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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 2 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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/

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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.

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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...

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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.
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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...

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inferiorhuman[dead post] ◴[16 Jan 20 03:25 UTC] No.22061424[source]▶
Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry.

Common decency? You mean like not going out of your way to deny rights to others or do you mean tolerance of bigotry? Hmm.

cookiecaper ◴[16 Jan 20 04:48 UTC] No.22061750[source]▶
Well, to be specific: by "common decency", I mean that the CEO should refrain from a publishing an infantilizing and derogatory post about a deceased employee. They should especially refrain from doing so days after the employee's death.

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.

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inferiorhuman ◴[16 Jan 20 05:38 UTC] No.22061960[source]▶
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.

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.

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1. pbhjpbhj ◴[16 Jan 20 09:57 UTC] No.22063097[source]▶
>their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed. //

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.

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2. inferiorhuman ◴[17 Jan 20 22:15 UTC] No.22080066[source]▶
If they violated work regulations then they should have been disciplined, did they, were they?

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.