Slashdot Mirror
Drunkeness and Sexual Harassment Alleged At Microsoft UK
rtfa-troll writes "A picture of vodka fountains, indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister, and sexual harassment is emerging from Microsoft. The former second in command at Microsoft UK was accused of sexual misconduct involving at least five separate women. A Microsoft internal investigation was unable to prove the allegations but decided to fire Simon Negus for having 'behaved dishonestly, and thereby acted in a manner calculated or likely to destroy trust and confidence between him and Microsoft' and sue him £75k. Now Negus, who already has a new job as COO at Upstream Systems has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories. I guess we can now guess why senior managers go away to Microsoft vowing never to buy anything and come back with signed contracts; presumably it was just lying there next to them in the morning and they were too afraid to ask what happened."
This happens at every company.....until someone reports it.
Where does the signature go?
Unless it's a small startup formed with people you're friends with, there's not much worse than a corporate culture of socially coerced "fun". Let's party with the boss!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Are.... are you Dr. Bob's "alt"?
Now Negus, who already as a new job as COO at Upstream Systems
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
now I want to work at MS.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Pictures or it didn't happen.
Trying for another Windows ME, I see.
That's even true for politicians.
Microsoft has deprecated sex. We're supposed to use the master bait now instead.
Pretty weak troll. You should have stopped after paragraph one. About a 3 on a scale of 1-10. For the record, Dr. Bob sits at a solid 10.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.
Let me guess, everything you learned about women you learned on TV? And you're still single you say? Marvelous, simply marvelous.
Bruce Molholland, is that you?
My work here is dung.
...why MSFT is always in the top three of the "top employers" rankings. And it looks like they only ask men in these surveys.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
No mention of him having his hand removed and replaced with a robotic one?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Do women hate sex? They do, but do you know why? Is it because of some kind of woman-guilt from an outdated puritan societal dogma? Or perhaps a stigma of guilt or a fear of abandonment? No. None of these things are it. Women hate sex simply because they are lousy at it.
I seriously get the impression it's you that is doing something wrong there mate. From what I can tell, women don't hate sex, certainly not the women I've been with, they just think there's much more to life than just that. And they'd be right.
By the way, it is entirely possible to take flirting too far. There's absolutely nothing wrong with flirting, but no means no and alcohol is not an excuse.
IT's a work function, you don't flirt. It' puts pressure on people because they are afraid to loose their job. And why are you overlooking the part where he kept touching them inappropriately?
"course weared sexy short skirts and shirts that highlights their boobs.
ah. You are blaming victims so yu can not feel guilt about seeing women as sex objects.
Why would you company a women leg to a penis...I mean my penis* could be confused with a leg, but not most others.
"Do women hate sex?"
Just with you.
"They do, but do you know why? "
no, they don't.
" Women hate sex simply because they are lousy at it."
ah, the blaming of women for your own sexual inadequacy.
You are a sociopath. A dangerous one.
*ob. lrg penis joke.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It was sounding great, but I could have used a little more subluxation.
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you.
Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
The old boys club. It's killing industry worldwide.
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol. I can count one part-time guy in my entire career of the top of my head, and he was the one who was planning to go into the seminary when he finished his undergraduate degree.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Where's Dr Bob when you need him?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Negus...has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies' lavatories.
So because someone else acted improperly, he thinks it was OK for him to do so too? I hope he gets laughed out of court.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
It depends. There are plenty of women who enjoy sex. But they are easily painted off as whores.
Or there are women who confuse sex with love and get hurt all the time after someone just "played them", so they choose not to get burned anymore.
Then there are the women who fuse sex with love and don't give their body unless they're in a loving relationship and feel a connection.
For men sex is a whole different kind of thing. And flirting and such serves another purpose or goal for each sex.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I thought it was hilarious and it made me feel better about myself for not being a bitter woman-hater.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Where's Davide Brent? LOL.
And so on.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Now Oracle has acquired a man who knows HP and probably would like nothing better than to move into the president's office after the cheap Oracle takeover and start firing some people. It is a terrible way to run business, but it makes a lot of sense.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They're just trying to achieve the Ballmer peak! http://xkcd.com/323/
If you get high enough up in a company, you can do whatever you want, get in whatever trouble you want, and some smaller company will always hire you. Another recent(ish?) example I can think of is Mark Hurd from HP, Oracle immediately gave him a job.
The old boys club. It's killing industry worldwide.
Nope, it's the reward for building a ladder of other people's bodies to climb your way to the top.
postmodernsideshow.com
Or a fucking moron.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
FTFA:
"Mr Negus, who claims he left a more senior position at Dell because of assurances he would eventually succeed Mr Frazer at Microsoft, was ranked as the top performing “level 69” partner at the company worldwide, posing a potential threat to his superior."
Unlikely_ look at the products of MICROsoft. No sex in it at all.
Even though knowing this isn't an uncommon practice at the corporate level it still makes me a little sick to read about the shameless expense fund. The harassment allegations almost seem like a secondary grievance.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
...they kept telling me that Microsoft Office is such a fuc*ing piece of crap
Poor baby. Sucks to be you, huh? Not once in your life, has a (actually, more than ten in my lifetime) woman grabbed you in a bar, and told you, "You're going home with me tonight!" Nor, have you ever experienced a (different) woman dragging you to the bedroom, saying "Gotta make hay while the sun shines", totally ignoring your protests that you need a shower. You can't find a woman who DEMANDS to have your baby? Damn. Sometimes I think life sucks but it would REALLY suck to be you! Everyone has their highs and lows - except you. All you know, is lows!!
I could recommend that you go see a shrink - but the shrink won't get you laid or anything. All he can do is make you feel better about not getting laid.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Microsoft's Campus in Charlotte has had many issues in the past.
Sexual harassment claims like crazy such as this one.
They've caught people having sex in the stairwell.
Female employees harasses on numerous occasions only for the reports to be suppressed because of superiors.
One engineer was trying to lure underage girls using the teleconference room.
I won't even talk about the pill popping SQL Team :-O
The cluster team likes uppers... (meth heads)
The list goes on and on... and on some more.
When one programmer panda touches another programmer panda in a private place without permission, that makes me a saaaad panda :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well, actually the first article says that it was an annual sales conference, and generally you'd notice everyone even mentioned is a manager or HR consultant or such. E.g., the woman he asked to flutter her eyelashes is apparently a HR consultant, at a quick googling.
What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃgermeister for the peons?
So unless you were some sales manager or such, yeah, probably you wouldn't see that happening at any company you worked for, or even at MS. They're not going to do that for the likes of YOU, of course.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Take a flat tire on a moonless night for instance. While a man is out changing nuts and bolts and doing all manner of screwing on the side of the road, will a woman so much as think to grab a flashlight and help? No.
If he's already doing all manner of screwing on the side of a road, having a women grab a flashlight and do whatever with it would not be necessary or helpful; in fact it could be very painful.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This kind of behaviour is typical in non competitive organizations which live on taxpayers money.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news-in-pictures/news-briefly/windows-7-designed-'during-massive-piss%11up'-201109014257/
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Wait, shirts that highlights their boobs.; you think boobs are sexually attractive? You do know that they're just modified sweat glands that are used for feeding baby primates, right? And you want to color on them with fluorescent markers?
Your weird!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Of course the Negus is going to get drunk and harass females.
The more important question is, what are hyoo-mahn females doing with clothes on in the first place?
Someone ought to be thrown off the Tower of Commerce for this.
I thought that was hilarious, but as I was reading it, it seemed rather unlikely that someone could come up with that entire thing in time to be the first post. And of course, he didn't. Everything after the first paragraph is copied from someone named Dick Masterson, "the most chauvinistic man alive". http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/why-women-hate-sex/
I'm willing to bet the real reason he's filing the suit is because he was rejected by Debra. Like a baus.
They are becoming more and more alike. It seems the GNU guys were right all along. Microsoft Church
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
http://www.reynholm.co.uk/
Maybe some of you are not familiar with this iconic corporation, but it is well known to have such problems in its offices.
Yeah... but having dated a girl who had a "problem car", the part about the flashlight made me laugh out loud.
If women would stay at home making babies, cleaning house, and cooking dinner the way God intended, this problem of "sexual harassment" in the workplace wouldn't be a problem. Women don't belong in the workplace. It's a scourge.
Isn't that the name of the Evil Necromancer from some supernatural pot-boiler?
Either that, or the Jewish Aleister Crowley.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Thanks for your insight. It's always nice to get a view of how others might see things from the outside of a situation.
In this case, I believe the class of "others" in question is that of the closeted homosexual.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One thing that consistently seems to happen at startups is that once they have more than a dozen or so people, there's a Friday afternoon beer party, and when the company gets up to 100-200 people they hire a professional HR department, whose first move is to kill the beer party.
But also, this is the UK Microsoft, and apparently it's more socially acceptable to get ripping drunk in the UK than it is in the US.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wait, shirts that highlights their boobs.;
you think boobs are sexually attractive? You do know that they're just modified sweat glands that are used for feeding baby primates, right? And you want to color on them with fluorescent markers?
Your weird!
That would be "you're wierd", not "your wierd". Learn to spell.
Boobs are sex organs. To fulfil their part time function as mammary glands they have no need to be as large or as sensitive.
âoeThe measure of a man is what he does with power.â -- Plato
(And to keep with times, I'd say it goes for women too.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That would be "you're wierd", not "your wierd". Learn to spell.
Oh, the ironey...
Wearing a short skirt is so much less inappropriate than repeatedly touching somebody who doesn't want to be touched, that it doesn't really deserve to be discussed at the same time.
And even if it was on the same level, person A doing something wrong doesn't excuse person B doing something wrong.
Powerful, self motivated executives think they're better than the common employee!!! News at 11:00.
So good luck with that.
I wish it was that clear.
For a start, Hurd wiped out almost all R&D. Which is pretty much guaranteed to boost stock in the short run by reducing costs. It also usually signals the spiral into death or becoming an irrelevant a me-too OEM for a tech company.
He also managed to drag the morale into the fucking ground, pretty much. And managed come across as a huge hypocrite by posing as cutting even his own salary in his quest to slash everyone else's... but have his compensation raised by the exact same amount. So, you know, way to say, "fuck you, it only applies to you peons after all." Padding his travel expenses on top of that, just made it all the more petty.
Anyone coming after that would face a stock drop sooner or later even if they did nothing but continue Hurd's line, because that's what's coming after such a policy. Trying to get back into being a tech company, well, that raises the costs right back in the short run and the payoff will be later, so it was pretty much predictable that it will drop the stock price even more.
I would hardly consider such (occasionally destructive) Wall Street metrics to be relevant for an apples-to-apples comparison of two CEOs.
As for Oracle, meh, Larry is a bit of Captain Asshole on a personal crusade to make the world safer for rich assholes everywhere to abuse their power. You can almost picture him swooping away, with his cape flowing in the wind, after saving some prick from those peons who thought to hold him responsible for some sexual harrassment or sexism or such, while starry-eyed crowds go, "Thank you, Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you!" But I doubt even he would blow that many billions just so Hurd can have his petty revenge. Now maybe if it was Larry's personal revenge, or rescuing yet another asshole CEO, he might do it, but I doubt he'll bet the company just to make Mark Hurd's day.
You have to give the man credit though, at least he puts his money where is convictions are. Many will offer lip service to why it should be like in the good old days when it was ok for a CEO to harass subordinates or for an academic to hold public speeches about how women are dumber. (Bonus points if they actually just prove how a little sexism adds up.) But it takes someone like Larry to actually go on public record as trying to financially bully a college into tolerating such a sexist prick, or to actually blow some money to make a point that Hurd should be allowed to be a flaming asshole, dammit. Hats off, not many people would do that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The source given is The Register. Considering every story I've read there has been dishonestly distorted, I'll pass on reading the fake article.
From TFA:
"Mr Negus, who claims he left a more senior position at Dell because of assurances he would eventually succeed Mr Frazer at Microsoft, was ranked as the top performing “level 69” partner at the company worldwide, posing a potential threat to his superior."
I LOL'ed out loud when I read that...
So the problem is that we don't know how much Jeagermeister there is? Is there a Jaegermeister Uncertainly Principal?
Wearing a short skirt is not appropriate, it makes men uncomfortable too. The door swings in both directions.
Appropriate is a matter of cultural choice. There have been many cultures where wondering around naked was fine. If you want your women to be invisible head to toe then you are making a sick and really sad cultural choice. It's people like you who make the office environment more boring and uniform. Worse, it's fundamentally a snobbish discrimination which picks a certain middle class dress and defines it as "appropriate" and then makes the others have to try (and inevitably, in small details fail) to copy that standard instead of just accepting that different people have different tastes and we should judge people by their ability. I can even understand that within a given company because the company its self is also judged. That doesn't make it right. Men who feel uncomfortable can get counselling or just come to terms with and accept their latent homosexuality and get a boyfriend instead.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
For men sex is a whole different kind of thing. And flirting and such serves another purpose or goal for each sex.
As a man, for me, sex is always emotional... perhaps I'm odd, but having sex with someone, even one night stands, generally means something. And I have done the seemingly "meaningless" one night stands quite a few times, and I've got a lot out of them - not just the sex. I can't think of one time I've had sex when I didn't like the person I was having sex with. YMMV.
Just because you know you're probably not going to see the other person again, doesn't mean they're a lump of meat.
As I said, perhaps I'm odd... I've never had sex when it's been _just_ sex - I've never disliked anyone who I've had sex with.
Also, bear in mind, that on average heterosexual men and women will have exactly the same numbers of partners - men will over-report, women will under-report. That's a problem with our culture. You can't get around the fact that men and women by definition have on average exactly the same number of partners, but men always claim more, and women always claim less. Everyone is lying about their sex life, men are ashamed by having too few partners, and women are ashamed by having too many, generally. It's fucking stupid, and it's getting worse.
That is the only way they can be seen and heard and the only way they can do something that gets noticed outside of the kitchen. Tell lies, tell lies, tell lies and exaggerate.
"indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister"
Isn't Jaeger one of those drinks whose quantity is indefinite more or less by definition? Like absinthe. Or Special Brew...
A woman I knew who worked at Microsoft in Brazil was told that her husband couldn't be covered on her health insurance, even though male employees' wives were all covered by their husbands' Microsoft-provided policies. When she started to say that was unfair, she was told to back off. I guess sexism at Microsoft is a worldwide thing.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I've been out after work with groups of people from both Microsoft and Dell in the UK a few times. In some parts of this country (for IT folks anyway), serious drinking after work happens a lot. In my experience the Microsoft folks were very restrained when it came to drinking. The folks from Dell seemed a little more serious about it ...perhaps the guy came from Dell and didn't quite get the new culture?
As a Computer Science student at one of the UK's better universities I can safely say, Microsoft can throw a good party. I'm not a huge fan of their software of general behaviour but they certainly know how to attract new graduates. They've had 3 talks over my current university career and each one has ended in an open bar for everyone who attended. All things equal I would rather work at a company which is slightly inappropriate than one which isn't.
Amen, brother!
Hint: It's spelled "irony".
I've just realized what's missing where I work (besided job satisfaction). Vodka fountains and a stock of whiskey.
thank you Professor Higgins
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
You do realize we evolved to find them attractive, because other animals only grow them when in heat (and the other animals find them attractive as a secondary sexual characteristic too).
But human females evolved to have them permanently to show the fact that they are essentially always fertile (I mean compared to animals that go into heat once a year). Thus the women that had boobs had more babies, thus passing the trait onto further generations.
For ages we've wondered why anyone would purchase windows or sign any kind of deal with microsoft. This Explains why: They were drunk.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Then what about anuses? Are they sex organs because they can be sensitive?
Liking huge tits that are bigger than her shoulder width is weird. Stop projecting your latent feelings for your mother onto women, sick fuck! As for me, see my sig.
Liking huge tits that are bigger than her shoulder width is weird. Stop projecting your latent feelings for your mother onto women, sick fuck! As for me, see my sig.
It's something I picked up in an anthropology course. It makes sense to me, breasts are 80% non functional. Now why would that be if it wasn't to attract the other sex?
That, plus it seems to me that most men, present company excepted, fixate on boobs.
Your milage obviously differs, maybe I'm a sick fuck, but I'm sick the same way everyone else is.
It's OK to be gay though, anuses are sensitive too. Boobs aren't for everyone.
Typical british from working there for 3 years that's what most people were doing, getting drunk and spending their money in booze.
Why isn't this modded up as funny? This is a fantastic, stream-of-consciousness pile of awesome. For my money, it doesn't get any better than when Michael Bolton sings, "That's because women hate holding flashlights, because they are complete rubbish at it."
Bravo!
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
It looks like you want to sexually molest your co-worker. Would you like some help with that?
but was sacked recently for coming to work sober!
Must have been using a Pentium processor to keep track of the allegations.
The question has to be asked : were sequential, or simultaneous harassments?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Also, bear in mind, that on average heterosexual men and women will have exactly the same numbers of partners - men will over-report, women will under-report.
Men will over-report to other men, but will under-report to women.
Women will under-report to men, and god knows what they report to other women.