I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.
I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.
As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.
At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.
>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.
Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.
I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.
>I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla.
Even if it did, what can we do?
Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.
Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.
Interestingly this appears like the same misconception and misdirection that lets people be deluded by their idea of "science".
A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.
Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to you.
But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.
Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.
To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.
The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.
The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develop a 2020 state of the art web engine), the complexity of starting a new engine from scratch would continue to grow.
It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.
You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?
Not Brendan, but I don't think anyone doubts that Brave would break from the Chromium homogeneity if it were practical to do so.
Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:
> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."
> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.
Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.
There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.
Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.
I would think the Peter Principle would be better represented if there was someone who was a star on the technical side, but messed up as the CEO in a role they couldn't handle. i.e. if Brendan Eich was CEO and this happened it would be a Peter Principle moment.
All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and were then misplaced as CEO.
Through the bank my experience is that a technical background with someone growing into a leadership role ultimately creates better results. People whose only skill is "leadership" tend to perform pretty badly.
But the Peter principle, doubtful if it even can be taken seriously, doesn't say anything about this specifically.
I don't know anything about Eich, but I don't really see how he would have been bad for Mozilla as a CEO. He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.
All that aside, that the execs at Mozilla get millions and they still lay off 70 people is bad leadership. Really, really bad leadership. And the recent focus seem to underline that failure in my opinion.
Mozilla has done incredible things for the net and technology. Sadly, I think this is subject to change.
they do take millions.
the money they take is basically from Google's search deal (thought technically a few other sources too).
The money you donate only goes to the foundation, which does not pay the exec, so any donation does not actually go to exec. The donations are required for the foundation to function at all, regardless of how well the corporation does.
to be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a hack though, because really mozilla functions 100% like a corporation even if they had a real foundation inside. its just a way to ensure that the board is Mitchell Baker - not a bunch of people who want the company to profit. this has good and bad sides, and right now we're definitely seeing the bad sides: exec get paid 800k to 2500k (Mitchell), senior devs get fired for making - i bet, 100k to 300k.
foundations are made to be places where you make the world a better place without having the "i want to make money" motto and that's not what Mozilla does. Mozilla wants money to pay execs and keep on surviving. Many other foundations have similar hacks (or arguably, scams!). The other advantage is that the foundation side does not pay tax of course.
Yes, I'm just using tech as an example. It still requires them to be excellent in any one field and then move into another field on the basis of that excellence, but then fail to have the excellence carry over to the new and different discipline.
None of these people show some kind of original standout excellence in a different field that was lost in their transition to Mozilla leadership roles.
You are introducing a change of “field” where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle talks only of skills from lower level position being insufficient for competency at higher level. No change of field in the standard definition. I’ve read about, heard, and used the PP for decades without any change of field or tech vs mgmt being required to use the phrase correctly. It may be that higher level management requires training in a different field from lower, but in many firms it does not exclude promotion from below. Some of the best CEOs confound the PP to rise from the ranks.
I think your comment falls into the same trap that Mozillas leadership probably fell into: Middle manager and top management are different, even if they look superficially the same. Not every good team lead or even department lead is a good fit for being part of a companies leadership.
Mozilla has way too many VP and above employees that are useless (check what the once VP engineering, then interim CTO, then fellow is actually doing for instance). They should let go a few, but as far as I know, none has been fired. Gotta keep getting twice the bonus percentage as regular ICs...
Well a bit further down Mitchell Baker is being skewered for making $2,500,000 annually. I'd assume that the multiplier at Mozilla is much, much lower than 70x.
Hardly any executive is just getting paid 7m in cash. They are typically paid in financial instruments that are time locked for several years. The media however, will go bananas on reporting about how they are paid crazy amounts when these instruments are finally unlocked, ignoring the tax implications, the lack liquidity and massive risk involved, and also just how much the rest of the market has increased during the time period of those instruments being locked.
When you pay yours executives a modest amount using such a method, it's often very feasible for this to be a massive windfall at the time of maturity (e.g. $1 options becoming $6, etc.).
I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)
> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.
Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.
Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult.
The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.
Kraken is hiring Senior SW Engineers with extensive Rust experience for our backend services team. The team is remote. Check out the link below to apply or get in touch at leon at kraken dot com
Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to pascal.paillier@zama.ai.
Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees.
That seems like it should be profitable.
Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much, right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.
As someone who jumped from chrome since quantum came out, I can't appreciate Mozilla enough, sadly things are not made to last...
I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed anything.
But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan Linux.
actually I'm pretty sure that the money goes to the mozilla innovation fund and not directly to mozilla? not sure how easily they can withdraw money from there.
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.
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.
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.
>She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet.
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.
Many CEOs derive a significant portion - often even the majority - of their compensation from performance-based bonuses. Compensation not only reflects performance, it is directly tied to it.
Millions/Billions were paid out in bailout money, to the very same people responsible for collapsing the housing market in 2009. Compensation for that level is complete bullshit.
The price of oil goes up, and all the oil company executives get bonuses (it sounds silly, but this genuinely does happen).
A lot of these compensation packages are well intended, but they aren't without problems. People who make bad decisions often get performance bonuses regardless.
Those are the ones you hear about in the press, but the press looks for outrage.
"CEO earns 10x less than previous year due to declining stock price linked to market share loss" is not a headline to set pulses racing. Performance linked comp works OK most of the time. Sometimes CEOs negotiate deals that are terrible for the company, where they get paid lots even if the firm tanks. My experience has been that this usually happens when the firm is in deep trouble anyway, the CEO knows they probably can't turn it around, but will have a tarnished reputation regardless. Getting experienced people to try and turn the Titanic is expensive and many will want a big reward for even trying.
Also, badly run companies do things like sign bad deals. But it's a circular problem. If they were well run they wouldn't be signing bad CEO deals to begin with.
> She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet
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?
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.
I knew Gerv, he was a convert to Christianity and as usual for converts to any religion, he was intense and fervent in his belief that he had discovered the ultimate truth. Unfortunately that can lead people to embracing the old testament bigotry more than the new testament forgiveness. Gerv wasn't a bad person, but Mitchell wasn't inaccurate in her post. Yes, Gerv was a great thing for Mozilla, but his legacy is not as clear.
A CEO in an employee obituary though, isn't their job at that time to laud the good rather than make it sound like "good riddance"?
>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?
That memoriam seems completely out of place. If you are a professional colleague, common sense would dictate that you write a professional piece that reflects on the person's services rendered to Mozilla. The repeated references to the deceased's religious beliefs seem very out of place and distateful, especially in a memoriam. No excuses there.
As I read that I figure she had to address the guy's controversial opinions such as to not offend people who were offended by them.
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.
It's taught in even the most basic teaching curriculum. I learned about it as a teenager learning to teach swimming. To be honest, it's nothing new or special, and I mean, I don't know where you're coming at with the snarky comment about management, but humans are human and sometimes _how you say something_ matters as much as _what you say_. Nobody likes taking criticism, so it helps blunt the blow, while still allowing for critical feedback to be communicated and heard.
It's been taught / used for a long time in North America, I can't speak for other parts of the world. It reminds me of the, "it's not you, it's me", break-up technique, but maybe I just watched too much Seinfeld.
I think it depends on how well it's done. Yeah, if you just transparently sandwich the criticism, it'll come off as a stupid management technique. But if you figure out how to do it genuinely, it can help.
Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)
Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to.
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.
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?"
> 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.
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.
If you'd like to be properly pedantic. 52% of the folks surveyed in one poll were against Prop 8, 52% of the voters voted for Prop 8. Other polls ranged from 35 to 55% against. Prop 8 was designed to prevent a minority group from attaining equivalent rights of the majority so it's not really surprising that Eich got skewered for that. For fucks sake Prop 8 wasn't "quote-unquote bigotry" it was absolutely bigoted — bigoted enough to be struck down by the courts.
Edit: to be clear what I'm getting at is that there is a difference between voters, voters who actually voted, and the overall California population.
Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place.
> 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.
Man, I'm not saying that his wife didn't love him. I'm not saying that his death wasn't tragic for her and many other people. I'm not even saying that I'd heard of any of these people before today. But without any other context, I just can't see "incredibly rude and grotesque" in there.
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.
Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years 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.
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.
> She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years
"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.
> I guess that would depend on whether they skipped over the same parts you did.
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".
I worked many years with gerv. I know that in the valley believing in Christ is seen as evil.
I'm not a believer. Gerv was a good person, easy to work with and never put his faith or illness in the way of work as far as i could see. All he had was a signature in his emails about his faith.
Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.
As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.
> Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque?
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.
Well maybe not, it depends very much on your value system. Fundamentalists (not saying that Gerv was one, just using that as an example) don't see anything wrong with fundamentalism, or at least their version of it.
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.
I personally have some reactions to her statement, but I never met any of them, so all I can do is to imagine. To me, this seems like a demonstration of honesty and sincerity.
> ..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)
> imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way //
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 have definitely gotten the impression (as a very peripheral observer of the Rust community) that ideological diversity is not at all the sort of diversity Mozilla is interested in.
I wonder where that impression comes from? The Rust project is surprisingly diverse there and especially the moderation teams run the gamut from very progressive to very classic conservative.
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.
We're not talking about "anyone with differing opinions", we're talking about a specific person who publicly denounced their coworkers based on their gender and sexuality.
They did clearly state "given the context". The context being someone who, supposedly (I don't know, that was before my time and outside of my circles), had those traits.
So I think saying "by thinking anyone with differing opinions is Xist" is a mischaracterization of what was expressed originally.
I didn't see this before, interesting. I remember Gerv from his blog, he indeed had strong opinions regarding religion, but this obituary is completely out of place, it seems as if she had some personal issues with him.
I went to lectures with Gervase at university 20 years ago and while I never really 'knew' him (and don't share his faith) his energy and enthusiasm were evident. This "obit" seems in bad taste; surely if he was causing so much "trauma" and "damage" at work, they would have done something about it during the last 18 years? It just seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.
This will sound outrageous to US technology workers in 2020, but some people are able to separate their professional lives from the religious and political beliefs of their co-workers.
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.
There are still tech companies like this. I have no detailed idea about my boss and coworkers' political beliefs, but I suspect they're different from mine. No problem, we keep things professional and respectful.
>Do they abide by work regulations and treat everyone equally/equitably (as the org requires)?
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 a person is a white supremacist, black supremacist, Indian supremacist, whatever, perhaps through working side-by-side towards common goals they can learn not only to fake non-discrimination but to adopt it as an ideology. If they're functionally equivalent to everyone else in their work I can't see a _reason_ to exclude them other than bigotry.
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.
>If a person is a white supremacist, black supremacist, Indian supremacist, whatever, perhaps through working side-by-side towards common goals they can learn not only to fake non-discrimination but to adopt it as an ideology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation?
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.
No -- employees cause damage all the live long day.
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 you've got beef with someone, take it up with them while they're living. Once they're dead, you missed your chance.
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.
Gerv's behavior would have led to him being fired a long time ago in any other company. He was a toxic employee. MoCo did him and his family a favor to keep him on the payroll until his death.
It would have been better to fire him when he was alive than to criticize him after he was dead. The former would have been productive, while the later is just distasteful.
Just speaking for myself here, but if someone would like to take adverse action against me, if they're willing to postpone it until after I'm dead, I'd vastly prefer that. Please and thank you. It makes no difference to me if you piss on my grave.
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.
I am not offended by that obit. I can see she was going for a "speaker for dead" thing. I know that sort of direct honesty is out of fashion, but that's the kind of obit I want.
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.
> It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.
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.
Why not do if for less, if you are so dedicated to the supposed Mozilla cause? It is a non-profit after all. Random non-profit: Goodwill (way bigger than Mozilla) CEO makes $1,114,375[1]. PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].
> PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].
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.
> 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.
Not the only one, but you are part of a very small group.
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:
> The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???
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.
> If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?
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?
I don't think that way of looking at things is fruitful, a CEO may have "presided" over huge growth, way above their compensation, but in practice that growth is most likely down to an amalgam of all the workers (and might have been higher without the CEO, for example).
Each worker gives the same, ultimately, an hour of their precious life each hour they work.
I find it annoying each time nonprofit compensation for various executives is raised. I don't want to derail the thread, but it is especially appalling in education, where entities brand themselves as nonprofit where administration swallows ridiculous amount of money.
Where do you get those executive jobs for relatively unknown entities that pay millions? Isn't there an entire IRS publication about how it is suppsed to be reasonable?
But its defenders constantly say "Mozilla is a non-profit" and when pressed, note that Mozilla Foundation is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation.
You can't have it both ways: either it is subject to Foundation=good presumptions as defenders invoke, or it is not. If not, then its comp may not be excessive at the top, but it sure jumped in 2017 while market share dropped -- and anyway, if it is a for-profit, it needs to act like one to make more money and avoid layoffs!
The double standard here just stinks. I am bound by NDAs from when I was at Mozilla, but since then I've observed and heard enough to call bullshit, and I am.
Then you should have posted this in every single reply where you stated Mozilla Corporation is NOT a non-profit. Or else you look ( and I presume you are before this reply ) that you are defending their status.
MoCo doesn't get the goodies. It's a cash generator (in theory, probably not so much at the moment) for MoFo, and money has to flow only in that direction as I understand it.
It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.
No, sorry -- it is encumbered as a for-profit to pay taxes, but it cannot operate as a for-profit wholly owned by private investors or public shareholders would (I'm not saying that is good or bad). It is different. It's like many sports stadia/teams, universities, hospitals: for-profit wholly owned sub of a non-profit.
As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-profit" when that wins social status, and denied (as you do) when trying to spiff Mozilla as a commercially-savvy for-profit. Sorry, you cannot have it both ways.
One thing I think is clear from its history, including when I was there (but not based on any NDA'ed info): Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech is the lineal descendent and successor to FirefoxOS, going to 200M+ smart-featurephones globally, even winning a Google investment. Mozilla dropped FirefoxOS (twice, painfully).
>Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech ...
I am just speculating here, but would this involve significant compromise on Mozilla's core values - specifically privacy? For example one of their investors and partners is Reliance Jio (the reason why KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India) who brag about monetizing the data of their subscribers as a fundamental business model and strategy. The reason i was excited about FirefoxOS was that i was hoping that they would do the same for mobile operating systems as they did for the World Wide Web. Personally, i trust KaiOS devices even less than Android in that regard.
AFAIK privacy had nothing to do with it. Mozilla did not want to keep investing, it lost hope in getting traction and had no other mobile-to-scale play, so it pulled back to focus on desktop. Confirmed in private comms from multiple execs.
>Probably not but that is what the market cost is.
Is it really? The average pay for the CEO of a company of Mozilla's size is somewhere around $800,000 according to [1]. And a pretty large chunk of that is performance related.
Of course salaries may vary a lot between industries, but given Mozilla's performance, their CEO's salary appears to be on the high side.
Besides the fact tech skews much higher, especially tech in SV, Mozilla doesn't have stock or equity to pass around, so has historically had relatively high cash compensation for its size instead.
I think that has become less true over the years, but it does tend to inflate salary or salary+bonus numbers unless you compare to total comp elsewhere (including parachutes and other bonuses that may not make these sheets).
The numbers I quoted include new stock/equity as well as equity gains.
Also, Mozilla is a rather unusual tech company in many ways. Leading Mozilla comes with unique opportunities not easily found elsewhere. Monetary compensation is not the only incentive for people.
I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.
Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.
Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be.
Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.
It would be interesting to see if the CEO bailed if her pay was cut in half. Many CEOs are not in a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. So they can walk away if you cut their pay without looking like an asshole. Then the board is stuck looking for a replacement who will accept 1.25M and the expectation that it could get cut again if the company doesn't turn around.
> Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.
This is a dangerous limb to go out on an HN, but what if they just didn't have a CEO? Do you think the quality of the resulting product would be significantly worse?
I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.
They were not the CEO until a few months ago. They aren't even Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. They are the chair of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors.
Sure, I'll do dev for 150k if they're fine with me remoting in from Germany. Currently earning a third of that as security consultant which is on average better paid than developer afaik. I could retire at 37 instead of 47.
You see, I'm fine donating money to a lot of places because I feel like I earn a lot (and I earn about 50k/year, not 150k and I never expect to earn 400k). The Internet Archive, Climeworks, OpenStreetMap, a local hackerspace, random sites or tools that I found useful, etc. But when I see that we need a hundred thousand average-sized donations to cover the cost of a single employee in a non-profit (what is even the definition of that word if not to not turn out profit to its owners?) then we're all just financing a pretty face instead of the product we love. One can argue all one wants about it being the market value or competitive offers or whatever, but if you are only in it for the money, Mozilla should not be the company for you. I'm not financing that. This is also why I don't donate to Wikipedia: the money doesn't actually go to Wikipedia the platform.
You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.
Think about that the next time you're thinking how much of a paycut you'd be willing to take if it meant you didn't have to talk to that guy every week.
>You know those meetings you hate? Quadruple them, add more customers and some unsavory financiers. Then sprinkle it with a bunch of business trips where you never get to see the city.
That argument is about "how hard/bothersome" the work is. That's not how compensation is set, however.
I, and most developers I presume, also don't like sweeping streets or cleaning gas station toilets (much more than business trips and tons of customer meetings), but nobody would pay millions to some gas station toilet attendant.
> There is very little about software development expertise that will help with either of those endeavors
Good point, we can pay them much less than developers. Having a warm smile and making informed decisions about ~things is something my mom can do and I assure you her hourly wage is less than a developer's.
And the first industrial grade confidence trickster (and when you're managing $500 million you tend to get the cream of the crop going after you) will take her (and her company) for all she's worth. Having seen people who are great at people skills and those who are not there is a world of difference.
There probably are, but that's not the issue when recruiting CEO.
You have to find a person with a relevant experience. That's the real bottleneck. Number of people available who have enough track record to be considered to become CEO in a tech company with half a billion in revenue and over thousand employees is small, those who are willing to work for less pay is really small.
Running a company such as this is like living in a shark tank. Powerful, convincing people are going to lobby you to do what they think you ought to be doing. See the recent privatization of .org for how things can go wrong. You need the right person at the helm with strong convictions.
This will discourage people from donating. Absolutely disgusting. Maybe it's good for them to go bankrupt, so that other non-profits will learn from their mistake.
The minute Mozilla goes bankrupt and Firefox loses funding is the minute the internet is dead. Imagine only having a single client for HTTP (Chrome/WebKit).
Main search deal is traffic based; user population, per statcounter and netmarketshare, continues downward trend. So less revenue over time, unless users search more for some reason.
Mitchell has been influential in Netscape and Mozilla since the beginning. Also, Mozilla isn’t just a software company. It’s also an technology and public policy advocacy organization.
Value isn't solely a function of effort, no. Some activities are more fruitful than others. This is a universal truth by the way, not simply a property of our current economic system. If I work up a sweat driving nails into wood with a hammer, that won't make whatever I'm creating stronger than if I used an electric screwdriver or nailgun.
Jobs do not have to be physically exhausting to be hard.
Coal miner's job is hard and deadly. programming is differently hard and not very deadly (arguably working at a desk, wreaking your brain 70h a week with 10 days off a year is somewhat deadly). i'd take the programming job any day as long as I get a bay area salary, granted that I can program.
However, i can tell you most programmer jobs are much harder, take much more hours than many lower paying jobs (not even mentioning the fact that you need to be somewhat smart and learn it for years before you can do anything).
Say drive a bus? Yeah its boring. But its not hard. Hold a 2 pers. shop? nope, not hard, and you do less hours. Etc. Heck even driving the trucks to the coal miners pay very well for a somewhat hard job.
I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.
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