If this is the case, then I'm pretty sure that this knowledge had reached the board long before. Rumors spread fast, after all.

That leaves me to wonder as to the timing of this action. Krzanich received a lot of flak over the past months... it's not entirely unthinkable that the board was sitting on this information and only now used it to get rid of Krzanich without making it look like it's one of the other major issues he could technically be blamed with.

All of these are good reasons the board might want him gone.

My only other point is that even on Hacker News, everyone assumes it's a female subordinate (count the "she's" in this thread). Not that I have any inside knowledge, but it tells you something in how this policy is interpreted.

This is a serious thing. What if you knew about the relationship, and the other person was promoted over you?

I worked at a place where 2 colleagues had an open/secret relationship. One was senior but there wasn’t a reporting relationship so everyone looked the other way. When the senior exec weighed in on the junior’s promotion, he lost all credibility in the organization.

If the CEO does this, they lose the entire organization.

I guess he can always go to Oracle.

Honestly, I get why these policies exist, but sometimes it feels heavy handed to fire somebody for having a consenting relationship at work. After all, when you work long and hard hours often times coworkers are the people you get to know best and your inner circle.

However it feels like many people are spending more and more time at work, and it also seems cruel to say: "you cannot get to know anyone romantically during 50-75% of your waking day."

If a relationship is consensual what's the issue? If we're spending a significant part of our waking hours at work, it should be a baked in assumption that at some point, some coworkers are going to end up in a romantic relationship together. Hell, the majority of my significant romantic relationships started out as consensual workplace flirting.

It should only ever be an issue when that relationship causes trouble for the business.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Oracle-Boss-In-High-Tech...

http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-ceo-krzanich-sold-share...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

How to discreetly solve the above issues? Have the CEO resign due to a reason that is not related in any way to his capacity of being a CEO. Put new CEO in the driver's position and have the board tell him where to go.

Usually CEOs have a nice package, even with a resignation, with some stocks and goodies so most likely everyone won in this case.

Getting the popcorn out to see how this unfolds...

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2018/06/intel_...

Regardless of your gender, orientation... whatever... keep it in your pants regarding the workplace!

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.

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.