[thadjo]

This is really a partial accounting of the risk. Don't forget to include the risk of reporters finding out about this whole arrangement and doing further damage to an already tarnished company and industry.

But risk assessment is really besides the point anyway. It's not difficult to see the correct course of action here and that Google as a company failed to take it.

[curun1r]

> Don't forget to include the risk of reporters finding out about this whole arrangement and doing further damage to an already tarnished company and industry

Perhaps, but 2014 is pre-#MeToo, so those risks wouldn't have been fully appreciated. SV has a long history of being able to use money to sweep sexual misconduct allegations under the rug and the current landscape of these arrangements causing PR problems for companies is a pretty recent development.

Not paying these bonuses would have certainly resulted in a court case and publicity that Google perhaps thought, at the time, would be negative. So they probably rationalized that resolving the situation by a) paying a settlement to the victim, b) ending Rubin's employment and c) not having to go to court and face that bad PR was the prudent approach.

Given how the industry (and country) has changed it's handling of sexual misconduct allegations in the last couple years, it's easy to find fault with the way they handled it, but Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

[coldtea]

>Given how the industry (and country) has changed it's handling of sexual misconduct allegations in the last couple years, it's easy to find fault with the way they handled it, but Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

I think the height of metoo power was temporary. When #metoo fades out, reactions will regress to the mean (or a slightly heightened mean).

Blacks rioted all over LA for Rodney King. Then that died off, and police killed unarmed blacks here and there without any major reaction for almost 30 years -- until black lives matter erupted. No this has faded again.

[ndarwincorn]

> Google's lawyers were operating in a very different context in 2014.

Worth noting that (as pointed out in the article) the head of Google's lawyers is himself a beneficiary of the very different context he's operating in in 2014. This imagined recommendation/risk assessment isn't made in a vacuum, independent of biases.

[thadjo]

> Not paying these bonuses would have certainly resulted in a court case and publicity that Google perhaps thought, at the time, would be negative. So they probably rationalized that resolving the situation by a) paying a settlement to the victim, b) ending Rubin's employment and c) not having to go to court and face that bad PR was the prudent approach.

And we all agree that this 'prudent approach' was objectively terrible, right? Not just in the hindsight of post-#MeToo PR. At the time it was actually wrong and a bad thing to do.

Explaining the reasoning behind unethical behavior does not make it more ethical.