Mozilla lays off 70

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll take today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.