5 ms·

"There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his job, and no single instance or evidence of any problem with his job." I don't know if t

• icelancer 10y ago
  "He resigned of his own volition..." Yeah, I'm sure he just up and decided to resign with zero pressure from political insiders and the flash mob causing outrage. That's probably what happened.
  • Frondo 10y ago
    I for one commend Eich, for putting on his big boy pants and owning the consequences of his actions. He held an unpopular view, acted on it, and people weren't happy with him. Far better to step down and let the organization right itself, than to try and hold onto his position and his retrograde views simultaneously. Shows real class.
    • sangnoir 10y ago
      > He held an unpopular view, acted on it, and people weren't happy with him. Isn't this the plot to every dystopian story ever told ("conform, or else")? As a lefty, I understand the motivation, but disagree with it- it will never work; you will never change a persons values (positive or negative) via public shaming, all you will do is force the 'undesirable attitudes' underground. As a member of a 'disadvantaged minority', I'd rather have bigotry out in the open and act accordingly. If Trump has as a silver lining, it is dragging all the latent bigotry into the light. edit: I always like to compare Mozilla to Dropbox. In the immediate aftermath of Eich being forced out, the same boycott mob tried to pressure Dropbox into removing Condoleezza Rice from its board for being a 'war criminal'. In contrast, Dropbox's board didn't blink- they called the bluff and showed unequivocal support for Ms. Rice with a firm "No" and that was the end of it.
      • ZoF 10y ago
        Yeah, this resonates with me a lot. I think humans are meta and that when censorship occurs like this it only empowers the people it's trying to silence. Meaning that while Brandon Eich may personally have had negative impact, I honestly don't think in terms of public opinion that this incident had a positive impact on gay rights. Instead, it's cited as an example of how the 'regressive left' is silencing conservative views, it strengthens their resolve. I think a large part of it is due to the internet. Meaning, in the past this likely wouldn't have been seen by nearly as many people, and they wouldn't have the ability or impetus to truly impact the individual. Given the relative ease of denigrating him, plus acting from a place of moral authority(depending on your views...) this is the result. And the 'justice' felt good too, because it was 'right'. I think about this a _lot_. I can feel the racial tensions even in my neighborhood, it's never felt this fractious before and I honestly believe the perceived(and in many cases very real) levels of censorship are a major contributing factor. Racism/Sexism/Homophobia - I firmly believe that the majority of individuals can see the immoral and in many cases plain stupid aspects of these. I also firmly believe that a part of developing a healthy moral framework involves 'testing/bouncing off' offensive beliefs between one another so that we can rationalize and come to the conclusions ourselves, not being able to freely 'play' stifles growth. All the silence does is make people want to go home and release their angst online, we end up with extremely polarized communities where these specific local instances of injustice from both sides are used to justify/re-enforce a narrative. The end result(or perhaps the ongoing/developing and hopefully not escalating) is things like actual white supremacists on /pol/ and #KillAllWhites etc. on Twitter. I have so much more I could say about this really.
      • Frondo 10y ago
        Not all dystopian stories are about non-comformity, and many, many non-dystopian stories involve social pressure or censure. Social pressure (conform or face consequences) is one of the basic parts of the human experience, so this is unsurprising. I too like how Trump is pulling a lot of hidden bigotry back out into the open; it gives me a chance to talk with my well-meaning but ignorant lefty friends about how racism really is still prevalent, and a problem. But it isn't enough just to show it's there, the point is to top up our sense that those attitudes are unacceptable and don't belong in civil society, and that we all still need to keep working on getting those ideas out of the discourse, and so on. But getting bigoted ideas out of civil society? Well, we're back to social pressure ("conform to my vision of the world where bigotry is no longer a thing"). If, by the way, you think bigoted ideas do belong in civil society, then we probably won't get any further than that.
    • smsm42 10y ago
      There was nothing in Mozilla that needed to be "righted" with respect to Eich, except, as it turned out, cowardice and spinelessness. Of course, working for organization that throws you under the bus on the first sigh somebody on twitter is cross with you is no picnic either, so maybe Eich is better of for this.
    • mzw_mzw 10y ago
      >I for one commend Eich, for putting on his big boy pants and owning the consequences of his actions. You might as well commend Soviet dissidents for "putting on their big boy pants and owning the consequences of their actions" when the KGB marched them off to the Gulag. The fact that someone bows to bullying pressure doesn't make the bullying pressure OK.
  • sprafa 10y ago
    The only way this will work is if you keep pretending he had no say in the matter. He resigned. Get over it.
    • smsm42 10y ago
      By "say" you mean that if he wanted, he could've stayed and Mozilla as an organization would support him and he wouldn't have any trouble? Yeah right.
      • sprafa 10y ago
        Of course he would have had trouble, enough that he felt like he had to go. But this was a personal issue between him and his colleagues. Comparing it into company-wide discrimination is not helpful. You're comparing a matter of policy (company-wide discrimination) with a matter of personal politics (can't work with this guy because we don't agree with him, plus he's using my added value as a way to attack my way of life). The end results are the same but the mechanism isn't. Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe. But they didn't. That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash.
        • smsm42 10y ago
          > But this was a personal issue between him and his colleagues. No it wasn't "personal issue". There was no personal issues with Eich, no evidence of anybody having personal beef with him - either because of sexual orientation issues or any other - was ever documented. It was a purely political issue, namely - political pressure to punish Eich for holding a particular viewpoint, completely unrelated to his job performance. > Comparing it into company-wide discrimination is not helpful. There was neither wide nor narrow discrimination. There wasn't any. Discrimination was not the issue. Thoughtcrime on Eich's part was. > can't work with this guy because we don't agree with him If you can't work with people that disagree with you, you should work as a lighthouse watcher, ranger in a remote mountainous region, hermit or another profession that puts you out of contact with people. People should not have to lose jobs because you disagree with them. > Could his colleagues have been more accommodating of his views ? Maybe. Nobody asked his colleagues to be "accommodating" to anything. The only thing was to have minimum decency to not throw out a person because he committed a thoughtcrime. That proved to high a bar for Mozilla. Thus they organization will now have to live with infamy of what they did. It takes years to build trust, it takes one case like this to destroy it. > That's a personal problem that comes from a large cultural clash. There was no "clash". Eich did not "clash" with anybody. There was a campaign of personal destruction, which run him out of the job, and which in eyes of many - including me - branded Mozilla as organization which is cowardly, disloyal to their loyal workers, and easily manipulated by hate mobs.
• gnarbarian 10y ago
  >I could imagine it might make them (gay employees) uncomfortable, Nobody likes being uncomfortable, perhaps having gay employees made Eich uncomfortable too. But I don't remember hearing about him forcing anyone out of the company or discriminating against anyone under any circumstance. To prevent his employees from feeling uncomfortable should the government allow Eich to stop hiring gay employees?
  • byuu 10y ago
    > To prevent his employees from feeling uncomfortable should the government allow Eich to stop hiring gay employees? Oh god, don't give the US Supreme Court any ideas >_> They already think corporations are people with religious rights, and that discrimination is a thing of the past. This wouldn't be much of a stretch for them at this point. ( You can already refuse to hire gay people (as well as outright fire them) in most states; but Mozilla is headquartered in a state where you can't. If anyone is interested, here is the map: https://mic.com/articles/121496/one-map-shows-where-you-can-still-be-fired-for-being-gay-in-2015#.6Axtan4Xa https://mic.com/articles/121496/one-map-shows-where-you-can-... )
    • smsm42 10y ago
      > They already think corporations are people with religious rights No they don't. They think people, when organizing into corporations, do not lose their rights just because they did something together. Example: you have freedom of speech, and US Constitution and US laws recognize that. You can print a newspaper and freedom of speech protects you. Now, printing a newspaper is hard. So you ask a bunch of people to help you, and you call these people together "The New York Times Corporation". Is printing the newspaper together still covered as your free speech? The US Supreme Court thinks yes, it is. I think they are completely correct. To think otherwise would be to say people have free speech right, but only to the point where it actually matters - where they can speak so powerfully and loudly that the government and other people in power have to listen. In our modern world it is virtually impossible to achieve it without organizing - and so by pretending that after organizing people lose their rights that they had before would be to rob the First Amendment of its meaning and turn it into a sham, when you can only speak freely when it does not matter.
• sangnoir 10y ago
  > I don't know how many gay folks work for Mozilla...They might have had a real problem with his donating to Prop 8 Does that mean CEOs/management should be forced to resign for donating to the Trump campaign if some of their employees are Mexican immigrants or Muslim?
  • Frondo 10y ago
    I'm not sure why you're talking about "be forced to resign". Eich resigned voluntarily, according to Eich and the Mozilla board (i.e. every involved party). No one forced him.
    • halflings 10y ago
      Which type of founder would voluntarily resign from the CEO position at his own company? (esp. a project like Mozilla) Eich resigned under huge pressure after the media broke the story and ran with it for days. I started an internship at Mozilla right when Eich got fired, and the vast majority of people I talked had the same reaction: "Yeah, his donation isn't bad in itself, but the way he dealt with this polemic shows he's a bad as a CEO" (which does not convince me at all... since, you know, nobody is ready to deal with that type of pressure from the media, unless you're a politician with a PR team). Bottom-line: As a CTO, he had a lot of engineers reporting to him, many of which were LGBTQ, and Mozilla is known for being one of the most pro-LGBTQ companies out there. He would have most likely been a great CEO to Mozilla, and a donation done personally cannot possibly be a valid reason for asking him to resign (the media, a tiny minority of people at Mozilla).
      • lallysingh 10y ago
        No. A C level officer is part of the public face of the organization. If one can't handle the binding of their personal life to that face, they should step down.
        • doe88 10y ago
          Great, that's what happened and now FF is in worst shape than ever. Anecdotally, I used to love FF but for the first time since the first released version of FF it is not my default browser anymore. Too much issues, I could not handle my frustration anymore. The silver lining may be Servo, I don't know, but at least I don't see a bright future with this current code base.
• creationix 10y ago
  Exactly, you don't know if that's true. From my personal experience talking to actual mozilla employees and reading blog posts by mozilla employees, that statement looks pretty true. Even LGBT employees supported him through the ordeal. Yes mozilla the company had some problems with it's policies, but from what I've heard directly from insiders, Eich was partnering with the LGBT people to solve their problems and never acted in and discriminatory manner against them. Loosing him hurt their cause and the company. Please do some research on what actually happened instead of blindly jumping on the popular bandwagon. Of course there were employees who were unhappy when they learned about his donation. In fact they were quite surprised because of how professionally he did his job. But I have never heard of any thing he's ever done to act in a discriminatory manner on the job. I have heard of cases where he actually protected such people and helped improve things internally.
• smsm42 10y ago
  > They might have had a real problem with his donating to Prop 8. So what? I might have a problem with my boss' watch or suit or the shows he likes or the newspapers she reads. Who cares? I'm not marrying him/her, I'm working with him/her. It's irrelevant for the work. There's no single piece of evidence Eich did in any way impede, discriminate against, was hostile to or in any other way hurt any gay - or straight, for that matter - employee, while working for Mozilla. If there were a shred of evidence, it would be unearthed and paraded by now. It wasn't. Conclusion is it doesn't exist. That's what I am talking about "no single instance". I don't claim nobody ever disagreed with him on anything, because a) that's impossible and b) nobody cares, disagreement is completely normal. > but I could imagine it might make them uncomfortable, The idea that everybody should behave in a way that makes absolutely everybody else comfortable and never do anything that could cause slightest discomfort to anybody is one of the most stupid ideas that ever come out of American college campuses. Fortunately, even its proponents don't actually believe in it - they are completely fine causing their opponents maximum discomfort. It's only their own comfort that they aim to protect. Which is fine - but I see no reason why their comfort is more important than everybody else. Of course, some people - including ones working for Mozilla - may hate Eich's views. So what? If you have views, somebody would eventually hate them. And some would love them. And most wouldn't care. > Mozilla didn't fire him Technically, no. Effectively, yes. There are more ways to fire a person than yell "You're FIRED!!!!" to his face. This "his own volition" is a pile of bull, just like saying "oh, your honor, this guy handed his wallet to me on his own volition, and the gun in my hand has really nothing to do with the case, let's forget about it. The guy even said "please take my wallet and let me go!" which I obliged to do. So I don't see what all the fuss is about, it's clearly a voluntary transaction." > but usually when I boycott something it's for real stuff, not stuff I just made up in my head. I remain grateful to you for this short, but instructive story about your life. It was very educational, truly a people interest story.