Mozilla lays off 70

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

I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it.

Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell.

You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million.

Is there some connection you would like to disclose?

by the way, I'm not arguing her position.i'm arguing her compensation. nice chart from brendan eich (formerly of mozilla) https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

If you make a claim like that, you need to provide some evidence or citation to back it up.

[1] https://paddockpost.com/2018/02/03/executive-salaries-at-goo...

[2] https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...

[3] https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2017-TorProject-For...

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

I wouldn't say this is how I would like somebody to be remembered after his early death:

> Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.

Saying things like--

"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate.

...

Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.

Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.

...

To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions."

I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.

David Anderson articulates some of my feelings on the obit better than I can.

https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I think there must be something missing here. Are they receiving some other form of compensation? How much does the median PETA employee make? More than that, I hope!

> Thirty-seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff earn between $30,000 and $44,999, including President Ingrid Newkirk, who made $31,285 during the fiscal year ending July 31, 2016. Seven percent of PETA’s dedicated staff only earn between $16,000 and $29,999, and the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year. Most staff members give a portion of their earnings back to PETA’s lifesaving programs through payroll deductions.

https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...

I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings.

If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague.

It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?"

It must be terrible to live under those auspices.

Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased.

No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of the deceased using their death to make a statement. This is that same leader telling the deceased's family that their relative was 'traumatic and damaging' while alive. What in the actual fuck?

It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.

So yeah, it's disgusting and not being able to see why it would be such a vile thing reflects an inability to grasp or visualize other people's perspectives. These failures in leadership build the types of toxic culture full of intolerance that they claim to preach against. It's better to write nothing at all about controversial individuals or ideally give a generic nod to the deceased's contributions with the company and well wishes to their family in their time of grief. Pay a damn PR person to write your obits if you lack empathy, shit.

This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and worked for Sun in the legal department. Netscape recruited her to help set up their legal department and that is how she became an executive at a technology company. She stayed at Netscape when it was bought by AOL to work on policy issues, but was eventually fired during a series of layoffs.

The only "foundational" piece of Mozilla she authored was the Mozilla Public License.

Any company that lost that much market share would have fired their CEO. At a minimum, she should take a deep pay cut and her compensation needs to be tied to performance.

While that doesn't excuse the "obit" Baker posted, I'm sure it had some effect on her thought process. Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry.

[0] http://archive.today/2020.01.16-002922/https://twitter.com/c...

> I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.

Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there.

But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.

Up until the last sentence Gerv probably would have been nodding along happily. If he did butt heads with the wider Moz community over those issues, the last sentence would come as no surprise.

Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?

The "only" thing that is bothering me with the insanely high salary of CEO's etc. is that they quite often seem disconnected from actual success. Like in this case:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???

(Also, in a ideal world, I think the biggest compensation for a technical product should be for the technical people. And not the lawers.)

You are subtly advocating for exactly the thing you are snarkly accusing the entire tech industry of.

I would feel deeply uncomfortable if my boss were to post an obit like that about a deceased coworker, even if I had hated that persons guts. It just isn't something you do, as you say it violates common decency.

> the remaining 56 percent make more than $45,000 per year

So the median is more than $45k. I would say the difference between $31k and $45k is pretty significant, at least depending on where you live. In San Francisco that would likely not be enough for someone to live comfortably alone.

Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California.

In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

Obvious: because she has to make bank before the ship sinks for good. I'm sure she would put forward a lot of arguments for it (all the extra time she spent over the years "underpaid" etc etc).

Baker has been more than "a lawyer" to Mozilla, for a very long time. She shouldered a lot of decisions - some good, some bad, some terrible. It's not surprising that she might be reaching for the money (most execs will, at that level), but rather that nobody at the corporation or the foundation is willing or able to stop her anytime soon.

Possibly. Another possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to fire a man with terminal cancer who presumably depended upon the health insurance provided by the company.

About 15 years ago it was perfectly normal for this exchange to take place: Your view of marriage is a faith-based promise to your deity based on millennia of tradition and completely different from my view of it as a legalistic civil affair that is even less serious than renewing a recreational boating licence? Not a problem, let's go back to work now.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lightandmomentary

You can watch some videos she put up for the Thanksgiving event they held 9 months after the funeral. https://vimeo.com/user97457269

[1] https://rationality.org/about/staff : "cofounded an emotional intelligence and communication training organization"

What I am saying is that he was a divisive character, and he knew that, accepted it, apparently tried to modify it a bit but basically carried on with it in an organisation that he knew was at least mildly hostile to his beliefs.

And the depth of emotion that he inspired (deserved or not) could have lead to a very ugly pile on after his death. Maybe that happened anyway. Instead of taking it as cheap sniping, a better-faith reading of Mitchell's eulogy would be as a call for peace - acknowledge the critics but also point out the valuable contributions that the guy made in the hope that all the emotions surrounding his death don't spill over onto twitter or somesuch stupidity.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html

She has really done anything for the internet besides working for Mozilla.

> ..that his interpretation should be encoded into law.

Law is dangerous, as it ultimately falls back into the (justification of the) usage of lethal force upon those who defy it.

So I imagine that directicy and strictness was related to him, and so, then, I imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way, which I suppose is what she did.

(but this is just a reaction based on imagination and my own personal experiences with other people, ofc)

That being said, I sure as hell wouldn't write that obit, even for someone I hated. If I didn't have anything positive to say about the person, I wouldn't write anything. There is no upside to this kind of handling of the situation.

As someone who doesn't know anyone involved the suggestion I would make would be to acknowledge controversy upfront, directly and exactly once and then state that you will not address the most controversial points from there on out, in acknowledgement of the deceased and their loved ones. The fact that she waffles back and forth between praise and condemnation in such tight space makes it seem like she simultaneously doesn't stand for much and doesn't forgive even after a person's death.

Even when we find someone's behavior or opinions abhorrent, there isn't a lot of point in holding grudges against dead people. Maybe she could have said that.

Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.

So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies.

Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here."

I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.

Is that to say you are equating homosexuality with pedophilia?

Employees dedicate roughly half of their waking hours to the employer, entailing much sacrifice from not only the employee themselves, but also their family. Regardless of the employee's competence, it insults that sacrifice when the employer comes out and denigrates the employment record of the deceased.

Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do.

Just as a rule of thumb, if you can't memorialize a person without talking about how much damage was caused or how you just couldn't get him to understand "nuance", it's probably best to leave the memorializing to others.

"Gerv’s work life was interspersed with a series of surgeries and radiation as new tumors appeared. Gerv would methodically inform everyone he would be away for a few weeks, and we would know he had some sort of major treatment coming up."

> or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.

"Gerv was a wildly active and effective contributor almost from the moment he chose Mozilla as his university-era open source project. He started as a volunteer in January 2000, doing QA for early Gecko builds in return for plushies, including an early program called the Gecko BugAThon. (With gratitude to the Internet Archive for its work archiving digital history and making it publicly available.)

Gerv had many roles over the years, from volunteer to mostly-volunteer to part-time, to full-time, and back again. When he went back to student life to attend Bible College, he worked a few hours a week, and many more during breaks. In 2009 or so, he became a full time employee and remained one until early 2018 when it became clear his cancer was entering a new and final stage.

Gerv’s work varied over the years. After his start in QA, Gerv did trademark work, a ton of FLOSS licensing work, supported Thunderbird, supported Bugzilla, Certificate Authority work, policy work and set up the MOSS grant program, to name a few areas. Gerv had a remarkable ability to get things done. In the early years, Gerv was also an active ambassador for Mozilla, and many Mozillians found their way into the project during this period because of Gerv... As Gerv put it, he’s gone home now, leaving untold memories around the FLOSS world."

> Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity

"He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me."

> she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.

Where does it say this?

> I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.

I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.

doctors without borders / msf pay their execs org non-profit salary. Chief makes less than 150k. 9 next highest paid makes around 100k.

https://www.charityintelligence.ca/charity-details/81-doctor...

Compare that to red cross or others.

More prestigious the org is, the less reason there should be to pay egregious salary.

And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation?

Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed.

I read the whole post.

The parts you've quoted are rote recitations of assignments and employment history. They could've been derived from an HR file.

A list of assignments is not a discussion about how his work product helped move the platform forward.

Stating that Gerv had to go to the doctor sometimes and that he was good about giving notice is not talking about the resilience inherent in maintaining a productive career and an apparently-happy family while simultaneously battling a terminal illness for 18 years.

> Where does it say this?

You quoted the last sentence of the paragraph above. Here:

> > Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.

Baker lists 5 things Gerv did and you quoted only the last one. 3 of the things are definitively negative: "challenged", "infuriated", and "enraged". One is neutral: "surprised". The only positive one is "impressed", but she immediately explains that she was impressed re: his "greater ability to work with ambiguity", which she had mentioned "work[ing] with him to ... better appreciate" two sentences earlier, i.e., she's impressed that some small portion of it appeared to finally stick.

Then, in the next paragraph, she immediately caveats her impression over his improved grasp of ambiguity with: "Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw." and "He was adamant that his interpretation was correct[.]" At least to my ears, that sounds a lot like "So I just said I was impressed, but I wasn't that impressed; he just wasn't smart enough to grasp the ambiguity that would've made it obvious that his personal beliefs were invalid".

No -- employees cause damage all the live long day. There's nothing unusual about that. Furthermore, discretion and secrecy are indispensable components in any professional environment; you don't have to make a publication about negative experiences just because they happened.

If the aggregate effect of an individual's employment is net negative, you start the prescribed HR processes to accommodate, adjust, cross-train, improve, and/or re-assign. If worse comes to worst and none of that works, you'd initiate processes for involuntary termination of employment.

I don't know about you, but personally, I've never seen an HR process that includes publishing a condemnation of a recently-deceased employee's political or religious views.

Hypothetical events that may provoke negative statements from an employer would be things like becoming deceased shortly after being arrested for some well-publicized crime, especially if the crime impacted the employer's business (e.g., money manager accused of embezzlement, arrest goes awry and suspect is killed). "Dying after decades-long battle against terminal cancer" doesn't feel likely to enter provocation territory to me.

> Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed.

You're ascribing motives that don't exist here. I don't know Eich and I didn't know Markham. I haven't read extensively about their private views and I'm sure that I disagree substantially with many of them.

Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about anyone's politics or religion to understand that it's incredibly crass for the CEO to a) publicly enumerate the managerial difficulties imposed by the deceased; b) publicly offer negative characterizations of the deceased's net impact on the organization; or c) really do anything except offer condolences and ensure prompt handling of the family's benefit claims.

Yeah, if that's normal to you all I can say is that you're working at the wrong places (or potentially you're the problem). If you want respect in death then act appropriately in life. No matter how talented Markham was, he was also well known for harassing and belittling his coworkers.

If you don't want to be remembered for being a jerk, don't be a jerk. It's pretty simple.

We have a common boundary agreement (that's what the CoC lays out), but other then that, you'd be surprised of the number of opinions you'd see.

Granted, some of the very public figures are very progressive/leftist, but they also do their legwork for it and generally keep that on the side when they speak with their Rust hat on.

Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.

I'll take today.

The question isn't only if the person brings that much value, but also - is there any other person who would bring as much value, but would work for less salary?

>Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. //

So Mitchell's response is to publicly judge him in politely stated but damning terms, whilst simultaneously making an employee's obituary about how they - the obituary writer - were the only thing that moderated the person's overly judgemental nature.

Wowser.

It's like Mitchell realised people would be applauding his work at Mozilla and decided that couldn't be allowed.

It sounds like you're saying his actions at work were abhorrent; or was it that his beliefs were incompatible with yours?

Yes, to the person, in the same arena (maybe, consider that carefully).

LPT - don't scathingly attack an employee in an obituary after their recent early death. You can say you found then difficult to live with, etc., you don't have to try and crucify their mortal remains.

I may hate their view point, and want them not to exist, but they feel the same about me I expect.

If they violated work regulations then they should have been disciplined, did they, were they?

Do you mean contempt for the people or was it for their views; how was it different to your contempt for them?

Refraining from heavily and repeatedly deriding someone in an obituary doesn't mean you're whitewashing anything.

Each worker gives the same, ultimately, an hour of their precious life each hour they work.

Probably not.

But in any case, why should non-white coworkers be expected to work with a racist just because the person in question (hypothetically) puts on a token display of being tolerant? It's insulting and demeaning to ask them to put up with that.

You seem more interested in defending some implausibly courteous hypothetical white supremacist than in ensuring that real work environments are minimally tolerable for people who aren't white.

If Baker thought he was damaging the org, it was her legal duty to protect its interests and terminate him. Not only did this never happen, but per Baker's account, Markham was repeatedly rehired.

If Moz changed their mind at some point and wanted him gone, well, he's gone -- crapping all over his legacy accomplishes nothing other than exacerbating the grief of survivors and potentially opening up legal liability.

Should someone allege that Baker's horrific "memorial" rises to the level of actionable defamation, she'll have a hard time winning the sympathy of the court. "Don't kick someone while they're down" and all that. You can't get any more down than "literally dead". If you can't settle the personnel file before the employee dies, just let it go.

Ultimately, it is pretty simple: a corporate officer publishing a barrage of criticism against a deceased subordinate can only be described as chickenshit.

They're wrong, outside work I'm happy to address that head on; peace doesn't come through uncompromising segregation off people based on ideology.

Presumably you find Muslims, whose religious book demands they murder those who won't convert, to be anathema in your workplace?

Rather than it being demeaning to accommodate people with ideological differences it is essentially human and calls us to the highest standards of non-discrimination, IMO.

That's a nice thought, but it's unfair to put the burden of rehabilitation of white supremacists on your colleagues.

>If they're functionally equivalent to everyone else in their work I can't see a _reason_ to exclude them other than bigotry.

The idea of them being "functionally equivalent" is a philosophical hypothetical, not a realistic possibility. (Do you think someone who thinks black people are inferior to white people is going to make fair decisions about e.g. who gets promoted?) But apart from this, it's dehumanising and humiliating to make people work with others who regard them as inferior on the basis of their race.

>Presumably you find Muslims, whose religious book demands they murder those who won't convert, to be anathema in your workplace?

I find Muslims who want to murder non-Muslisms anathema in my workplace, yes. I work with a few Muslims, but curiously, none of them want to do this. But come on, your comment here is borderline trolling, and makes me question whether you're really being serious about white supremacists either.

So I think saying "by thinking anyone with differing opinions is Xist" is a mischaracterization of what was expressed originally.

How do you know? If you ask someone whether they're harboring murderous intent, they're obviously going to say they aren't. Most people that actually commit murder will go on to claim that they never had murderous intent, and in the majority of cases, they're probably not even lying. Yet they still murdered.

We can't even understand our own motives and intentions. The internal monologue is a parlor trick, consciousness is a lifelong self-delusion. If we can't accurately conceptualize or reliably control our own behavior, despite living inside of ourselves all the time, what makes us think we can do it for others?

When you're working to accomplish a specific end with a specific group of people, as long as they're providing useful work, adhering to social norms, and not otherwise exhibiting specific malice or triggering physiological fight-or-flight responses within the group, there's no sense getting worked up about whether or not the neuronal spasms that produce consciousness may've been yielding some unconventional theories lately.

"I have this really high-level theory that I feel may characterize typical variations among several major human ethnotypes" -- well, shit man, my brain is doing weird stuff today too. I dreamed about computer-birds. Now, can we stop talking about this and go over your commit from yesterday?

In general, everyone is wrong about everything all the time, and that ought to be good enough for all of us. Let's stop firing useful people over it.

>this really high-level theory that I feel may characterize typical variations among several major human ethnotypes

I assume that you don't intend this as a characterization of the beliefs of actual white supremacists (?), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

I'd be very interested to learn how a CEOs worth is evaluated, I cannot imagine it being a fair process that truly demonstrates that they deserve this much money.

Yeah, I absolutely did. Upvoted.

> In any case, I have no idea how you think your main argument gets from A to B, so I can't usefully respond to it.

It boils down to "professionals should not allow differing opinions on non-work-related issues to negatively impact their working relationships, no matter how strongly they disagree." The fact that no one knows anything about anything just helps people cope with that reality.

> I assume that you don't intend this as a characterization of the beliefs of actual white supremacists (?), so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

It's a placeholder for any ideology, at least insofar as it remains in the realm of ideology and isn't unduly brought into the professional environment by the accused ideologue.

If someone starts bringing up politics, religion, or other controversial topics at work, redirect the conversation and ignore. If someone dispenses of their personal time advocating for causes that some others may find distasteful or even repugnant? Ignore, live and let live. It's not a professional issue.

Taking adverse action against an employee for using their private time to participate in the political process is not only already illegal in many states, but it's also hugely counterproductive. The ideologue is essentially compelled to lay their career at the problem ideology's altar (often post-facto, because the muckrakers are digging up some ancient LiveJournal entry or whatever). This creates fertile ground for a new internal narrative of heroic and principled self-martyrdom in behalf of the problem ideology. It's a fast track to radicalization, and you've likely just made the ideologue unsure how they're going to pay their rent next month. Bad scene.

If someone really hates the problem ideology and not the individual currently fascinated with it, "fire ideologue" will be pretty far down on the todo list.

tl;dr, If the employee is doing good work and they're not disrupting the work environment, leave them alone.

------

Pre-edit: harassment, stalking, direct interference with other employees' lives, threats of violence, and other types of red-flag behaviors should never be ignored, no matter how professionally someone behaves during business hours. Dangerous behavior should always be reported to HR and any applicable civil organization.

Pre-edit 2: This is not medical advice and I'm not your attorney. I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor of any type. As discussed in the grandparent comment, I made all this up mostly on accident, everything I think is surely wrong and dumb, and everything I type should be ignored.

You're not allowed to post insinuations like that to HN. It's nearly always imaginary and poisons discussion badly. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The ceo is responsible for those macro goals. Those macro goals are failing, ergo while most works should be receiving increases in comp, the CEO should be seeing a decrease.

I have come to a place in my life where I crave more honesty all around, and I'm willing to pay for it with emotional pain. And it's not just a selfish sort of myopia--like, I can imagine you reading that and thinking I have some autistic flavored honesty fixation and I am projecting that onto everyone without considering their feelings. It's not that. Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.

For what it's worth, I do agree with you about at least one thing: she probably wasn't the person who should have written this, even if we take as a given that it should have been written at all. If someone wrote something similar about me, I'd want them to be someone I loved and who loved me--the kind of person who could say something profoundly true about me, as a testament to the real effect I had in the world, both good and bad.

Edit: Oh, and since it obviously doesn't go without saying, I'll say this too: I am not offended by the obit she wrote, and I would want a similar thing for myself, but I nevertheless think she did the wrong thing by writing it. I might have a fantasy about what I consider to be a better world in which what she wrote was fine, but we don't live in that world and she clearly violated dearly held norms when she wrote that.

That was part of my context when I wrote the post that started this conversation, but I didn't make it clear at all.

"Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments – the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum – also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Internet – in 2018".

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

This nor my last post was written to suggest autistic perception, but rather that not everyone thinks from others' different perspectives naturally (wherever they sit on the spectrum). I will indulge in your stated interest to receive honesty. You don't write like someone that thinks by putting themselves in other's shoes and thinking through the lens of their values. Rather, the internal value systems you have becomes a framework to apply externally in your life. 'I believe' 'I think' 'I agree', checks upon those value systems you have logically/emotionally and your writing and actions are built upon that. Those with this line of thought seek to change the world to fit their value systems, not harmonize the chaos of different value systems by speaking inside them.

As one interested in emotional intelligence, I'm telling you this because it might actually help you, but more importantly help those you're trying to help. For what it's worth most of the people I chose to work with are more like you and don't think through others' value systems naturally. It 'feels' more authentic to see people's clear and consistent values than try to peg down the chameleons that constantly lens through systems.

>Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.

You're alive, you can write posts in response to criticism. The deceased cannot. An obit isn't a performance review of a person written while they are alive; it's a final send-off written to tell a story about someone's life and comfort the living.

I understand why you'd believe it's ok to have things written like this about you (this is directed to you) in your obituary, but you should be aware that it may cause pain to your friends and relatives, that they won't understand why people spoke of you in these ways. Everyone makes mistakes and values can change as we grow older and move between social groups. The 'you' that you see yourself as-is always going to be different from how others see you. It will never match your ideal. This is an inescapable fact.

The issue at hand is that you, whether or not you're consciously aware, are seeking to project your own value system onto those that won't share that value system. I'm not asking you to share in their values or even to fully understand them. I'm asking you to acknowledge their presence and understand that an obit isn't written to a party of one.

Consider this example: People feel pain and sadness after their relatives die. Even if Mitchell wanted to say she didn't get along with Gerv, she could have made her narrative something that would have respected his values that didn't match her own. There's a way to say something like: 'We did not always agree on matters, but Gerv's dedication always impressed me.' (Which is sort of what the totality of her post could be taken as) Rather than inform his family that he caused distress inside the organization, she could still try the express the totality of Gerv by not showcasing the pain he's caused.

Perhaps the optics of disciplining a terminally ill employee were judged to be worse than keeping him around.

how was it different to your contempt for them?

How is acknowledging their abusive behavior contempt? Hate the message not the person.

It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.

My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.

Never claimed you were deficient. I claimed it appears that you do not naturally think this way and it shows in your writing.

>My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.

That's the gist of what I'm trying to convey. I can understand though that some, maybe you, would rather risk some distress to those around them in hopes others will have a better acceptance/understanding of who they really were.

If you feel I'm really off-base on my comments about you, I'm actually making a point with that too. If I were you wrote an obit about you, you'd obviously disagree with claims being made (yes, I'm aware we only know each other from a series of brief posts back and forth). It's the same way with any acquaintance doing it, they only get to know parts of you and the parts you think they know might be totally at odds with the values/image you tried to convey about yourself.