9 ms·

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 d

• catalogia 7y ago
  That's appalling. How did that make people still working at Mozilla feel? I can't imagine working under somebody like that.
  • cookiecaper 7y ago
    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/christi3k/status/1023300369416249346 http://archive.today/2020.01.16-002922/https://twitter.com/c...
    • pgsbathhouse 7y ago
      >Common decency is apparently not valued above political homogeneity in the tech industry. You are subtly advocating for exactly the thing you are snarkly accusing the entire tech industry of.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      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.
    • inferiorhuman 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
        • inferiorhuman 7y ago
          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.
          • cookiecaper 7y ago
            > 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.
  • 9152ba83773b 7y ago
    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.
    • catalogia 7y ago
      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.
      • 9152ba83773b 7y ago
        I don't disagree they should have done that. I guess they didn't want to look like the bad guys that are firing a dying man.
      • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        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.
        • deleted 7y ago
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    • mda 7y ago
      Doesn't explain hostile obituary from Ceo.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • tenpies 7y ago
    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.
    • monoideism 7y ago
      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.
    • eschaton 7y ago
      And then the person who views it as faith-based starts talking about how his views need to be encoded into law, and those who are affected are sinners who will suffer for it. You can’t “agree to disagree” about bigotry. It fundamentally denies others’ humanity which is the very definition of making a hostile environment. How in the hell is this something people even consider should still be litigated? What’s next, opposing firing of open white supremacists because you think everyone should agree to disagree and get back to work, never mind that they think some of their coworkers are “inferior?”
      • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Is the white supremacist living according to the law? Do they abide by work regulations and treat everyone equally/equitably (as the org requires)? I may hate their view point, and want them not to exist, but they feel the same about me I expect.
        • foldr 7y ago
          >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.
• cookie_monsta 7y ago
  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)
  • krn 7y ago
    > 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.
    • cookie_monsta 7y ago
      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.
      • shard972 7y ago
        Talk about jumping through hoops to justify an awful obituary.
      • mcantelon 7y ago
        Characterizing someone as having a "traumatic and damaging" influence seems pretty positive.
    • swfsql 7y ago
      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)
• pmichaud 7y ago
  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.
  • joecool1029 7y ago
    > I am not offended by that obit. 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.
    • samantohermes 7y ago
      No need for you to be rude either. Many people are on the autism spectrum, so it's not necessarily due to bad faith.
      • joecool1029 7y ago
        I had the author[1] in mind when I wrote my comment. [1] https://rationality.org/about/staff https://rationality.org/about/staff : "cofounded an emotional intelligence and communication training organization"
    • 7y ago
• Blake_Emigro 7y ago
  She used the sandwich feedback technique for a eulogy - an interesting approach. https://www.rightattitudes.com/2008/02/20/sandwich-feedback-technique/ https://www.rightattitudes.com/2008/02/20/sandwich-feedback-...
  • sushid 7y ago
    Gross, is this actually a technique taught in management? Seems disingenuous and sounds like something a really bad manager would do.
    • The_rationalist 7y ago
      It can actually be an effective method if the employee isn't able to listen to factual criticism.
      • craftinator 7y ago
        s/employee/specimen|patient/
    • 7thaccount 7y ago
      Yes, just had it taught to my management class where we universally agreed that it felt fake and unnatural.
      • tempestn 7y ago
        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.
    • Blake_Emigro 7y ago
      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.
• deleted 7y ago
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• burnte 7y ago
  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.
  • tzjmetron 7y ago
    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.
  • mcantelon 7y ago
    Using an obituary to characterize someone's influence as "traumatic and damaging" is kind of extraordinary.
    • pnako 7y ago
      The whole thing reads as if written by Michael Scott.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    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?
• senderista 7y ago
  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.
  • Argorak 7y ago
    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.
    • dependenttypes 7y ago
      I don't know about the parent but at least for me that impression came from the censorship enforced by the moderation team in https://snew.notabug.io/r/rust/comments/7nx3cm/announcement_ashley_williams_joins_the_core_team/ https://snew.notabug.io/r/rust/comments/7nx3cm/announcement_...
  • intarga 7y ago
    Given the context, I take ideological diversity to mean inclusion of people who are sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. The identity characteristic here revolves around the exclusion of others, how in any sense does that make it reasonable to include them in the name of diversity? You're asking people to tolerate intolerance in the name of tolerance. I can't see such a request as anything less than insincere.
    • wyoh 7y ago
      You're part of the problem by thinking anyone with differing opinions is sexist racist transphobic and any other ism.
• asveikau 7y ago
  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.
• mda 7y ago
  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.
• jlarcombe 7y ago
  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.