Mozilla lays off 70

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.

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.

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.

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.