I'm not sure if this impossible position is given: he fucked up. He was C-level executive, his partner got hired, but he did not tell a word to HR (or company) about their relationship. Now, you have impossible position.

If the company and HR knew about their relationship then his position might not be so impossible.

Relationships are nebulous, unpredictable things.

Sometimes it feels like even talking about a relationship to other people can effect the state of that relationship. It's easy in hindsight to say, hey, you shouldn't have done it this way. But maybe at certain points it looked like it was about to dissolve itself, but didn't... who knows. I can see a few reasons why I wouldn't want to say anything, especially if this person wasn't a direct report.

(This is taking the story at face value – who knows the truth and if there was a more nefarious reason behind the withholding of that information.)

It's a spectrum. Consider two extremes:

Smart and clean: Don't form relationships at the office, period.

Dumb and messy: As CEO, have sex with the office manager of your small startup.

This sounds like something very much in the gray area in between.

> I can see a few reasons why I wouldn't want to say anything, especially if this person wasn't a direct report.

Really?

The guy was the COO, almost by definition everyone else in the company reports to him through some direct line.

The guy admitted to having a physical relationship. There is absolutely no gray area here as far as HR would be concerned.

Your a C level exec, you have a physical relationship with someone else at the company, whether or not it stopped before that person arrived, you report it the first moment you know that person starts working at your company.

I agree relationships are messy and life has lots of gray areas. This, however, is not one of them. This is HR 101 and if your still not convinced he admitted he knew this and should have reported it.

You are absolutely, 100% right.

Wouldn't want to say anything isn't the same as wouldn't say anything. We do things all the time where we know it's the wrong call, but we want to do it a certain way anyway.

I doubt there's anyone who believes he should have said something more than he. I just get the mindset that clouded things.

I know I should have gone to the gym this week. I didn't. You can probably understand the thinking, moods and circumstances that made that true, but we'd still agree I made the wrong call. That's all I'm saying.

Is that a US specific thing only? Why would I have to disclose this deeply personal information to my employer? It is no one's business.

That said if crazy legal allegations like this come out of it I can understand the pressure. Still, it seems just wrong.

Everyone seems to agree that not disclosing this to HR was a huge mistake, but I am not sure I understand how that would have helped.

You still have a sexual relationship between two people in the same organization with a big power differential between them.

Shouldn't the proper HR response just be "you need to absolutely not do that?" What can HR do beyond "keeping an eye on things?"

The proper HR response is to remove the higher ranking officer from an "evaluatory role" and put someone else in charge of determining future promotions, demotions, bonuses, team role, etc.

Let's imagine a horribly messy situation. A professor and a graduate student that works in her lab want to become intimate. That's perfectly fine, so long as the professor gives up the ability to determine if they can graduate, dictate what classes they take, dictate pay, etc. Even cleaner because there is a record that the professor is to not be asked to evaluate performance in the future, so there's less likelihood that the other professor could be influenced.

You at some point do have to assume that people are trying to do things correctly, of course. But the more people there are who are aware of the situation the less likely it is that a conspiracy to cover up abuse of power will occur.

for starters, they could extensively document how the person with more power had absolutely no impact on the other's relationship with the company.

When I read his post I was thinking "That's sad. Hope it works out for him."

But when you realise he's a C-Level exec, it's more a case of "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!"

There is a straightforward way to address this situation. It is unfortunate that he either was not aware of it or did not avail himself of it.

Basically any sexual harassment training will tell you that yes, it is in fact okay to have a work place relationship so long as you disclose the relationship, and do not have a "evaluatory position" (meaning that either person is allowed to evaluate the performance of the other).

This was like stuff I was told on day one of working a real job. This sounds like an awful situation, so I hope anyone else in a similar situation realizes that disclosure is the only thing that disarms these sorts of situations.

HR is required to keep such things confidential, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a work place relationship. And if you do this, what can really go wrong? If your relationship explodes into some dramatic fireball, sure, it sucks, but that's the reason you're in a non-evaluatory role. You may have to work in the same building, but at least you don't have your career path impacted by your ex.

In this case he didn't have an evaluatory position, so why is its HRs business?

Agreed. It was a great post, but #2 (not informing the employer of the relationship) essentially vetos the rest of the statement.

If you are a C-level executive then this sort of disclosure is fundamental - a good lesson to take away.

Wrong order. He had a romantic relationship, THEN recommended him to Square for a job (without disclosing the relationship). Not an impossible position at all-- more of an abuse of trust.

That seems an overly salacious interpretation. You're reading from the same text that said he had nothing to do with the hiring.

Recommending someone with technical skills work at your startup only crosses a line when you're both porking them and directly making the hiring decision, which if we're taking this at face value, didn't happen.

True, but I think the point stands: it's not an impossible position, because the partner never had to work at Square in the first place. If he can get a job at Square, he could most likely get a job anywhere in SF/the Valley.

You wrote, “recommended him to Square for a job”

Keith wrote, “I recommended that he interview at Square.”

The first is a recommendation given to Square. The second is a recommendation given to the thus-far-anonymous party. Big difference.

Perhaps it will come out that Keith did put in a good word at Square, but thus far Keith is denying this.

That's not quite his story either -- his claim is that he suggested to his romantic partner that they apply at Square, and was not involved at all in the actual hiring.

Doesn't it seem likely to anyone else that Keith Rabois was not openly homosexual or bisexual, and that is the reason he didn't report the relationship to the company?

Or am I missing something really obvious?

There's so much implicit wrongness in your statement my mind doesn't know where to lock on to respond. Sorry.

edit: I figured it out.

You seem to desire a world where Square is exalted to some sort of sovereign status, answerable to no law beyond their own policies and procedures. Which is a horrifying state of affairs.

If something happened here that is against the law, I am heartened that a legal framework exists to provide remedies. If it did not, I am similarly heartened to note that the accused at least has resources sufficient to mount a defense. We can argue the injustice of a false accusation, if indeed it turns out the accusation was so, but the accused admits maintaining a physical relationship was in poor judgment. This is one of the realities that comes from that level of success. It's a cost of doing business that you must be much, much more cautious in the deployment of your genitals.

I guess I just don't see who, other than the couple in question, was harmed here. Is the author being intentionally vague about what really happened? Was Square harmed? Was a third party harmed?

You seem to desire a world where Square is exalted to some sort of sovereign status, answerable to no law beyond their own policies and procedures. Which is a horrifying state of affairs.

Why would it be a horrifying state of affairs? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand!

> Why would it be a horrifying state of affairs? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand!

Well.

It would mean that corporations would exist outside of laws to govern their behavior. And we've already figured out that's a bad idea.

Society, generally, wants it to be illegal to force people to fuck you to keep a job, in an extreme example.

Generally, it wants it to be legal to blow the whistle on illegal activity.

Generally, it wants it to be illegal to prioritize profits over the safety of workers.

Being successful and making lots of money shouldn't relieve your company of accountability under the law.

> Was Square harmed?

Square's reputation would have been harmed by a protracted and public legal battle.

> I guess I just don't see who, other than the couple in question, was harmed here.

There's not a couple here. There's an accuser, who claims that Rabois sexually harassed him and that Square covered for it.

Where it gets complicated for Rabois, I suspect, comes with this line:

"exchanged intimate, personal information, as people in similar relationships often do."

This suggests to me that the accuser has sufficient proof that Rabois can't deny a sexual relationship continuing after the hire. Given the asymmetry of power between these two sexual partners, consent starts to get very muddy to sort out.

So he had to leave, given the very real legal issues this opened for the company.

Imagine a company with the official policy that feeding your kids is not important. Can employees off that company now starve their children without fear of legal consequence? How about beating up fellow employees - oh too bad, you should have worked somewhere with a policy against assault?

So managers should be allowed to require their employees to have sex with them as a condition of their continued employment?

I'm not saying that's what happened here; rather, the laws against this sort of arrangement are what the alleged "victim" is invoking to bring a case against Mr. Rabois.

Yours is a remarkable position. The accuser asserts that he was coerced into sex by Keith, who (simplifying slightly) ran the company and set the policies. Do you think someone like Keith should have the authority to set policies that allow him to coerce his employees into sex? Like a US slave owner before the Civil War?

I'm not asserting that Keith did what he's accused of. But many, many other people have, and if we have to choose, I'd rather see the state monopoly on violence used to protect the victims, not the perpetrators.