Drunkeness and Sexual Harassment Alleged At Microsoft UK 159
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."
Meh (Score:2)
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This wasnt the craziest part, the sexism was prevalent, including pay differences.
So I left.
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Unfortunately, everywhere is so "PC" these days, and afraid of any kind of problems from sue happy people.
Kinda sux that some people looking to make a buck out of suing ruin it for us all.
Hell, the open bar Xmas party now is becoming a thing of the past....in some ways, the old days WERE better...at least more fun.
Political Correctness at Startups (Score:2)
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.
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I used to work for a large multi-national (Australian division) where we used to have quite a few senior managers from the UK.
While Australians have a reputation for hard drinking, the UK guys would typically start earlier, go longer and get totally wrecked. Then be up the next morning roaring to go. I remember at one work event we were informed that the company would no longer be welcome to book accomodation at that venue because someone decided around midnight to start playing carpet bowls in the lounge a
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You can still have social functions, they just have to be stupid, like everyone riding go-karts or playing laser tag in the hopes that this will make our product better.
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Go-karts & laser tag aren't fun?
We even did bocce ball, which I thought was going to be boring, but was fun.
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Supplying hookers doesn't always go well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E4yrqGGLPo [youtube.com]
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This happens at every company.....until someone reports it.
I'm a pretty big Microsoft hater but I have to say I totally agree with you.
People with any kind of power will abuse it and men often abuse their position to get female attention. The women who flirt with the boss get good reviews, the women that sleep with the boss get big pay raises, the ones that have their kids get jobs for life on pay they could not otherwise justify. It happens everywhere just like fiddling expenses and booking extra flights to collect air miles. It's not seen as wrong until someone s
Reminds me of a quote (Score:2)
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.)
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Mij
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The bing results are very similiar to the google results. The only difference is the bloomberg article which is link 1 on google is link 12 on bing.
I think we're just seeing a difference in the ranking algorithms... google is pushing "news" harder than the facebook, linked in, etc stuff.
As for not finding it on msnbc... its not on CNN either, or Fox News, or CBS News... so I don't read much into that at all either.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Why doesn't this ever happen at companies I work at? The places I've worked suck the sex drive out, along with motivation, sense of self-preservation and sometimes even the desire to breathe.
Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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The logic goes something along the lines of the Employer is legally responisble for providing a safe work environment, free from threat of phyisical injury, bullying or harrasment. As the function is arranged and funded by the employer, it is considered an extension of the workplace, and all workplace protection responsibilities apply.
That's not to say that if someone criminally assulted someone else they wouldn't be held personally responsible in the eyes of the law. But an employer could potentially be se
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What? Did you think they had parties with unlimited vodka and JÃfgermeister for the peons?
I'm a developer but a bit more outgoing than your average bunch of devs. And it's my experience that there is a large part of this group that doesn't even want to go to a party with girls, even if you tell them it's all paid for.
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To hazard a guess, everyone where you work is probably not that attractive.
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Why doesn't this ever happen at companies I work at?
Everyone was too busy making stuff?
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Sexual Harassment...Panda! (Score:3)
When one programmer panda touches another programmer panda in a private place without permission, that makes me a saaaad panda :-(
sounds annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:sounds annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
Its either "party with the boss" or you're the one who has to stay sober and get the work done.
So the boss' idiot son-in-law can take credit for it.
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I was that guy once. Worked many 30+ hour overnights to correct problems created by the adopted idiot son and the son's best friend, lead coder and project manager with no experience, respectively.
I was fired 9 months in for not getting enough done.
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i wouldn't have waited to get fired - i would have found another job and quit
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It's not just internal. When I went on a trip to Reading in a previous job where they were showing off new server technologies they had hired good time girls there too to basically act as eye candy for all the people they were trying to tie in to a future with Microsoft tech.
But let's also be honest, Microsoft is far from unique here, it's not fair to single them out over it, really, it's a problem with corporate sales and marketing culture across many industries.
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Microsoft and Intel have thrown some legendary parties at Supercomputing. In 2006, they rented an entire Mall in Tampa. Free food and drink (Pretty much anything you wanted, They wouldn't hand out 20 year old scotch I'm sure, but I specifically remember having a Bombay Sapphire martini), live music, probably more than a thousand people. It was an amazing time, but I'm told that it paled in comparison to some previous years. There's no doubt Redmond knows how to throw a party.
This is exactly the problem with the higher ups. (Score:4)
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.
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That's even true for politicians.
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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.
Re:This is exactly the problem with the higher ups (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not the best example (Score:3)
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
Wish it was that clear (Score:3)
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 am
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Depends on who you think about, I should think. I'm talking about Lawrence Summers.
If he can actually quote scientific disparities, then he should go ahead. If he's just postulating unsupported bullshit then it's just the usual sexism.
I didn't see him quoting any scientific data, just inventing some numbers and massaging them into
well damn (Score:5, Funny)
now I want to work at MS.
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Beats the hell out of the ping pong tables at google. At least MS knows to use them for beer pong.
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I'd join Microsoft in a flash - except all their senior staff are butt-ugly.
Then just think of them all as professional wingmen!
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Proof (Score:1)
Pictures or it didn't happen.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:1)
Trying for another Windows ME [xkcd.com], I see.
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yea ME that wasn't a decade ago and is still funny! I wanna know where the xkcd is for MSDOS 4 that would be a fucking barrel roll
Didn't he get the memo? (Score:1)
Now we also know.. (Score:2)
What about the robot hand? (Score:2)
No mention of him having his hand removed and replaced with a robotic one?
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Was it an evil robot hand?
If the boss is paying.... (Score:2)
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I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol
In short, it's not many people. There's a few practical declines (designated driver, pregnancy), a few muslims who don't drink out of religious convictions and a few others, but the vast majority of people in all walks of like will have a few free beers or glasses of wine. Not everyone is looking to get drunk on the company's bill though, but there's usually someone who does. They don't all try to flirt, and most do it in a way that's not sexual harassment. But does it happen? Yes, probably.
The problem is t
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There's a good reason the employer is responsible and the club is not. First, some random drunk guy in a club can't threaten employment consequences against women who turn him down. Second (and closely related), the club didn't hire the guy to represent them and then grant him the authority to affect the future employment of the people he harassed.
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At a previous job, we had a guy in our group who didn't drink, and was always convenient as a designated driver. There are enough techies around who aren't neurotypical or otherwise don't drink because they don't like having their heads messed with, or who don't drink because they had alcoholics in their family and don't want to go there. There are also people who don't drink because they used to be alcoholics, though I ran into that more often with sales people and cops than with techies. Also, when I
No case (Score:3)
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.
Re:No case (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Did you miss the part of the article where he denied the accusations against him? Or the one where the investigation turned out no proof of the allegations?
He's not saying, "everybody else was acting improperly, so it was ok for me to do it." He's saying, "I was acting properly amidst massive impropriety. If anything, they fired me because I wasn't playing along."
Whether you believe him or not is moot. The question is, can he prove his allegations while Microsoft can't prove theirs? If that's the case, not only should this not be dismissed, but he should win.
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This will continue until he becomes convinced of his own invincibility and cocks it up royally enough to get the attention of the police and thrown in jail.
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The Office (Score:1)
They're actually working (Score:5, Funny)
They're just trying to achieve the Ballmer peak! http://xkcd.com/323/ [xkcd.com]
Unlikely (Score:1)
First World Problems of the corporate elite (Score:3)
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.
MS and the Catholic church. (Score:2)
They are becoming more and more alike. It seems the GNU guys were right all along. Microsoft Church [gnu.org]
Microsoft UK the new Renholm Industries? (Score:2)
http://www.reynholm.co.uk/ [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.
"indefinite amounts of Jaegermeister" (Score:2)
So the problem is that we don't know how much Jeagermeister there is? Is there a Jaegermeister Uncertainly Principal?
Jaeger (Score:2)
"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...
At Microsoft in Brazil... (Score:2)
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.
That's what's missing (Score:2)
Well, this explains a lot of things. (Score:2)
For ages we've wondered why anyone would purchase windows or sign any kind of deal with microsoft. This Explains why: They were drunk.
Must have been using ... (Score:2)
Must have been using a Pentium processor to keep track of the allegations.
The question has to be asked : were sequential, or simultaneous harassments?
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"Simon Negus" (Score:2)
Isn't that the name of the Evil Necromancer from some supernatural pot-boiler?
Either that, or the Jewish Aleister Crowley.
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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.
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I thought it was hilarious and it made me feel better about myself for not being a bitter woman-hater.
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Or a fucking moron.
That's Just Like Women, Alright! (Score:3)
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 [youtube.com]? And you're still single you say? Marvelous, simply marvelous.
Bruce Molholland, is that you [theonion.com]?
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But if there's a zombie attack, people seem to skip the chainsaws, shotguns, cricket bats and flamethrowers and go straight for the flash light. Weird!
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Many years ago I was playing in a Macho women with Guns game at a RP convention and I had a character who in the initial part of the adventure was determine to be too stupid to be trusted with a gun, so she was given a flashlight.
Over the course of the module she found that anything she shone the toch on died (because the other characters shot it), so when we were gearing up for the ultimate encounter and she was finally told she could have any weapon she wanted, she asked for a portable floodlight.
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*golf clap*
Re:What's so bad about little partying? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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 c
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And s
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thank you Professor Higgins
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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 thei
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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 fl
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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 y
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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.
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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.
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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.
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