I’m just kind of surprised to see some of the things in this post portrayed as bad when they are very common in EA orgs, like living together and being open to unconventional and kind of unclear boundaries and pay arrangements and especially conflicts of interest from dating coworkers and bosses.
I think the sentiment in Lilly’s comment are read not as saying that all of these behaviours are always bad, but that they are often in contravention of professional norms and that, sometimes, there’s a reason for this.
For what it’s worth, I think romantic entanglements between employees at different power levels (especially company leaders, or those who have power to fire others) is something to be concerned about. I have similar thoughts toward romantic relationships between grantors and grantees—that should be default transparent in my opinion.
Yeah, my thought is pretty high-level, basically: a lot of professional norms exist for good reasons, and if we violate them—and especially if we violate a lot of them at the same time, as happened here—then this produces the kinds of circumstances in which these disputes tend to arise.
Certainly, there’s some cost-benefit here with respect to specific norms, and specific contexts, that could be, and I’m sure will continue to be, litigated. But everyone involved has been really harmed by this—in terms of their time being wasted, emotional energy sunk into this, and people’s reputations—and that just seems really unfortunate, given that it is not that hard to substantially reduce the risks of these kinds of things happening by adhering to standard professional norms.
I think the sentiment in Lilly’s comment are read not as saying that all of these behaviours are always bad, but that they are often in contravention of professional norms and that, sometimes, there’s a reason for this.
For what it’s worth, I think romantic entanglements between employees at different power levels (especially company leaders, or those who have power to fire others) is something to be concerned about. I have similar thoughts toward romantic relationships between grantors and grantees—that should be default transparent in my opinion.
Yeah, my thought is pretty high-level, basically: a lot of professional norms exist for good reasons, and if we violate them—and especially if we violate a lot of them at the same time, as happened here—then this produces the kinds of circumstances in which these disputes tend to arise.
Certainly, there’s some cost-benefit here with respect to specific norms, and specific contexts, that could be, and I’m sure will continue to be, litigated. But everyone involved has been really harmed by this—in terms of their time being wasted, emotional energy sunk into this, and people’s reputations—and that just seems really unfortunate, given that it is not that hard to substantially reduce the risks of these kinds of things happening by adhering to standard professional norms.