Intel CEO resigns after relationship with employee (opens in new tab)

Game of Thrones Season 80x86?

Agreed. AMD is breathing down INTC's neck, particularly in servers. Board wants a different direction.

The whole semiconductor industry is in trouble right now, though few seem to feel the weight of the issue.

We are looking at just a couple process nodes at best before we reach the end of the road for silicon lithography. Sure, there will be further tweaks on existing techniques which will squeeze out small improvements in power, performance and density.

But long gone are the days when we saw steady improvements in circuit density and simultaneously speed and simultaneously cost.

When this knowledge finally sinks in with the investment community, it will call into question the valuation of the entire computer industry. We're already seeing that in the desktop space. I could replace my 6-year old Intel i7-3770 desktop with 32GB of RAM, but what's out there that's significantly better at a reasonable cost? Well, a used Xeon workstation maybe, but that's about it.

That should be a big red flag to the investment community, but for reasons I don't understand, people don't seem to care yet.

Why would a CEO of a microprocessor company be accepted at Oracle?

If she got promoted, would it be because of her work, or her relationship with the boss? If she didn't get promoted, would it be because of her attitude, or her relationship with the boss? If she had an argument with a colleague, was it because she was an entitled slut? If he cut the budget of the department she worked in, was it because he was going off her?

It's pernicious and there's nothing you can do about it except simply not sleep with the people you manage.

If a CEO of a blue-chip like Intel doesn't get this basic rule of management, what other basic mistakes is he going to make? Bring a gun into work? ;)

But your remark about the "moralising" of US companies has also been my experience. I worked in a Europe-based office for a US-owned multinational company. Alcohol was strictly forbidden. (Needless to say, the fridge was filled regardless and late Friday afternoon, people would have a beer and fraternize.)

You really don't think so? I'm no CEO but I imagine carrying a gun around would at least warrant some public criticism, particularly for a tech CEO in the San Francisco Bay Area.

These are short questions that probably can't ever be fully answered and require books to be answered even semi-adequately. That said, a good answer probably has some element of the U.S.'s strange relationships with sexuality and Christianity, going back to the particular kinds of European settlers who showed up here. This is often referred to as "Puritanism," although the Puritans actually had a much more complicated and less prim experience than is commonly supposed with the slur "Puritanism."

At the same time, in the last several decades (maybe 50 or 60), there have been various strands of feminism; two particularly noticeable parts could be labeled as "sex positive" (Camille Paglia is a good person to read on the subject) and... I actually can't think of a good label for the other one. But the other one actually has quite a bit in common with the old-school and religiously motivated views of sexuality as dangerous and in need of extreme restraint or channeling into "appropriate" spaces. This one has quite a bit of currency, currently, and it has a lot of continuity with past aspects of U.S. culture.

It's not just the specific act(s) but the fact that he knowingly broke policy, which raises the question of whether he decided other policies also didn't apply to him. CEOs have a lot of power and enormous compensation and, at least in theory, that's founded on their judgement.

Not just in the US but almost everywhere people tend to extremize moral reactions to the point their judgement in a situation is being impaired. Generally morals are used to drive people actions away from cold rational reasoning, and they also make strong arguments during war time or elections.

Unrelated, but strong example: take a toy gun and a sex toy then ask 1000 people if they would let their children play with one or the other or both. Pretty sure all of them would say no to the sex toy in disgust (which would be my reply as well, just to be clear), but most wouldn't mind letting their kids play with the toy gun. That would be a pretty normal reaction, so no problem here, apparently. But we can also describe a sex toy as a device to simulate the act of creating a life, and a toy gun as a device to simulate the act of taking away a life, so the question would be: why our morals which rightly prevent us from giving dildos to children don't prevent us from giving them toy guns as well?

Or consider Mozilla's week-long CEO who years earlier donated $1000 to a popular ballot initiative supported by most California voters.

Be careful how you vote, citizen. Your livelihood depends on it.

The military has a policy that treats an affair between an officer and the spouse of someone in their unit as non-consensual. It is treated basically like statutory rape. What the spouse says is irrelevant because you can't eliminate the possibility they are basically being blackmailed into claiming it was consenting.

If you have enough direct power over someone, you can't really determine if it was mutually consenting. I think this is a root cause of a lot of the he said/she said stuff where men are all astonished that they are being accused of anything when they felt it was consenting.

In some cases, I have some sympathy for the guy who may well have not really fully understood the intimidation factor in the situation. In other cases, they clearly are happy to use their power to bully others into getting their way and, no, I'm not sympathetic to their bullshit claims.

Secondly, BK is married and presumably this was a hidden affair, which adds another layer of complexity to this situation.

Given that the other employees did not seek out or allow relationships with managers, their relative disadvantage can be seen as a sort of inverse sexual harassment, as they may see themselves having to put themselves in a sexual situation for the sake of career advancement, even if it’s not explicitly stated by anyone in higher management.

I think that in this case #metoo applies, since the subject is a matter of sexuality and power imbalances, although the content is far, far removed from the Weinstein scandal.

The unfortunate fact about a consensual workplace romance is that if they go sour it can destroy company culture and moral.

If it's not, maybe he should have chosen a different job.

   So obviously relationships are bad when 
   there's a power dynamic,

I feel like the solution to this is to engineer society so people spend less time at work, not so that they are encouraged to move their personal lives into the workplace.

Few companies have such strict relationship policies.

If you're CEO, yeah that means you can't date anyone at work. But for anyone else it only eliminates some % of the dating pool.

Nobody cares if two engineers hook up, but it's a Very Bad Thing if your boss starts putting the moves on you. Relationships where one person holds real-world power over another are prone to exploitation and violation of consent.

First, he agreed – it was in his contract he couldn't do it.

Second, oftentimes it's hard to tell how consensual it is when there's a large imbalance of power. Was it completely consensual? Maybe. But companies have a no-tolerance policy because it's hard to tell, and you don't want managers going around making subordinates uncomfortable, or employees taking advantage of managers.

Third, he now has an explicit bias toward a single employee.

He doesn't deserve to be blacklisted and grouped in with sexual harassers, however he did violate his contract and brought his fate at Intel upon himself.

Even though what happened between Alice and Bob was consensual, it made it impossible for Bob to do his job. Alice and Bob were both fired.

You can’t effectively distinguish between a “good relationship” and a “bad relationship” so a blanket rule makes the most sense. The issue is not necessarily about whether the relationship itself is ethical, but how it appears to observers and if it affects the organization.

That said, if the other party gets pissed at the end of the relationship and complains, you are gone.

Did he conceal his relationship with his future wife?

Unsure there is enough information to suggest Bill Gates "got away" with anything.

ps: i'm joking but who knows!

Those should be good enough reasons.

At the end of the day, they had to get rid of him, not just for the insider trading, which is probably one of those "everyone does it" things in corporate America, but primarily because he seemed completely incapable of keeping Intel competitive against AMD's offensive over the next few years. Plus, under Krzanich's watch Intel lost its multi-year leadership in process technology.

That doesn't mean not to say it, but don't be surprised when it happens anyway. Sometimes people don't make the "rational" decision, or don't value their job enough to put the workplace's priorities above their own.

I know it sounds punitive, but it’s really a question of fairness to every other employee working for that manager — nothing improper needs to be done by either party for it to negatively impact the other employees.

It also discourages managers from taking their pick of young staff members, and discourages any lower-level staff who might try to sleep their way to the top.

FWIW, most companies also have a reporting policy where you can report a relationship to HR and request a transfer to another department to avoid violating the policy. But that wouldn’t apply to a CEO — people in that position are simply expected to have better judgment than that.

> Krzanich violated a policy that said he could not have a relationship with either a direct or indirect report

Conjecture: Zero.

Does that say anything interesting about humans?

That we are an unusually genetically homogenous species. You could do the same thing with practically any activity between two people, desirable or undesirable, because the human population collapsed to practically nothing in the last Ice Age.

No.