6 ms·

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
      [deleted]
- mda 7y ago
  Doesn't explain hostile obituary from Ceo.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
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.

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
    [deleted]
mda 7y ago
Doesn't explain hostile obituary from Ceo.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

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.