Previously they had appointed an excellent CEO from within that is universally well respected for his technology contributions and then they fired him after 11 days without cause. Now that guy is a CEO at a different company.
Thanks for the link, wasn't aware of the details. While I 100% disagree with him on marriage equality I don't understand why he was driven from his role that has nothing to do with Proposition 8. Why did his freedom to support a cause with his own money result in him having to resign, seems anti-democratic to me.
I don't know, man. It's easy to get all abstract with phrases like "support a cause" but we live in a concrete world. Mozilla employs a lot of gay people. Prop 8 was viciously homophobic, both in concept and especially in execution of its campaign. How would you feel going to work knowing your boss's boss thinks you don't deserve rights?
A few people commenting is not widespread support. I was at Mozilla at the time and I didn't get the impression that the views you linked were broadly representative.
And FWIW: I didn't personally feel the backlash at Brendan was appropriate, but given that it existed the outcome was probably unavoidable.
I say this as someone who, while living in Virgina and having never lived in California at the time prop 8 was on the ballot (I moved here a few years later), I donated to opposition to CA prop 8 and decided to not get married to my (opposite sex) partner out of solidarity with gay people who couldn't get married in our state.
I never felt that I should be or would be persecuted at Mozilla (which employed a lot of christians, and particularly Catholics), if it had become public that I funded opposition to prop 8. Nor, by the same token, did I think it was appropriate for Brendan to come under fire for funding support for it. I have sympathy for the theoretical argument that it might be difficult to work for someone with personal views incompatible with yours or your identity, but in practice Mozilla was an an extremely open and inclusive place that employed people of all kinds and treated them with respect. (In other words, a theoretical problem which wasn't in this instance a practical problem by any report I heard.)
Although I don't have any actual knowledge, if I had to speculate I would guess there were other Mozilla employees who supported prop 8 (many?). -- especially considering that prop 8 _passed_ with >52% support.
Even though I strongly disagreed with him on this subject (apparently! not that I'd have any way to know other than the media coverage of this), the incident made me feel slightly less safe and welcome there-- because clearly your lawful and constitutionally protected outside-of-work personal/political/religious views were potentially subject to scrutiny. Although not very much so, because it appeared clear to me that the events were primarily being driven by public noise, and not by some internal wrong-think witchhunt.
His views weren't the problem. His actions were. And not thinking his actions were discriminatory.
The CEO is the face of the company and oversees HR. Most people who objected to Eich being CEO didn't have a problem with him being CTO.
Believing different races shouldn't mix is legal. Just saying it in public will disqualify you from being CEO at most companies. Never mind funding a constitutional amendment.
In my experience it's been about a half-and-half split between managers I respect and those that I don't. It's certainly not my preference but I have worked for people who don't really respect me and, very likely, didn't believe I deserved all sorts of things (a living wage being among them).
That said, Mozilla works in a competitive environment. Perhaps it would have made more sense to wait for valuable employees to start leaving before dismissing their CEO. While I find his position on Prop 8 offensive, as others have pointed out, they are entitled to their beliefs.
If I earn $100,000 am I allowed to ask for people advocating for tax increases to be ejected from the company for being wealthophobes?
That isn't as idle a question as you might think on first glance. Denying someone marriage rights is waaay down the list of ways voters can screw each other over through government policy. Most high income earners are in companies with co-workers who literally argue that they should be less well off.
Being anti-gay-marriage is more stupid because the upside is unclear, but we expect people in the same company to put up with bigger differences of opinion on a routine basis. Different religions have gone to war in the past. I don't think many battles have been fought over official marriage rights.
Are you seriously comparing civil rights to a tax increase? Spend 10 minutes today learning about marriage and the rights it includes. I used to think it wasn't a big deal until I actually learned about it. Marriage includes hundreds of legal rights that have a huge impact on a couple's life (and death).
I one time notice that strict job descriptions are incredibly rare. I've only really seen them on factory floors. For laughs I ask a bunch of people in the same function to describe their job. Having asked this a few times it was fun to chat about how different their idea was from their colleagues. Some of them were surprisingly clueless. They thought their job was the stuff that currently consumed most of their time.
I think in programming we've learned (the hard way) that fuzzy input should be rejected. Stuff should do exactly what it says on the can. No mather how sophisticated, if a date object returns political opinion they are not parsed.
Perhaps one day we can do modular job descriptions or functional employment. Accurate task descriptions with actual specs. Well formed execution and response text. The most professional people I've worked with were already strict about what everyone's job was.
Doesn't basically everyone feel they are being denied some basic human rights all the time? Progressives are being denied healthcare rights. Libertarians are being denied property rights. etc.
Looking at from the other side of the globe, as a non-american. I get the impression that in silicon valley, technology is all about skin color, what you have between your legs and what you want to do with what you have between you legs - end of story. Those are the really important bit. Everything else is just the details.
It looks like pure politics, keep conservatives out and keep liberals in. His fault wasn't the donation. His fault was being outed as a conservative.
I think someone should try wearing a trump hat to work at a technology company for a week and see how long they last in the organization.
If you aren't in America, and you're frequenting (largely) American discussion boards, you're going to see the topics that get a lot of discussion - things where not everyone is on board with one side or the other. This of course tilts heavily toward culture issues.
Some people like to wax poetic about getting along with people with whom you disagree. But there's a difference between disagreeing on, say, tabs vs. spaces or fiscal policy or something, and disagreeing about what sort of people do or do not deserve rights. This situation clearly falls in the latter category and attempts to conflate it with the former are very unconvincing.
I'd say the answer to that is the same reason why there was a front page article the other day about which was more important: revenue stream or culture. Comments almost made it feel like people would gladly ride a company to the grave so long as they could feel good about what they haven't accomplished (making money).
How is this anti-democratic? Democracy means the reign of the people - nothing in that concept involves that corporations can't remove someone (pressure someone to step down) because of his views/actions.
To be more precise: In a democracy corporations can still be concerned with their public image and distance themselves from (particularly high-ranked) employees, if they consider them detrimental for their business.
I'll say it again: If Eich remaining CEO would have resulted in Firefox bundling a cryptocurrency (not to mention ads) like Brave does, then I'm really glad Eich left.
I'll also note that Brave went for Chrome's Blink engine, and while that calculus might have been different if he were running Firefox, it doesn't give me confidence that he would have preserved the Gecko engine.
Well, if Brendan Eich stayed CEO of Mozilla, maybe we would now have a kind of firefox/brave mixed browser.
But instead, we can choose between Firefox, and Brave. 2 competitors for Chrome, from which users can choose. So, in the end, maybe it was for the best?
Brave is just chrome with a few additions it’s much worse than a Braved-Firefox would be. I’m guessing he rightly feels he couldn’t use Firefox as his base due to the history.
"We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,
Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex
Browser. For Brave with its default settings we did not find
any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over
time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with
backend servers. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details
of web pages visited with backend servers."
Of course it says that he left. That's how business works. "We agreed upon parting ways, so XY can focus on other projects." It's never "we kicked his ass and threw his stuff out".
He was asked to resign by Mitchell Baker at which point he presented a resignation letter. That is an involuntary termination, which for everybody outside the "C" suite is being fired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich