Bill Maris, who founded Google's venture capital arm and reported directly to Drummond before quitting in 2016, tells Axios...
"The news of David Drummond leaving Google today brings to mind a quote from one of my most favorite creatures. 'At an end, your rule is. And not short enough, it was.' I had been asked in the past why I left Google in 2016, and I have never really commented on that. David Drummond is the reason I left Google. I simply could not work with him any longer. It’s that simple. We have very, very different ideas about how to treat people, and this was a long time coming."[1]
> Drummond was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2005 with causing Google to violate securities law because he failed to advise the company's board that the company was required to register $80 million in stock options used as compensation for employees.[1]
Do you know anyone who would hire someone after making a $80MM mistake??
I worked for Bill for about a year at GV. He was one of the friendliest managers I've ever met at Google.
I randomly met Dave Drummond once at a coffee shop in Sausalito (I didn't know who he was at the time... he just commented on my Google shirt), and he gave me an inexplicably uncomfortable feeling.
I think it is a bad idea to say this about him without providing a concrete example on how he made you uncomfortable. I'm sure I have accidentally made someone uncomfortable before. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not.
Of course it doesn't make you a bad person. In fact, there's a good chance you're a good person, and if you have accidentally made someone uncomfortable, it was through something they could easily put their finger on; you said something, you reminded them of something, etc.
This doesn't sound like it's that. He does, after all, call it 'inexplicable'; literally unable to be interpreted or expanded upon. It was a 'gut' feeling, a combination of all the things you pick up quickly and instinctively, the summation of which is discomfort.
That _also_ doesn't mean the guy is bad, or that it's necessarily fairly representative of him. Just that he gave the OP a feeling of discomfort.
It is totally unreasonable to go around commenting on third parties giving off creepy vibes of no consequence based on no evidence. Not to be too personal because a comment isn't the measure of a commentator but kcanini is basically saying nothing with as much negative allusion as can be put into a comment. It is a comment with no consequences, no relevant context, no observations and no argument.
Gut feelings are often surprisingly accurate, sometimes we all pick things up a lot earlier than our consciousness cottons on. But that is no standard to hold in public discourse. There are a bunch of people who give off creepy vibes who are great and a bunch of people who give off positive vibes who are creepy. Binning people like that should ideally be done with evidence or at the very least an argument to give the comment some substance.
We've figured out that good looking people are not more upstanding than ugly people. Truly the next step is to avoid comments like that. Truth is no defence for a comment like that; a comment that says nothing is automatically truthful but also meaningless.
> Gut feelings are often surprisingly accurate, sometimes we all pick things up a lot earlier than our consciousness cottons on. ... We've figured out that good looking people are not more upstanding than ugly people.
There, see the difference? You said it yourself - as it turns out, being good looking vs. ugly is not meaningful evidence as to whether you're going to treat others fairly. Being actively disdainful of others to the extent that you're giving off huge "creeper" vibes (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps intentionally!) can be evidence of sorts - at least in a very loose, "more likely than not" sense.
Of course, this is not to say that it should be considered anywhere close to OK to spread wild rumors about "the creeper vibes that this creepy guy gave me once", or anything like that - just think about how open this would be to abuse! But OP wasn't doing that, at all. He/she was seeking to confirm the assessment that others had already, independently come up with, and that can be a very good thing.
The danger with such unqualified sentiments is that there are many things that can make someone uncomfortable. Let me be more plain: David Drummond is (was) the most famous black male executive in tech. I have heard black men voicing frustrations at people being uncomfortable at them for no good reason.
I am not saying that the OP or anyone here is being racist. We need to provide more context to these statements if we are going to say these in public. Otherwise, some groups of people will be at the receiving end of these kind of statements more often than the rest of us.
The majority of human communication is nonverbal. I saw this same kind of commentary about Epstein's "assistants". Humans can read humans to an extent that should impact behavior (but rarely does). Get over it.
I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing.
This is the same Ben Horowitz who defended illegal option price fixing and other ethically dubious behavior in his last book. I'll probably get penalized for this, but achieving success is not equivalent to being a role model.
> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."
Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative...
Not really. Eric Schmidt (also a notorious womanizer) had a saying while I was there: "More revenue solves all known problems." When everybody at the company is getting rich, they're all working on exciting problems, Fortune and Time and BusinessWeek and Playboy magazines are featuring employees on the cover, and everyone you meet is impressed at where you work, then employees are willing to overlook a large number of shenanigans and petty injustices. It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.
Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.
I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem )
I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?
I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to change the world for the better because they don't understand the essential futility of it all.
Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.
Your risk-taking realist needs at least one more quality -- a high pain tolerance. There are two pains you need to deal with, the pain of fearing failure, and the pain of failure itself.
Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)
That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.
I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.
I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.
Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo. Especially on this site where a lot of people seem to take a weird pseudo-detached outlook. Trying to analyze things in an almost entirely emotionless judgement free manner. I think this is seen by people as enlightened.
Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.
This isn't really the site for people who want to create genuine social change in the world, other than through startups. The site guidelines say that what's on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Curiosity is more about knowing things than doing things. I think one implicit belief held by the folks who started this site is that if you do want to challenge entrenched power structures, the best way to do that is to be very circumspect about who you tell that you're challenging power structures, because you can expect to have a strong negative reaction from the power structures themselves. (Peter Thiel describes startups as "a conspiracy to change the world".)
There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.
Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo
It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.
For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.
This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".
To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.
>>It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.
I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.
We'll have to agree to disagree on point 1, as there's plenty of common knowledge out there that I don't need to muddy the thread with.
The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.
Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...
Often bankrupt property tycoon riddled with dubious overseas Russian debt and has historic shady dealings in a number of countries doesn’t have skeletons in his closet that would impact national security?
Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.
If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.
Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.
> but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.
This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were.
There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.
In general, I agree, and I also agree this is not acknowledged often enough.
I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.
That’s not an exception; that’s the norm. Talent in every field is wildly unequally distributed. Messi makes the average international player look kind of ok. The average international player makes club players look like a weekend hobby player. The hobby player can run rings around people who don’t care about football.
Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.
Qualified is not the same as good. Passing the minimum quality bar to be acceptable on some level is very different to having even one success, never mind having multiple, massive successes.
Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.
Fucking your reports is not your personal life. It's your professional life. It opens both you and your employer to professional liability.
Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain.
If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.
Exactly. Success as a business person has nothing to do with success as a moral or ethical person. In fact it's probably easier to be one when not being the others.
Being good at business does not make you a "good person".
Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point.
Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
> Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
Vinod Khosla. Robert Bolton. Samantha Power. Practically every dictator bar Lee Kuan Yew.
> Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.
People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.
The idea that business cares only about profit is just plain wrong. The law people think of is almost never relevant. Each year, millions of business decisions are made knowing full well that it will cost a bit of money, not bring in any (or even good PR), but is the decent thing to do.
As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.
>American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United.
>Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success.
>“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”
I know anecdotally My employer constantly gets in trouble during earnings calls from shareholders for doing anything remotely environmentally responsible because it impacts margins. It's pretty clear capital has no intention of being ethical at the cost of profit
Because it's being phrased as "punishment", which implies some kind of punitive action. "Oh the greenies are putting trees over green, we'll show them! Watch your share price tank!" That's not what happens. It's a bunch of quants sitting and running the numbers forward a few years to estimate numbers and price accordingly, not a conscious decision to punish. The big traders don't really have a particular attachment to a given company and just buy and sell accordingly. A big chunk of it's algorithmic anyways. If it decreases profit, a company can expect to see a decrease in share price because the company will likely be worth less in a few years. The phrasing of the parent implies it's an intended or targeted action, but that's not how markets work.
I think it's more likely the rationale was to support a local business, thus building a stronger community for their employees to live in, thus allowing them to be more attractive to prospective employees. Maybe they also thought it'd increase the chance that you'd apply there.
You're correct, that's not how companies usually make their personnel decisions. But one would think more companies would factor in PR-risk as a real financial risk. But Google being Google economically-speaking, this still probably isn't a material event.
These sexual misconduct investigations at Google are really finding some critical stuff. At this point my guess is that it is related to the Larry and Sergey resignations, and we will eventually hear information that reflects poorly on them directly.
Xoogler here; I haven't been close to the food chain to be there in person, but close enough to see photos from Managers/owners trips to Thailand, and believe me they were not going there to visit Temple of the Emerald Buddha. I seen photos that UK's the Sun would probably pay me seven digits for, but I was much younger and still wanted to live lawsuits free life. Fun times.
This phrasing is a bit misleading. It makes it sound like Sergey had designated a room exclusively for sex with employees and called it the "masseuse room." To be precise, Google's offices include private massage rooms in which employees can get professional massages. Sergey allegedly had sex in one or more of these rooms.
Quote from link above: "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."
Sure, but in this case, stopping the behavior that is likely to lead to harassment claims is aligned with both the company's and the employees' interests.
I might be wrong, but I don't think there's any law that forbids having consensual sex with employees. It's unethical if they're his direct reports, sure, but I don't think it's illegal. I'm sure if I had _fifty billion dollars_, I'd have to fight off women like zombies in a movie even though I'm already married.
There is a potential criminal risk if a relationship can be construed as nonconsensual, coerced, or quid pro quo.
More generally, there's a tremendous civil liability, both personally to the principles involved and the firm, through such activity. A liability which may be entirely independent of the apparent (or actual) consensuality at the time, and which might be filed by non-participants (e.g., other employees perceiving sexual favouratism or discrimination).
A principle function of a corporation is as a risk-externalising, and limiting, legal structure. (This is literally stated in some forms of organisation, as with an LLC: limited liability corporation.) The principle job of management and oversight is to maximise the reward-to-risk ratio.
Company founders openly and documentedly treating the employee pool as their personal coital resource is a risk in the extreme.
Consent is murky at best when there's a large power discrepancy between two co-workers. See: everything that's been going on with Hollywood in the past couple of years
The law has no concept of "large power discrepancy" affecting the notion of whether sex is legal or not, if there's no violence or force involved.
The attempts in recent years by a small group of feminists to broaden the definition of non-consensual sex to include "I had sex with that rich guy because he could give me an attractive job but later regretted it" just degrades everything, especially women. It causes people to stop believing them when they say they were coerced by a powerful man. After all, Weinstein's accusers settled, didn't they? And his ex employers picked up the legal bills. Rumoured to be because he had tons of evidence that the complainants had willingly accepted their side of the "deals" and that such arrangements were commonplace throughout the industry.
There's no criminal law against it, but it opens you up to civil suits from aggrieved parties (who can be either participants in the affair or bystanders who feel they were given a raw deal because of the relationship). Hiring, firing, and performance management is supposed to be based on your performance at doing your job, not because your boss dumped you and now dislikes you. Sexual harassment and discrimination suits are both relatively easy to document and tend to be viewed sympathetically by juries.
You're assuming there are "aggrieved parties". To the best of my knowledge nobody was "aggrieved" by Sergey at least. He probably had them sign something before the "massage" or else I'm sure we'd see some lawsuits.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying sexual harassment in any way. But it's not "harassment" if it's wanted and consensual, and it's not _automatically_ unethical if the employee is not in his chain of command or even if they are, if they aren't forced into it, and there's no punishment for declining. If they make advances on their own and are merely not turned down (see e.g. Rosenberg, who IIRC wasn't in his chain of command), that's stretching the definition.
Consent requires no coercion, meaning that both parties are fully informed of all relevant information and both are in a legal capacity to do so. It is guaranteed that employees are not in a position to be fully informed because they will not have the same access to company information and employee resources.
It's honestly more angering when figures like this think everyone else is dumb and will swallow the story that nothing is happening, it was just the right time to leave. This one is even worse, he's trying to sell himself as a wise leader leaving to see his pupils grow:
> He said that it was the “right time for me to make way for the next generation of leaders”
> In his farewell note, Mr. Drummond did not mention any of the claims.
Really? At least mention the full context around your departure. Moreover, he tries to pull this one off:
> “I know this company is in the best of hands, and I am excited for what the future holds for Google, for Alphabet and for me,”
> His departure had been telegraphed in the last few months as he sold off most of his shares in Alphabet, unloading roughly $170 million worth of company stock from November to January.
Come on. Drummond, you're leaving as consequence of the investigation around your misconduct. This is not an opportunity to try to squeeze idolatry out of. Just leave.
> Last year, a committee of independent directors from Alphabet’s board hired a law firm to investigate its handling of allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate relationships by current and former executives as part of its legal defense against shareholder lawsuits over its handling of the matters, according to documents viewed by The Times.
Let’s sure hope they investigated Sergey and Larry too, unlike them, at least this guy got married to his office romantic interest.
Am I the only one not thinking there's anything too outrageous in the article? I've also read the medium article by the ex. It paints the picture of somebody that definitely doesn't get top marks in family, but ... well... he's not that much different from the average american. A standard deviation, maybe? He met somebody else, separated from the wife, tried to make a new family, failed, went back to the wife. Makes me feel a bit sorry for everyone involved, but that's it. I really don't see a demon.
If the bad part is moving the girlfriend in another department, everybody looks like they've been overly accommodating, honestly. Having the bosses's wife work in the same department is not fair to the other members of the team. "Hey, Bill, who do you think will get the big bonus this time? You or the bosses's wife?". The decision to be together was mutual - acting as if it wasn't is extremely insulting to her. Some consequences are positive and some negative, that's just life, and one is that they couldn't work together anymore.
I can't see anything else. Alleged affairs? Not that many, not while in a committed relationship, and to be perfectly candid, not unusual if they happened. And given the current popularity of poly, possibly accepted by everybody. Definitely not loudly protested at the time.
He's not the devil, he just makes it extremely hard for alphabet to claim any moral authority (or that it's really being serious) about the issue of executives facing any consequences for misbehavior. It's pretty awkward to simultaneously say "we will never have another Andy Rubin case" and have a chief legal officer who dated (and mistreated) a subordinate.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I would assume men in positions of power / wealth would be more likely to engage in these types of behavior.
Romance / sex is a pretty primal thing for most people, in many cases limited by available options and / or consequences. It also tends to override the more logical parts of the brain. Having more options opened up, even if causing ethical issues I'm pretty sure will push a good percentage of men over.
I have no idea what that percentage is, but I wouldn't think it is very small. I think if we dig hard enough we'd uncover a lot more of of these cases in many different companies.
If we look at the behavior of alpha males vs. alpha females in other non-human mammalian species, it suggests that it is at least more common among alpha males. Not that it couldn't also happen with females.
What do non-human mammalian species have to do with anything? Few things vary across species more than sexual behavior. Even chimps and bonobos (very closely related, same genus) have wildly different gender roles, sexual/mating patterns, etc.
It makes no sense at all to invoke the entire of mammalia.
Not one of my favorite people at Google. We had an interesting discussion about why Google, which was "transparent" about ranking and rating kept two variables about your performance secret which made it impossible to verify whether or not your bonus was in fact what they had promised you. Very annoying.
The multiple scandals, trip-ups, investigations and blunders at Google sounds very eligible to be turned into its own theatrical melodrama set.
In this rehearsal, the CLO has already been "off script" for many years and the "directors" have told him that he isn't getting his $50m golden parachute this time. Instead, he leaves with nothing and takes an Uber back home. No travel expenses paid.
People zoom in on the wrong things. What this person did is one thing. In a normal company that kind of thing results in a chat with your boss and ultimately some kind of resolution that probably involves people leaving the company.
What happened here instead is years of this being the status quo with people looking the other way that really should not be. Even helping to cover this up; or even actively harassing people pointing out that this wasn't cool. Google is firing people who speak up and rewarding people who abuse their power & privilege.
This person was very gently nudged out the door when he should have obviously been fired years ago. This kind of thing is a no-brainer in modern companies. You fuck around like that and you fail to keep it a secret, that's a career ending event. It's a failure of leadership right there. That leadership is still in place. The problem is still there.
Right. I'd gotten a similar clarification from dang when I emailed mods.
When I was posting the dupe/prior notes, there'd been about 4-5 submissions within an hour, and it seemed likely the story would continue to draw submissions. A challenge in that case is that no submission gains critical mass.
A challenge of user-submission-based media aggregators.
He specifies that he was there over 20 years, prior to the company being incorporated, and only joined full-time in 2002.
That being said: David Drummond is a terrible person[0], who only has been there this long because of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's protection, because they are terrible people too[1][2]. The way Google's highest executives have treated women is disgusting and inexcusable. And while Drummond may not be getting an exit package, he sold off $200 million in stock this past year.
Please keep the "terrible person" trope off HN. The online call-out culture is good for shaming and indignation, but it wrecks curious conversation. Here we want curious conversation.
Two answers. First: sure it does. It's not about the person, it's about ourselves and what things like personal attacks do to the community [1].
The second answer is more pragmatic: in practice, it's much easier to simply ask "please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar" [2]. Everyone understands that. If we say "please don't do personal attacks" or "please don't do online shaming" about a major political figure, people mistake that for an expression of political support and object sharply. It's not worth the confusion, and I only have so much energy for explaining that it doesn't mean we're Trump supporters or communists or whatever.
> After our son was born, I received a call from HR notifying me that one of us would have to leave the legal department where David was now Chief Legal Officer (...)
This sounds like the worst possible policy I can think of. Get pregnant from your boss, and HR kicks you from the team! How does that help anyone?
The right way to implement a policy like that is to say that supervisors are not permitted to have relationships with their subordinates. That way, if such a relationship develops against the rules, it's clear upon whom the consequences should fall: the supervisor.
Supervisors get more money and power from the organization than their subordinates, so it's fair for the organization to have higher expectations for the behavior of the supervisor than the subordinate.
Agreed, but a bigger factor is the power differential, IMO: the boss has the higher need to maintain at least an image of impartiality, and it's harder for the subordinate to resist advances knowing that the giver is key in deciding when they can and can't get time off, pay rises, etc.
Google had one that said exactly that when I joined in 2009, but that post-dates the alleged affair(s) here, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was introduced directly because of this.
Drummond wasn't the only one engaged in such shenanigans, too - I can think of at least half a dozen executives (including both founders) who engaged in relationships within their reporting chain.
Supervisors also have more skin in the game so, quite trivially, making the supervisor responsible also means it's inherently easier to enforce that policy! The fact that they'd try to shift that burden onto the subordinate just tells you how much they care about following the rules, i.e. not at all.
I wonder what they would have said if her response had been, "OK, David can leave. I'm fine right here." It's hardly like they could fire her for refusing to leave her job after her boss knocked her up. Unfortunately all these kinds of hypotheticals that come up in these situations are impossible to test, because the person without power always has too much on the line to stand up and fight.
They knew the relationship was against company policy from the get go, what did they think was going happen? Two people made a poor decision and have to live with the consequences?
> aware that our relationship was in violation of Google’s new policy which went from “discouraging” direct-reporting-line relationships to outright banning them.
During manager training done by any lawyer worth their salt, it is drilled into you two hundred times that if you start a relationship with a subordinate, you have to declare this relationship to HR, you have to move jobs, and that you may be personally liable for any of the legal fallout that comes with workplace relationships/allegations of harassment/allegations of nepotism.
It seems that the execs don't get the same kind of training that line managers get. Or, perhaps, they are protected from the consequences. One set of rules for me, another for you...
Both people knew it was wrong, but Larry and Sergey's best buddy got promoted to become one of the most powerful executives on the planet and paid hundreds of millions of dollars, and the woman got pushed out of her job and left to support their kid herself.
She was forced out because it was against company policy. She wasnt forced out of google, but to a different department. And she voluntarily quit google, she was never fired. It's a sad story, but it's just adults making their own decisions that don't work out.
> so I quit Google, signing whatever documents they required because likewise, I wanted to protect him
It's not a punishment, it's to prevent nepotism and moral hazard. I think normally they will try to place you in the same role in some other project but that may not have been possible in this case(?)
The way you implement that is by proactively asking for a transfer before the relationship comes to light. If you don't do that, this is essentially proof that you were seeking to abuse the situation in some way hence penalties (on the supervisor, see my side comment) are very much appropriate.
It's not down out of cruelty, it's done out of greed. He's more important, so even though he should absolutely 1000% be the one on the chopping block, she gets forced to sales. Then he uses the financial hardship and promises from him to get her to quit.
How to tidy up a disastrous bit of professional misconduct in just a few easy completely sociopathic steps.
> David would go for months or even years at a time completely ignoring my pleas to see his son — not even so much as a text to us, despite living about a mile away.
I can see not having the desire to be with her and break up the relationship, but abandoning his child and not seeing them for years at a time is downright evil.
It's so strange to hear how Google touts itself to be at the forefront of inclusivity and tolerance, and here their executive acting this way for decades and nobody does anything.
What is "evil" about not wanting to see a child that you presumably didn't want to begin with? A woman with an unwanted pregnancy can abort. Men don't have that option. But that doesn't obligate them to an emotional bond with the child.
> What is "evil" about not wanting to see a child that you presumably didn't want to begin with?
The child doesn't get a choice about being brought into the world, so your desire or intent to produce a child is irrelevant. If you don't want to father a child, don't do anything that could reasonably lead to producing a child. If you father one anyway, that's on you. To deliberately alienate yourself from your child in that way, especially when you have the wealth and resources he does, is evil in my opinion.
> The child doesn't get a choice about being brought into the world, so your desire or intent to produce a child is irrelevant. If you don't want to father a child, don't do anything that could reasonably lead to producing a child. If you father one anyway, that's on you.
That's on a man no more than it's on a women if she gets pregnant and the previous agreement was that the guy had to use condoms and he didn't. Otherwise what you're saying is "if you don't want to get STDs or have kids never have sex". Luckily that's not how the law works.
And yet, we generally accept that women have the right to an abortion regardless of their willfully chosen actions prior. How do you square the two positions? Note that I'm not arguing that the man has a right to absolve himself of financial responsibility.
> The people in Google’s legal department were very close and in 2004, at my birthday party at the W in San Francisco, David reserved a suite to host an “after party.” It was there, that night he told me how he wanted more children. I urged to him to have one with his wife but he demurred and said that would never happen because he was estranged from her, which admittedly I already knew — he was the only married one in attendance without his spouse.
The kid was, in fact, David's idea from the get-go. He lamented at a party to a then-just-coworker about how badly he wanted more children. Of course, whether or not that was just his move to try to get a woman into an affair with him or not, we have no way of knowing.
And: "deeply at odds with the ethical standards that Google once claimed to stand for (not that we ever took them seriously when they said those things)."
Yes, this is a woman who entered a relationship and it didnt work out. Ive definitely read it and this is not a #metoo story. He didnt force himself up on, he didnt take advantage of her, he didnt threaten her, he didnt demand she date him, it's about dating someone at work when there are clear rules around it. No one said she had to leave the department, but that one of them would have to leave. It's a tragically sad story, especially for the child, but this was two consenting adults in an adult relationship that was full of bad choices.
Well, then maybe you read the story but did not understand it. That's fine with me, but I did read the story and that is not my takeaway at all.
For starters, there is a clear abuse of power here with one party being the senior person at the company suggesting that things will be 'ok' when clearly there was a plan all along to create a situation of asymmetry and dependency, followed up with a lot of very mean and manipulative action.
Besides using the child as leverage against the mother there is a clear - and continuous - act in the self interest of the dominant party, more wealthy, still employed and willing to use every dirty tactic in the book and a couple I'd never even seen before against the other.
Utterly revolting and not simply 'two consenting adults in an adult relationship full of bad choices'. That's victim blaming at its worst.
You don't punish the subordinate. Given his level, he should have been out.
Instead they transferred her from legal to sales and her performance tanked because it was a job she was in no way qualified to do.
He got her to quit (and sign a bunch of forms) promising to support her, then bailed.
He refused child support and after she sued, he started using threats against her kid to fuck with her.
This is a woman who got into a relationship, then realized that not only was the guy a complete psycho but the company had his back because he's the important one.
I did but I don't take her comments after the disappointment at face value. How dare a married, billionaire cheater not settle down with her but continue to sleep with other women?
She was an adult that entered in a consenting relationship with a married man (I can guess why), she admitted so much. Google policy or not, is irrelevant since both sides knew the deal.
It's not irrelevant, it's a blatant abuse of power.
This guy is clearly a pretty sick sort of predator.
> How dare a married, billionaire cheater not settle down with her but continue to sleep with other women?
He basically got her fired and then bailed on her and their son. He refused to pay child support despite being a millionaire and is basically in an abusive relationship with her still.
It's disgusting. It's the sort of behaviour that should ruin your personal and professional life completely.
A true all-star in his profession. Managed to protect one of the most unethical businesses in technology history from any substantial legal/regulatory consequences. His tenure at Google is comparable to OJ Simpson’s unforgettable 1973 season for the Buffalo Bills.
At the rates of return Alphabet experiences, along with such a large share percentage held by a ‘smallish’ group of founders/early supporters, many of whom are apparently credibly stated to have engaged in very similar behavior, I doubt there will much pressure from shareholders. It is doubtful, but if this was the straw that broke the regulation-impasse-camel’s back, Drummond makes a good scapegoat for current leadership.
Good, more mayhem for Google. I don't mind see them burning a bit. Hopefully the EU forces them to split up soon too.
I have had my share of monopolist corporations playing moral compass.
There is nothing toxic about Google’s culture. These are normal events in any organization of this size. They are just as focussed as ever on organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.
Curious, are the downvotes on this comment for the comment which I assumed was sarcasm, or for the fact that a non-qualified sarcastic comment is of a type of discussion HN rules discourage?
Just to clarify, I’m not being sarcastic as such, but it is makes sense why people would consider that as a possibility.
I have tended to interpret Google in the negative over time, but I have heard the kind of statement I expressed enough times that I honestly am not sure that it isn’t as true as the more negative reads are.
Bill Maris, who founded Google's venture capital arm and reported directly to Drummond before quitting in 2016, tells Axios...
"The news of David Drummond leaving Google today brings to mind a quote from one of my most favorite creatures. 'At an end, your rule is. And not short enough, it was.' I had been asked in the past why I left Google in 2016, and I have never really commented on that. David Drummond is the reason I left Google. I simply could not work with him any longer. It’s that simple. We have very, very different ideas about how to treat people, and this was a long time coming."[1]
[1]https://www.axios.com/alphabet-david-drummond-departure-7572...