Mozilla lays off 70

Post by core-questions » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #421

codezero wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that it was less about the end-user as it was about the gay people working for Mozilla who felt uncomfortable working with a CEO who took the actions Eich took in his past. One cannot know peoples' private thoughts or biases, so folks often take what ever signal they can get.

Its exactly the same as avoiding a company which uses slave labor in some 3rd world countries. No one wants to be funding these actions.

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:53 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #342

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.

CS was never close to meritocracy (I'd argue that finance is/was historically far closer to meritocracy than CS ever was). Eich was raised in the Valley, got a Master's in CS before he had gotten a job, and was a millionaire and investing in Silicon Valley real estate before he had been working for ten years (he never started a company, and only created Javascript after something like eleven). There are people workin…

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #452

JohnFen wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to second-guess the marketing team, as I clearly don't know all of the things I'd need to know to do that. But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?

Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to. Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstr…

Post by shard972 » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

cookie_monsta wrote: post #454

krn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 vie…

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.

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #239

Thorentis wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded B…

Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay. That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).