She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did.
I knew Gerv, he was a convert to Christianity and as usual for converts to any religion, he was intense and fervent in his belief that he had discovered the ultimate truth. Unfortunately that can lead people to embracing the old testament bigotry more than the new testament forgiveness. Gerv wasn't a bad person, but Mitchell wasn't inaccurate in her post. Yes, Gerv was a great thing for Mozilla, but his legacy is not as clear.
A CEO in an employee obituary though, isn't their job at that time to laud the good rather than make it sound like "good riddance"?
>Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. //
So Mitchell's response is to publicly judge him in politely stated but damning terms, whilst simultaneously making an employee's obituary about how they - the obituary writer - were the only thing that moderated the person's overly judgemental nature.
Wowser.
It's like Mitchell realised people would be applauding his work at Mozilla and decided that couldn't be allowed.
It sounds like you're saying his actions at work were abhorrent; or was it that his beliefs were incompatible with yours?
That memoriam seems completely out of place. If you are a professional colleague, common sense would dictate that you write a professional piece that reflects on the person's services rendered to Mozilla. The repeated references to the deceased's religious beliefs seem very out of place and distateful, especially in a memoriam. No excuses there.
As I read that I figure she had to address the guy's controversial opinions such as to not offend people who were offended by them.
As someone who doesn't know anyone involved the suggestion I would make would be to acknowledge controversy upfront, directly and exactly once and then state that you will not address the most controversial points from there on out, in acknowledgement of the deceased and their loved ones. The fact that she waffles back and forth between praise and condemnation in such tight space makes it seem like she simultaneously doesn't stand for much and doesn't forgive even after a person's death.
Even when we find someone's behavior or opinions abhorrent, there isn't a lot of point in holding grudges against dead people. Maybe she could have said that.
It's taught in even the most basic teaching curriculum. I learned about it as a teenager learning to teach swimming. To be honest, it's nothing new or special, and I mean, I don't know where you're coming at with the snarky comment about management, but humans are human and sometimes _how you say something_ matters as much as _what you say_. Nobody likes taking criticism, so it helps blunt the blow, while still allowing for critical feedback to be communicated and heard.
It's been taught / used for a long time in North America, I can't speak for other parts of the world. It reminds me of the, "it's not you, it's me", break-up technique, but maybe I just watched too much Seinfeld.
I think it depends on how well it's done. Yeah, if you just transparently sandwich the criticism, it'll come off as a stupid management technique. But if you figure out how to do it genuinely, it can help.
Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)
Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to.
Saying things like--
"Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate.
...
Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me.
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 views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
...
To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions."
I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
David Anderson articulates some of my feelings on the obit better than I can.
I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings.
If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague.
It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?"
> Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier.
Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California.
In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes.
Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place.
> I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief.
Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there.
But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.
Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward.
Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance.
So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies.
Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here."
I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
I worked many years with gerv. I know that in the valley believing in Christ is seen as evil.
I'm not a believer. Gerv was a good person, easy to work with and never put his faith or illness in the way of work as far as i could see. All he had was a signature in his emails about his faith.
Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.
As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.
Netscape had three phases, the startup, the amazing new big business, and then the slow decline. During the slow decline a lot of fiefdoms popped up. With some people control was more important than collaboration, process was more important than results. Too many suits took over without any real engineering prowess to understand how the things they wanted to do would actually work, and how long they'd take.
> 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 views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.
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.
I personally have some reactions to her statement, but I never met any of them, so all I can do is to imagine. To me, this seems like a demonstration of honesty and sincerity.
> ..that his interpretation should be encoded into law.
Law is dangerous, as it ultimately falls back into the (justification of the) usage of lethal force upon those who defy it.
So I imagine that directicy and strictness was related to him, and so, then, I imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way, which I suppose is what she did.
(but this is just a reaction based on imagination and my own personal experiences with other people, ofc)
> imagine that it is respectful to respond in a direct and strict way //
Yes, to the person, in the same arena (maybe, consider that carefully).
LPT - don't scathingly attack an employee in an obituary after their recent early death. You can say you found then difficult to live with, etc., you don't have to try and crucify their mortal remains.
I have definitely gotten the impression (as a very peripheral observer of the Rust community) that ideological diversity is not at all the sort of diversity Mozilla is interested in.
I wonder where that impression comes from? The Rust project is surprisingly diverse there and especially the moderation teams run the gamut from very progressive to very classic conservative.
We have a common boundary agreement (that's what the CoC lays out), but other then that, you'd be surprised of the number of opinions you'd see.
Granted, some of the very public figures are very progressive/leftist, but they also do their legwork for it and generally keep that on the side when they speak with their Rust hat on.
I went to lectures with Gervase at university 20 years ago and while I never really 'knew' him (and don't share his faith) his energy and enthusiasm were evident. This "obit" seems in bad taste; surely if he was causing so much "trauma" and "damage" at work, they would have done something about it during the last 18 years? It just seems unnecessarily mean-spirited.
I didn't see this before, interesting. I remember Gerv from his blog, he indeed had strong opinions regarding religion, but this obituary is completely out of place, it seems as if she had some personal issues with him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not offended by that obit. I can see she was going for a "speaker for dead" thing. I know that sort of direct honesty is out of fashion, but that's the kind of obit I want.
Let me break this down for you. This isn't about you and an obituary or eulogy isn't something written to the dead: It's written to their family, their coworkers and friends, and for those who may have never really known the deceased.
No leader should write in such a way that would insult the families of the dead and their belief systems. Reminder: This is a non-family relative of the deceased using their death to make a statement. This is that same leader telling the deceased's family that their relative was 'traumatic and damaging' while alive. What in the actual fuck?
It is obvious that the deceased's contributions outweighed their perceived transgressions, else they would have been terminated.
So yeah, it's disgusting and not being able to see why it would be such a vile thing reflects an inability to grasp or visualize other people's perspectives. These failures in leadership build the types of toxic culture full of intolerance that they claim to preach against. It's better to write nothing at all about controversial individuals or ideally give a generic nod to the deceased's contributions with the company and well wishes to their family in their time of grief. Pay a damn PR person to write your obits if you lack empathy, shit.
> 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.
I think I won't convince you about my capacity for empathy in this context, but I guess I'll just say that my opinion here isn't a lack of empathy for the guy or his family. I'm not confused that reading such things could hurt.
I have come to a place in my life where I crave more honesty all around, and I'm willing to pay for it with emotional pain. And it's not just a selfish sort of myopia--like, I can imagine you reading that and thinking I have some autistic flavored honesty fixation and I am projecting that onto everyone without considering their feelings. It's not that. Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
For what it's worth, I do agree with you about at least one thing: she probably wasn't the person who should have written this, even if we take as a given that it should have been written at all. If someone wrote something similar about me, I'd want them to be someone I loved and who loved me--the kind of person who could say something profoundly true about me, as a testament to the real effect I had in the world, both good and bad.
Edit: Oh, and since it obviously doesn't go without saying, I'll say this too: I am not offended by the obit she wrote, and I would want a similar thing for myself, but I nevertheless think she did the wrong thing by writing it. I might have a fantasy about what I consider to be a better world in which what she wrote was fine, but we don't live in that world and she clearly violated dearly held norms when she wrote that.
That was part of my context when I wrote the post that started this conversation, but I didn't make it clear at all.
As an exercise I want you to go back, read what you wrote on this topic and count the I's. Then read my response which I will now use neutral language in.
This nor my last post was written to suggest autistic perception, but rather that not everyone thinks from others' different perspectives naturally (wherever they sit on the spectrum). I will indulge in your stated interest to receive honesty. You don't write like someone that thinks by putting themselves in other's shoes and thinking through the lens of their values. Rather, the internal value systems you have becomes a framework to apply externally in your life. 'I believe' 'I think' 'I agree', checks upon those value systems you have logically/emotionally and your writing and actions are built upon that. Those with this line of thought seek to change the world to fit their value systems, not harmonize the chaos of different value systems by speaking inside them.
As one interested in emotional intelligence, I'm telling you this because it might actually help you, but more importantly help those you're trying to help. For what it's worth most of the people I chose to work with are more like you and don't think through others' value systems naturally. It 'feels' more authentic to see people's clear and consistent values than try to peg down the chameleons that constantly lens through systems.
>Actually I believe that we as a society would better if we set the baseline somewhere closer to what she wrote than to perfunctory respect and polite platitudes. And I believe the various negative emotions that would come with that new baseline are both real costs dearly paid AND worth paying all the same. I know my perspective on this isn't popular.
You're alive, you can write posts in response to criticism. The deceased cannot. An obit isn't a performance review of a person written while they are alive; it's a final send-off written to tell a story about someone's life and comfort the living.
I understand why you'd believe it's ok to have things written like this about you (this is directed to you) in your obituary, but you should be aware that it may cause pain to your friends and relatives, that they won't understand why people spoke of you in these ways. Everyone makes mistakes and values can change as we grow older and move between social groups. The 'you' that you see yourself as-is always going to be different from how others see you. It will never match your ideal. This is an inescapable fact.
The issue at hand is that you, whether or not you're consciously aware, are seeking to project your own value system onto those that won't share that value system. I'm not asking you to share in their values or even to fully understand them. I'm asking you to acknowledge their presence and understand that an obit isn't written to a party of one.
Consider this example: People feel pain and sadness after their relatives die. Even if Mitchell wanted to say she didn't get along with Gerv, she could have made her narrative something that would have respected his values that didn't match her own. There's a way to say something like: 'We did not always agree on matters, but Gerv's dedication always impressed me.' (Which is sort of what the totality of her post could be taken as) Rather than inform his family that he caused distress inside the organization, she could still try the express the totality of Gerv by not showcasing the pain he's caused.
If you read my original post it was a straightforward statement about my preferences for myself, and nothing about what I thought the right thing was or what other people should want. That wasn't an accident. I think your heuristics for judging people by their statements might be misleading you about who I am and what I think?
It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.
My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
>It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.
Never claimed you were deficient. I claimed it appears that you do not naturally think this way and it shows in your writing.
>My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
That's the gist of what I'm trying to convey. I can understand though that some, maybe you, would rather risk some distress to those around them in hopes others will have a better acceptance/understanding of who they really were.
If you feel I'm really off-base on my comments about you, I'm actually making a point with that too. If I were you wrote an obit about you, you'd obviously disagree with claims being made (yes, I'm aware we only know each other from a series of brief posts back and forth). It's the same way with any acquaintance doing it, they only get to know parts of you and the parts you think they know might be totally at odds with the values/image you tried to convey about yourself.