←back to thread

Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 1 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
petagonoral ◴[15 Jan 20 21:03 UTC] No.22058534[source]▶
in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets:

2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. nice job if you can get it.

edit: 1 million USD in 2016 and before.jumped to 2.3 million in 2017! pg8 of form 990 available at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/

replies(12): >>22058581 #>>22058625 #>>22058647 #>>22058731 #>>22058749 #>>22058837 #>>22058864 #>>22058906 #>>22059064 #>>22059281 #>>22059390 #>>22060078 #
shawndrost ◴[15 Jan 20 22:05 UTC] No.22059281[source]▶
The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368 million in Foundation assets that parent cited.

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.

replies(9): >>22059368 #>>22059473 #>>22059520 #>>22059686 #>>22059813 #>>22060258 #>>22060372 #>>22061707 #>>22061954 #
phonon ◴[15 Jan 20 22:49 UTC] No.22059686[source]▶
She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.

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

replies(10): >>22059816 #>>22059874 #>>22059934 #>>22060260 #>>22060898 #>>22060990 #>>22061636 #>>22061657 #>>22062741 #>>22063069 #
catalogia ◴[15 Jan 20 23:06 UTC] No.22059816[source]▶
That's appalling. How did that make people still working at Mozilla feel? I can't imagine working under somebody like that.
replies(4): >>22060453 #>>22060715 #>>22060869 #>>22061051 #
cookiecaper ◴[16 Jan 20 00:28 UTC] No.22060453[source]▶
It seems that there was some subsection of Mozilla employees who were offended by Gerv's views and thus publicly ambivalent, though undoubtedly privately relieved, to hear of his passing. [0]

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...

replies(3): >>22060679 #>>22060691 #>>22061424 #
1. catalogia ◴[16 Jan 20 01:06 UTC] No.22060691[source]▶
It's better to criticize people when they're still alive, rather than shortly after their death. Where I come from at least, it's considered crass at best to speak ill of the dead, unless they were some sort of heinous violent criminal.

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.