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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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.