611–620 of 962 posts
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> It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated. Possibly. Another possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to fire a man with terminal cancer who presumably depended upon the health insurance provided by the company.
He lived in England. Not a factor.
Besides donating and the as-yet-to-be-released VPN service, how else can we support Mozilla? I don't see anything they're actually selling and I hate for stuff like this to happen.
You can also donate your voice here: https://voice.mozilla.org
Let me have Rome for but a single eight-hour workday.
They are trying things they shouldn't and not doing well on things they should be. I will never understand the dumb decision to make address bar row single line long from two lines earlier. It's basic ux! Just because chrome does it doesn't make it right
What did Mitchell mean by "Most will not join us in Berlin"?
I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment…
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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…
I was never a millionaire from real estate before I'd been working ten years. Are you perhaps misinformed by someone who was at SGI and exaggerated rumors they heard? I made more off of SGI options than I did by ten years in from real estate, and I never flipped. I've owned the same properties for over 30 years. I agree with you that many fine people do life-saving or otherwise important work for far less. But facts…
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/09/business/part-artist-part...
I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case. I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible fut…
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.
As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.
At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.
>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.
Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.
I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.
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How do you know that it is Mozilla's company policy? That is the distinction based on the law that you cited. Firing someone for a reason in an at-will employment state does not suddenly make that reason part of the company policy.
Because they fired an employee specifically for their political donations. Your claim that firing employees for their political activity is ok as long as it's not a company policy and only one-off instances is not what law groups are saying. Here's one that addresses Eich's case specifically: https://shawlawgroup.com/2014/05/california-law-protects-emp... > Mr. Eich’s situation is somewhat analogous to the one addres…
Being fired for your political actions is entirely legal in at-will employment states like California.
The law you cited does not apply, except to companies that use company policy to _coerce_ political action from employees. Firing someone for their actions does not make it company policy.
Mozilla was not coercing employees to take political action by adding politics into their company policy. Mozilla was saying that for that particular position at their company, the employee's political actions were grounds to be terminated.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can explain this, but that's why what happened is legal, despite the lawyers opinion you googled.
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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.
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.
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.