijke wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the New York Post. Maybe it is guilty of publishing false and dishonest reporting. But I would also point out that a lot of people here on HN (in past discussions) and elsewhere have noted that the New York Times and the Washington Post also publish creatively interpreted news (or outright creative writing) at times. Despite this news articles from these sources are considered independently without…

It's a tabloid and it is not left-leaning... and it published true and embarrassing things about the Biden family up to the last US presidential election. It also regularly publishes true things about crime (and about who commits it). This is more than enough to explain why some people distrust it. In my book, it is much more reliable than the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In my book it’s slightly more reliable simply because it’s a tabloid and any political leaning takes the backseat in favor of headlines and blood.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#423

Post by bloak »

ahtihn wrote: post #388
benced wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering is a high prestige job. Rightly or wrongly, most female dominated jobs are not.

Eh in my experience it's a highly paid job but there's 0 prestige in it.

I tend to agree with that. Lawyers have more "prestige", I think. Of course, a huge majority of people studying law are female. However, despite what the general public thinks, lawyers are not highly paid. (I'm talking about the UK. Some lawyers are highly paid, of course, but lawyers are not highly paid on average, particularly if you divide their pay by the hours worked because the famous law firms that offer reasonably high salaries also expect a lot of unpaid overtime.)

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#424

Post by vidarh »

j-bos wrote: post #321
vidarh wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why physical characteristics like gender or ethnicity should be important in the management selection? To be clear, the below is not taking into account the allegations in the article, but just seeks to explain the thinking without judgement (as I'm frankly not sure which side I fall down on). There's a school of thought that some degree of weighting helps to redress systemic issues by changing incentives, justifie…

Thanks, this is a great explanation. And combined with OP's last question, raises for me the question, why not incentivize other marginalized classes, like people who are highly unattractive? Note this a question of curiosity in reasoning, not one of judgement. *Do we say OP for the top level comment?

The challenge with applying this too broadly, I think is that it becomes a dual problem of objectively enough defining who fits in the marginalised class, and of defining a class that is big enough that you can try to accommodate it without harming other groups, marginalised or otherwise, in an unreasonable manner.

With respect to gender it's fairly simple. Already with respect to ethnicity it starts getting tricky to define objective rules.

It's also a tricky problem to apply at too small scale. E.g. in a small enough team or in a small enough niche, pure chance will end up with some small groups that are not diverse by pure chance even in an idealised setting with no biases. Trying to prevent that all the time could be potentially highly detrimental. Figuring out which imbalances and at which scales are by chance, and which are down to biases is a hard problem.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#426

Post by ShredKazoo »

peaky_blinder wrote: post #300
ShredKazoo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted these links elsewhere in the thread, but I'll post them again. Pretty much every job has a gender imbalance to some degree or another. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/software-deve...

Gender imbalance on it's own doesn't say everything. You should actually talk with women in STEM. Many of them shared their horrible experiences so far.

I agree we should work to reduce horrible experiences.

My point is that we shouldn't be surprised by a gender imbalance on priors. By itself, a gender imbalance only goes to show that software engineering is like a lot of other jobs.

BTW, my suspicion is that similar experiences happen in many industries, and industries vary according to (a) how horrible a given experience is said to be and (b) social norms around registering a complaint.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#427

Post by ShredKazoo »

benced wrote: post #341
ShredKazoo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>More curious is the very direct "your team is too male" and the encouragement to fire someone. My friend who still lives in the Valley says this kind of sentiment is incredibly common there nowadays, e.g. advertising an open position and having discussions internally that a man won't be hired for the role. It's pretty surprising to me, because statistics show that most major careers have a gender imbalance in one di…

Software engineering is a high prestige job. Rightly or wrongly, most female dominated jobs are not.

CEOs and politicians are even higher-prestige jobs dominated by men, but the sense of moral urgency around achieving gender balance in those jobs seems significantly lower.

Police officers have a lot of power in society & are mostly male. I think there's a strong case to be made that bringing women into the force would be very beneficial, in terms of improved handling of sexual assault cases and reduced police violence. However, I haven't seen a peep about the need to make policing gender-balanced.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#428

Post by ShredKazoo »

jterrys wrote: post #303
ShredKazoo wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>More curious is the very direct "your team is too male" and the encouragement to fire someone. My friend who still lives in the Valley says this kind of sentiment is incredibly common there nowadays, e.g. advertising an open position and having discussions internally that a man won't be hired for the role. It's pretty surprising to me, because statistics show that most major careers have a gender imbalance in one di…

>Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority? My conspiracy theory is that software engineering is the last real, single, meritocratic, growing career path that costs a lot of money for employers and they'd rather tank the market by making sure the other 50% of sex is able to participate to wreck wages. Nob…

I don't think your argument quite works. Suppose I'm a superintendent worried about the teacher shortage. Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?

I think maybe there's a workable argument along these lines: Both nursing and teaching are bureaucratic industries with heavy government involvement. The price system doesn't function effectively in those industries, which means that a shortage of workers doesn't cause wages to rise. And the overall dysfunction means that managers in those industries don't think strategically about how to increase the supply of workers, the way managers in the software industry do.

EDIT: Another point is that the oligopolistic industry structure in tech means that big players have a stronger incentive to do things that benefit the industry as a whole.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#429

Post by npteljes »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #87

I was interested to notice how I formed my initial guess about the man's credibility. The factors included: - How attractive was he vs. the woman? - I noticed he has 7 kids, and went to Providence College. So I'm guessing a devout Roman Catholic, which would mean he (publicly, at least) has a world view that values marital fidelity. - In his LinkedIn profile [0], he claims that his family started basically a charity…

It's fun to gauge personalities like this, but the outcomes can be reversed in a human way as well.

Attraction is personal. Someone can, for example, be biased for and against certain ways people look, and so, their selection don't match the supposed attractiveness. And also, attraction is not just looks. A beautiful person can reek of body odor, for example.

Being religious can't just imply morality, it can imply hypocrisy too. People sometimes lead a very different personal life, compared to their public life, and religion works well for that.

Similar thing applies to the charity ice-cream shop. People take on all kinds of projects in a distressed situation. For one thing, it can be an excellent way to not care about the original problems. It's a thing for example that troubled couples try for children, in order to better their relationship.

The only thing that's worthy of consideration is the marketing angle. But even then, there are a lot of shitty marketers in the world. And many people who can build a certain image, and yet they don't work in marketing.

Re: Google exec fired after female boss groped him at drunken bash, suit says

#430

Post by rswskg »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #218
grapehut wrote: post #72

These stories leave a bad taste in my mouth. It hasn't yet gone to court, so the guys allegations could be really be anything from the God's honest truth all the way to a complete fabrication. Yet there is a huge amount of irreparable damage by public stories like this. I was once personally on the receiving end of a complete false sexual harassment allegation from a coworker almost at random (someone I had almost no…

Not quite as damaging, but I was accused of harassment from some blue-haired weirdo on a video call with nearly a hundred people at work. Like you, this was a person I had zero interaction with prior to the call. I considered getting a lawyer involved because I feared this could blow up, but was talked out of it by my boss, who asked me to apologize and "let's leave it at that".

That's so depressing. I avoid blue hairs like the plague, to hear they will go after you anyway, yet another reason not to participate at work.
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