On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 29, 2014 18:29 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by sfeam
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I don't think there's much point in keeping up the pretence after this particular cat is out of the bag. People make excuses yes, so very many excuses, but what they actually wanted is revenge. And they got it, and sure enough they were content.

I care about outcomes, that's what I do. So revenge doesn't work for me. You nailed the guy to a cross? That's great, did it actually help? No? Well that's a bunch of time you wasted and one more corpse.

We used to do that a lot in safety critical jobs. Train crash? Find out if the driver lived and if so fire him. Tell everybody he's incompetent and may have been drunk. Now the papers are distracted by a simple easy to understand bad guy story (also his children will probably starve). Meanwhile, we'll continue to run railways the same as before. Huh, another train crash. Well, you know the drill, fire the driver.

But it turns out you can investigate the actual causes, work out how to prevent them and solve the problem instead. Newspapers don't like this approach, because instead of an instant bad guy to demonise they have to wait a year to digest a sixty page report that says basically "A lot of things went wrong" and then painstakingly lists them. That's not a good story! But it is a good way to improve, and it saved a huge number of lives over the last century or so.

If you _really_ thought the problem here was that an executive might be supervising people they were biased against there were lots of sensible options for what to do about that. Options with a real lasting benefit to Mozilla employees (or if mandated more widely, all employees). But that is not what the people who forced that resignation wanted. They wanted revenge, and they got it.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 30, 2014 16:27 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

There's really no comparison between some poor faceless train driver working for a railway, and the CEO -- the public face -- of a non-profit corporation that justifies its whole existence by claiming to defend principles of openness and inclusivity. Mozilla's whole existence depends on people trusting Mozilla to have their back. Brendan's initial sin was giving the impression that he wasn't trustworthy in this respect; his mortal sin was that after the PR mess started, he completely and utterly failed to take any actions whatsoever to respond and reassure people. Very talented programmer, sure, but the whole situation, and his lack of handling it, made clear that he was simply unqualified for a CEO position.

This has all been explained many times, of course, so if you want to keep claiming that everyone who disagreed with you was acting out of pure malice then I guess it probably won't stop you...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 30, 2014 18:11 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

I assure you a mere employee chosen to be the scapegoat and sate the public's desire for revenge doesn't remain faceless for long. You would probably recognise the face of Francesco Schettino even if you don't live in Italy. Schettino will likely get a jail sentence for his role in the Costa Concordia disaster. But do not be fooled, Schettino while culpable is not the problem, sending this man to jail saves not one single life, it's purely society's retribution.

Firstly let's briefly tackle a purely technical mistake. Brendan was CEO of Mozilla Corporation, not Mozilla Foundation. The corporation is a for-profit, and only its owner the foundation is a non-profit. The corporation hires most of Mozilla's employees and always has undertaken activities that don't contribute to "principles of openness" and of course most of their income is from Google, in exchange for ensuring that the 99% of users who never change their defaults will visit Google's search engine and other properties.

Anyway, so you claim the problem was that Brendan couldn't handle this "PR mess" and this (even though it looks exactly like the others) is not an excuse but instead a /real/ reason why he just had to go.

That seems fine, right? Except, if you fail one component for its inability to pass a new test you made up, it's weird if you then subsequently just never use that test on any other components. That makes it pretty obvious that your real motivation was the failure of that component, not setting a higher standard. So, this new excuse doesn't fly because there was no effort to create a "PR mess" for Chris Beard and see how he'd fare nor for the equally important Mitchell Baker.

In fact Chris and Mitchell can keep their jobs because there isn't a powerful and organised political group trying to get them fired. They probably feel a little bit less secure knowing (from Brendan's experience) that if they piss off the wrong people they're history but for now they are safe.