[mohamedattahri]

I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position (e.g. CEO), but that doesn't mean I don't respect their past contributions.

I find the accusations of sexism towards anyone who dares question her as excessive as some of the comments that were made towards her.

[MyOutfitIsVague]

The accusations aren't "towards anyone who dares question her", they're towards people who assume that she had come in after the fact and unfairly got into somebody else's role, which is ignorant (and easily cleared up by glancing at a Wikipedia article) and also a common refrain aimed at any woman in any position of authority.

I'm not a fan of Baker for many reasons, but "how did she even get that role?" always pings my shithead radar, and isn't a question I hear for incompetent male CEOs, who are assumed to be just incompetent, while the women are assumed to be incompetent infiltrators who were hired on the basis of their sex.

[tristor]

> I can question the qualifications of a person as it relates to a specific position

Sure, but do people generally question the qualifications of founders that successfully grew something from inception? Or is it only for people who are women? Because I definitely see a trend in the comment threads in HN over the last many years.

[mohamedattahri]

This has nothing to do with the founder status.

Founders don’t face any competition when they get the job at their own companies, and they often have ownership to force it as an outcome if there’s ever a debate.

Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».

HN tends to like people who have a certain understanding of product and technology. Baker’s legal background probably didn’t help put forward her other skills, hence the questions.

If the argument is based on trends your personally noticed on HN, then I’m afraid there’s not much to discuss.

[pseudalopex]

> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».

Baker was Mozilla Foundation's president from founding to 2025. She was Mozilla Corporation's CEO from founding to 2008, interim CEO from 2019 to 2020, and CEO from 2020 to 2024.

You think there was brutal competition for Mozilla Corporation CEO in 2020?

[tristor]

> Baker, to her credit, probably faced brutal competition to get to the top job. It’s not out there to wonder why she was picked, and the answer cannot be because « she was there from the beginning ».

You are completely discounting her founder status. She wasn't "there from the beginning", she /created/ the Mozilla Foundation and led it from inception to 2025 and later orchestrated the Mozilla Foundation / Mozilla Corporation split structure (which was the first of its kind and has later been used by other institutions). She was the primary author of the Mozilla Public License. She was the Legal mind behind rescuing the codebase from Netscape by going open source.

In one breath you say this has nothing to do with founder status, because founders are founders, and then completely discount that Mitchell is a founder.

There are MANY valid reasons to criticize Mitchell's tenure at Mozilla, and I haven't seen anyone in this larger thread bring up anything of substance when there are several such things available and well known. Instead this is just a "just asking questions" style of shade-throwing that is unequally applied, and can only be presumed to be because Mitchell is a woman.

It turns out the person I originally replied to didn't even get their women in open source correct, because they were talking about GNOME Foundation and not Mozilla, but I can be forgiven for the mistake as I thought them calling Mitchell a "witch" was a joke about her legal first name Winifred, that she has avoided going by in part due to people taking her more seriously because Mitchell is a gender-ambiguous name. Clearly they have no rational and real basis for criticism if they can't even accurately identify which woman they want to make sexist comments about.

I would encourage you and the person I originally wrote my reply to to both pause and do better.

[mohamedattahri]

I'm not discounting her founder status. My point is that it's orthogonal to one's ability to run a company. Founders don't automatically make good CEOs. Plenty of founders step aside for professional management, and plenty stay on and struggle.

Questioning whether someone was the right fit for a role isn't an attack on their legitimacy or their earlier contributions, no matter how pivotal they were. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft had a quasi-founder status, and he received the exact same backlash and hate throughout his tenure because he was perceived as someone who "didn't get it".

If the argument is that any skepticism of a female CEO's performance must be sexist, that shuts down legitimate discussion. I'd rather focus on outcomes rather than on trying to divine each other's motives.

Lastly, Your "pause and do better" is exactly what I'm objecting to: framing disagreement as moral failure. Question Baker? Sexist. Disagree with me? You're not doing enough for the cause.

[pseudalopex]

Zuckerberg's founder status is known because he was Facebook's most visible person always. Baker's founder status is less known because she was not Mozilla's most visible person most years.