Lots of reasons... 'the firm' isn't its own thing, it is controlled by the executive team, and the people making decisions about how to respond to allegations like these are the peers of the person being accused... they are likely close and know each other well, so they are more likely to believe and want to protect their friend.
In addition, often times the other executives also behave in the same way as the accused exec and want to protect themselves.
It may also have nothing to do with friendships with the accused offender whatsoever. Maybe they also hate the accused offender.
One thing big orgs do a LOT LOT LOT of is cover-ups. I would imagine (gut estimate) 1% or less of such saucy dramatic events ever float out into the public due to limited media coverage and cover ups. It's not about covering whatever accused who is accused of doing this, no, it's about protecting the fine name and reputation of the firm.
So they aren't saying necessarily "we don't care" in a typical case, more like "we care.. buuuut we care way more about our own org, so we're hushing this all up like it never happened and it will never see the light of day".
This is particularly true of very big or very prestigious orgs, your McKinseys, your Goldman, Your Harvard, your Stanford, your federal government, and so on
Employers are overly protective if charges have not been filed and litigated due to the reputational impact it might have.
It can also potentially mean the employer is liable as well for not protecting the victim - such as the case being litigated in the article, where Blumberg Capital is alleged to have tried to hush up sexual harassment allegations.
Furthermore, in relationship heavy fields like Entrepreneurship, power politics can and do happen - look at what David Sacks did to Parker Conrad.
Sacks only stopped because PG and sama both threatened to blackball A16Z. Now imagine if you are a less connected founder like Parker Conrad - you don't have many options and if you go public, you might be blackballed despite being the victim.
Having seen this multiple times before[1] I think a lot of time it’s partly embarrassment and partly acting on bad legal advice because they kinda know about it and have been turning a blind eye. The legal advice is bad as well as immoral because the coverup is only going to make any liability worse.
[1] including one where it was an open secret but the guy was pretty powerful in his world. He’s in jail for rape now so make of that what you will.
Groups approximately never like outsiders imposing consequences on group members.
This shows up everywhere. It's why whistleblower protection laws exist. It's why it's reportedly hazardous for the cops to interrupt domestic disputes. It's why various organizations keep getting caught covering up bad behavior by their members.
My understanding is this is why it's a "Jury of your peers".
Someone from outside the community is an alien and would convict differently than someone who is more integrated with the scenario. Not only is the understanding of the situation different, but the incentives are different.
The scale of society has changed, but imagine what this was like when communities were smaller.
this just reminded me of the warriors video of draymond green punching his teammate. the organization was more mad that the video got out than anything else. Steve Kerr who likes to moralize carries endless weight for the misdeeds of his players. Institutions protect themselves foremost as a law of nature
> Groups approximately never like outsiders imposing consequences on group members.
It's also worth considering why this happens, instead of just regarding it as something people do because they're inherently malevolent.
Suppose you suspect your organization of violating some law. You think they're supposed to be using some safety feature on their equipment and they're not, or what have you. In a normal organization, you report this to the leadership and if it's a real problem they fix it, because they know what happens if you report it to law enforcement or it causes someone to get hurt and they don't want that.
Now suppose one of your members reports it to law enforcement instead of the organization's leadership. Government inspectors show up and you have to pay lawyers to deal with them, and lawyers are expensive. Reporters write negative stories about you. These things happen even if the person reporting it was wrong and there was never a real problem. Worse, these outsiders are not always that diligent and you could be prosecuted or dragged through the mud despite the person reporting it being the one who made an error. And if they didn't make an error -- if the problem was real -- that's even worse, because now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem. Many laws are even implicitly written under the expectation that honest mistakes are handled internally and only intransigent bastards get reported to the government, so anyone who goes there first is going to be a pariah.
This is legitimately hard to fix because there is a trade off between cost and accuracy. If investigators are more diligent, so they get the result right more often, they have to spend more time finding out what's really going on in an organization they don't come into it with any internal understanding of. Which imposes costs on both the government and the possibly-innocent subject of the investigation. But if they're less diligent then they'll be imposing penalties on innocent people more often. In both cases, any group is not going to want there to be an investigation and is going to be resentful of anyone who causes there to be one.
Governments often make this worse by trying to make it better and imposing penalties on people who fail to report. Because that requirement doesn't eliminate the structural incentive -- if nobody reports then nobody gets punished for not reporting -- but now the group is going to respond with more severe retaliation for reporting because you've just given everyone who didn't report it the incentive to protect the perpetrators to protect themselves and to retaliate against anybody who does.
What you really want here is to do the opposite. Limit the costs and consequences to the unrepentant actual perpetrators, and make sure they're actually guilty, so you don't give the general group the impression that they're all in the same boat and should be collectively fighting against their enemies in the other tribe.
> now you're getting convicted instead of having an opportunity to correct the problem
You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case, and is provably almost the norm in countless other cases like this. There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
Even assuming that these were honest mistakes (I don't believe so), the actions taken by leadership in most of these situations tend to wring the complainant out of the system. If there's a "free market" way to resolve these problems, this certainly ain't it, which calls for regulations. If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters. Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Failure to report isn't the problem here. It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
> You have completely ignored the fact that this is literally the opposite of what has (likely) happened in this case
What happens in a particular case is not what motivates behavior in the aggregate. People have incomplete information and use heuristics. If you set up a system that causes people to loath interacting with the government, the prevailing heuristics come to be about what you would expect.
> There was an opportunity to make things right by the leadership. They did not choose to do so. At every step along the way.
And that's what the system we have encourages. The prevailing rules and political climate empirically lead to this result.
> If those regulations aren't strong enough to coerce the intended result (if you find out one of your employees acted in this manner, immediately contact law enforcement and let them figure it out, otherwise you're in trouble as well), then you are actively encouraging an extrajudicial mechanism for resolving these matters.
Consider the alternatives you've laid out here.
Their first option is to go to law enforcement right away, but that immediately leads to a scandal, bad PR, legal expenses, etc. Unless you can significantly mitigate these deterrents, people will inherently have a disinclination to do this, whether it's "required" or not.
Their second option is to try to arbitrate the situation internally. This has an intrinsic advantage because you get an attempt to handle things by people who know the parties and their circumstances, and if it turns out to be a false accusation or some other shenanigans you don't get a public scandal. And if that doesn't work the first option is still available afterwards. So people are going to want to start here.
Now suppose you say that they're not allowed to start there. People are still going to want to and a lot of times they're still going to do it anyway. But once they have, they're now under much more pressure to make sure it goes away even if it turns out not to be a false accusation, because the initially-innocent people who were just trying to avoid a scandal are now regarded as co-conspirators who could be charged if they don't engage in an effective coverup. That is a helluva perverse incentive to create.
> Specifically, you're encouraging civil remedies vs. criminal ones.
Which is a trade off but not always the worst one.
> It's that the failure to report has no consequences on people with adequate power, who get to create their own kangaroo court of dispute and certainly resolve cases to their own benefit.
"People with power will use their power to their own advantage" is nearly a tautology. The question is, how do you create a system that produces reasonable outcomes in that context?
A system that causes intuitive human responses to put people into a situation that exercise of power is necessary to extricate them from it is going to both encourage that result and disadvantage people without influence, which is bad. Ideally you want a system that doesn't harm any innocent people because it's efficient and reasonable, so people don't expect to be unjustly damaged by interacting with it.
Your mindset is responsible for so much corruption and abuse. It is sad to see someone smart spend so much time on this - even worse is to imagine the untalkable things you have seen and done.
If you want systems to work they have to reflect how people will respond to them in reality. Otherwise you get unmitigated fiascos like the War on Drugs.
If you make something more expensive, people do it less. If you make engaging with the government more expensive, it's not different. Imposing costs on group members who are not themselves the perpetrators will do that. Creating a system that can ruin the accused even if they're innocent motivates people to circle the wagons.
This isn't an argument that the way people respond is normatively good. But the way people respond is what actually happens, so if that's not what you wanted, you need a different system that doesn't cause people to resist its mechanism because the system itself indiscriminately damages friendlies.
You see, it is not because something is logical that we should accept the immorality of it as a fact. You don't need to be evil because the world is full of evil people :)
You do, however, need a system that accomplishes what you want it to in practice, rather than only on paper, if your goal is to make things better rather than just getting reelected by telling people what they want to hear.
I completely agree with you. It's astonishing how many policy makers think in terms of how they wish the world to function, instead of how it actually functions.
Obviously, in a war against other humans, you'd never want the executives who know your weaknesses, to be your enemies. Usually the challenger will be an agent with less knowledge—easy to tackle them.
Admitting blame in any form exposes you to all sorts of litigation potential.
Since it's impossible to know definitively that every hire you make is a good human, it's inevitable that someone will come along who can really do damage.
That said, culpability at the org level is mostly optics, unless it's a systemic problem. Which this could be.
TLDR if you have a legal team, they'll demand you say nothing and not admit any wrongdoing.
I have to agree with lazide here. One poignant example is a man who accepts the fatherly role of a child can become legally liable for that child's wellbeing, support payments etc., whether or not the child is actually his biologically.
Therefore it is not _the action_ of having a child that exposes the man to legal liability, it is verbally accepting and or acting as if the child is his (cases and situations vary greatly).
This is part of why saying "Sorry" is so heavily avoided in certain subcultures, because it accepts culpability.
You can end up with mountains of liability while doing nothing wrong. And doing plenty of things wrong while having no practical liability (due to leverage).
Frankly, it’s so common that lawyers often don’t even care about what actually happened, rather what can be spun/alluded to/proven.
In the American system the lawyer is also obligated to give you the best defense possible, actually caring about what happened might make that more difficult.
Assuming the article is reporting it faithfully, before.
Doesn't meet any definition of "protective". I don't know the details here, but if the person did such thing claimed and deserves punishment, it's for society via the criminal justice system to decide and hand out.
2% seemed low so I looked it up and that's the amount that goes to exclusively female founding teams. 20% goes to founders with a female cofounder on the team. Just clarification for anyone else who got confused by that.
I don't think so. My line of thinking was that you don't consider all the names you hear that belong to someone without a matching job - the ones that stick out are the ones that match. I believe this is confirmation bias.
I don't really understand what you're complaining about. She did inform the police. She was also at the conference in a professional capacity with two colleagues who got her drunk and raped her. According to you she's just supposed to ignore that connection as if it were some assault by random strangers? Just... not ever bring it up at work? Weird.
This thread is wretched enough without lunging into personal attack as you did here. We ban users who do this and you unfortunately have a history of doing it. Please don't do it again.
Calling someone an "enabler" of "dark triad bullshit" after snarkily misrepresenting their comment in the nastiest way is...certainly a personal attack by HN standards. Not only that but it's all-internet-tropes—something else the HN guidelines ask you to avoid.
I referenced comments from this year, 2 years ago, and 5 years ago to make the point that this has been a problem for a long time. There's more where that came from (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31213019 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20079646). Worse, you've been either breaking or (let's call it) stretching the site guidelines in many of your other recent comments. That's not good.
But I didn't ban you because I saw other comments, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41187694 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40971535, which are within the intended spirit of HN—especially the latter one, which struck me as thoroughly decent. Moderation has to go by the worst things people post, not the best things, but I always stretch to avoid banning someone who posts good things like that.
If you'll post more of those good things and fewer nasty things and especially avoid attacking others in the future, that would be a good improvement.
If an employee of mine committed assault, I'd absolutely wish to know - both to protect my own employees as well as to manage my own insurance liabilities.
In addition, most hiring contracts require employees who have been charged to report this to HR.
Absolutely, and not even assault. If an employee of mine was making people feel uncomfortable and potentially damaging my organisation's brand with their behaviour, I'd want to know immediately. And at the very least have a strongly-worded conversation about it. If they then showed no signs of adjusting their behaviour, I'd remove them from a position where they can damage the brand any more.
Letting it get to the point that police are involved is waaay too late.
Tbh if I heard that an employee of mine had a fully-consensual sexual encounter with a client, I'd be asking pointy questions. This is a business not a dating service or a swinger's club. Keep it professional, people.
Machiavellian in the sense of "Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace" [1] or what? (Machiavelli is a good person to pay attention to, in my opinion)
Since you broached the meta first, here's some feedback on the downvotes:
1. "HN hivemind" never goes over well.
2. "Rage-boner" is an ironically sexual metaphor for a comment on this topic. You could legitimately get in trouble for using that kind of language in a company that takes sexual harassment seriously, so it's a bit jarring to see it in your comment given the topic and your expressed opinion on it.
3. As the HN guidelines say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." Commenting about downvotes will generally get you more downvotes even if the rest of your content is fine.
I agree that I broke HN rules, yet I've grown tired of the meta being used sparingly (not the fault of the mod team per say, but more so a reflection of how much HN usership has grown over the past 3-4 years).
This connects with a point I've made to Dang multiple times over the years - ban any and all culture war topics like this from HN, they only degrade the platform.
Alternatively, HN rules need to be reformed - HN is no longer a niche platform used by a handful of connected techies.
I've even shown cases where accounts that Meta's abuse team linked to nation state disinfo campaigns remained active on HN [0]
I see these in the court document linked in the child comment, which looks like it's the same case, but not in the (archive version of the) Bloomberg article.
