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Comment by confounded | Hacker News Reader

"Mozilla" isn't a man in a room smoking a cigar, it's a building full of relatively young and well-educated people, in San Francisco.

If a leader does anything to lose a consensus of respect from their workers (and ultimately authority over them) the long term productivity of the organization is imperiled. Firing everyone except the leader isn't going to be a good option.

Politics is a contentious issue, no matter how much people wish it wasn't. Involvement in it makes you polarizing, whether you like it or not.

Do I believe in marriage equality? Absolutely, yes.

Am I personally outraged that Eich donated that money? Not at all.

Is it reasonable for him to expect to maintain authority and influence over a building full of relatively young and well-educated people, in San Francisco, after publicly (though perhaps inadvertently so) working against marriage equality? Of course not. Morals aside, it's a low probability outcome.

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I really don't want to rehash this discussion, but there is one important inaccuracy in your presentation of what happened that keeps being propagated. As far as I could tell at the time, the people who Brendan would have had "authority and influence" over by and large didn't seem to feel that he should go. Some of them were fairly conflicted about the whole thing, but in the end felt that the things Mozilla works on should be important across the "traditional" left/right spectrum. And please don't forget that pretty much everyone who worked with Brendan was already aware of the donation, since it had been gone over in the press in 2008. So it's not like there was important new information coming to light for the people who he would have "authority and influence" over.

There were some comments on twitter calling on him to resign from some people at the Mozilla _Foundation_ (not to be confused with the _Corporation_), starting with one of the then-interns, iirc. The irony is that those particular people wouldn't have had any interaction with Brendan anyway...

Of course the reporting on the whole thing blew everything completely out of proportion, like the media usually does.

Oh, one other inaccuracy: I'd guess something like 1/3 of Mozilla's employees are in the SF bay area. Others are in other places, with a variety of cultural and political outlooks. So assuming that "Mozilla" is well-represented by "young, well-educated people in San Francisco" is not a great idea.

I stand corrected (and you have my upvote)!

I would say that a CEO’s authority and influence does need to extend well beyond the people they work with day-to-day (though I doubt this is a point of disagreement).

Do you have any thoughts on the parent discussion?

My main thought on the parent discussion is that it should be possible for two reasonable people to cooperate on achieving a goal, including a political goal, even if their politics otherwise do not align very well (or at all). If a "left-leaning" organization is organizing encrypted email, and you want to push for encrypted email, it may make sense to support them in that endeavor even if you disagree with their other goals. If the Koch brothers are pushing for an end to asset forfeiture and you think that needs to happen, feel free to push with them, even if you disagree with other things they do.

Of course there may be other tradeoffs, and maybe there are other organizations that aim for the same goal that are more closely aligned with one's views, and then it may make sense to support those. But the important thing for me is not having everything decided by ideological litmus tests. Results matter more than affiliations, at least for me. I'm not sure that's true of everyone...

You are mixing up two different things here. It's true that individuals inevitably have complex, multidimensional views on reality and, therefore, need to concentrate on cooperation based on shared interests. An organization, particularly one based on volunteering and donations, on the other hand, can and should choose a narrow set of goals and pursue them without taking any more sides than necessary. Otherwise people may and will withhold support for that organization because they disagree with its secondary goals.

Political bias is generally supposed to be bad for business, and the current tendency of tech companies to take active political stance is a sign that something very rotten has happened to the public discourse. Indeed: entire sectors of society (mass media, universities, now tech companies) are becoming increasingly hostile towards still widespread conservative views, excluding huge sections of the population from political debate and deligitimizing their views. That population is now oppressed and unable to advocate their views in a public way, but they can still vote, so now USA has leftist mass media going nuts over the election of President Trump. But it's not going to end there: when the conservatives realize that Trump has failed to turn this oppression around, it might come to violence and who knows what else.

> An organization, particularly one based on volunteering and donations, on the other hand, can and should choose a narrow set of goals and pursue them without taking any more sides than necessary.

First, even given a narrow set of goals you can end up with other organizations that are aligned with your organization on some but not all of those goals.

Second, my point is that when someone _is_ aligned with your organization on its narrow set of goals, they may be worth working with even if you may disagree with other goals they have. The devil is, as usual, in the details.

This line of thinking is that it's acceptable to fire a CEO of a company for not having the same political views of employees. Do you not see how rediculous that is?

It depends how much you want those employees (and possibly, customers / users).

> If a leader does anything to lose a consensus of respect from their workers (and ultimately authority over them) the long term productivity of the organization is imperiled.

So the leader has to go because employees can't separate work life from home life? Usually it's the other way around with companies being to over bearing of en employees private life.

> Is it reasonable for him to expect to maintain authority over a building full of relatively young and well-educated people, in San Francisco, after publicly (though perhaps inadvertently so) working against marriage equality? Of course not. Morals aside, it's unrealistic proposition.

Yes, because his opinion on gay marriage is irrelevant to his work as a CEO, just as my activities on the weekend should have no bearing on my job.

> work life from home life

I have to imagine it would be hard to separate your work life from your home life when you know your boss doesn't believe that you have the right to your home life.

> So the leader has to go because employees can't separate work life from home life?

Yeah, and bad companies. But a leader has to lead. And it wasn't just employees having issues. The CEO is the face of the company, and if they can't lead either employees nor can they effectively be the face of the company, they have to go.

> Yes, because his opinion on gay marriage is irrelevant to his work as a CEO, just as my activities on the weekend should have no bearing on my job.

Your activities don't involve being a leader or being the face of the company. If you can't do that, you can't do your job as CEO. This happens all the time. See Equifax as the latest example. The CEO wasn't personally responsible for the security issue. But he was the leader, and his priorities sets the companies priorities. He leads, and his failure in leadership is what fundamentally failed the company.

If you think a CEO and a junior level employee have the same responsibilities and are graded on the same metrics, you are sorely mistaken.

> The CEO is the face of the company, and if they can't lead either employees nor can they effectively be the face of the company, they have to go.

And yet no one has explained why a guy holding particular political views can not effectively be the face of the company. If one does believes in gay marriage rights, can they effectively be the face of the company? Clearly, many people oppose that view, so let's oust every CEO out there who donated to gay rights campaigns.

What differentiates between these two CEOs with opposing views on gay rights in this respect is only how much public outrage there is about their biography. Somehow, people holding left views tend to be much louder than people holding right views. Which, without a doubt, has a lot to do with leftist bias in the mass media. So, taking your statement to its logical conclusion, what you are suggesting is we give up any sense of fairness and work ethic and bow to our mass media overlords because they have the microphone.

> And yet no one has explained why a guy holding particular political views can not effectively be the face of the company.

I'm pretty sure they have, many times, but you presumably don't agree - which is perfectly fine but don't say it's not been explained!

(To recap: someone with exclusionary views, donating money to promote and enforce those exclusionary views, cannot effectively be head of a company specifically promoting inclusionary views.)

You raise an interesting objection. Some questions in this regard:

1) What does inclusivity have to do with Mozilla's core business, namely open-source Internet software?

2) Can any organization declare inclusivity as one of its core values and start enforcing it by firing every person in position of power who holds an exclusionary view on any subject? By the way, there are more people in positions of power than just the CEO. Every person in the corporate hierarchy, except perhaps the lowest, holds power over other people. The exact same argument you make about the CEO can be made about a VP, a CTO or a teamleader. They all represent their group in front of everyone else and they are all looked up to by their inferiors.

3) What is an exclusionary view? Is it one advocating that people in certain category deserve less than in another category? But by that logic, you hold an exclusionary view: after all, you support the idea that people with particular views should not occupy positions of power.

4) Why is it a good idea for an organization to declare holding exclusionary opinions a punishable offense? I can tell you why it is a bad idea. Quoting an excellent comment [1] below, "there's something wrong with injecting ideology into everything, that is, dividing everything in the world into what supports your ideology and what doesn't, making all judgments based on it, and shunning all who don't share your ideology. All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated. It's a very dangerous approach, and a quick glance at history books will tell you what's at the end of this path."

The life is a complex, non-binary (in fact, multidimensional) thing, and we all err in some regard, including yourself. You don't want to be discriminated based on your opinions, unless you overstep the boundaries of law.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398460

> What does inclusivity have to do with Mozilla's core business

Irrelevant - it's a stated organisational value. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Diversity_and_Inclusion_Strategy

> Can any organization declare inclusivity as one of its core values

Yep.

> and start enforcing it by firing every person in position of power who holds an exclusionary view on any subject?

In the US, probably, although it may depend on which state and precisely which exclusionary views are in play. In the UK, maybe, depending on what those exclusionary views are.

> But by that logic, you hold an exclusionary view

I do, yes. Well done! I hold many exclusionary views but they are all targeted at people who people who want to exclude or hurt others for what I consider bullshit reasons.

> "All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated."

Nonsense.

> You don't want to be discriminated based on your opinions

I am 100% behind discriminating against people who hold opinions that another class of person is lesser than them.

Not everyone who opposes gay marriage thinks of gays as lesser than them. Some oppose it for religious reasons, for example. Also, what about views on other exclusionary policies? Wherever you live, I'm sure many people in your country think that no foreigners have an inherent right to gain citizenship and residence in your country. Perhaps even you feel that way. This is an exclusionary view and therefore should be punished by prohibiting those people from holding positions of power... right?

Besides, you are still missing the main point. Discriminating against people for their opinions is nonconstructive - by excluding them from dialog, oppressing them in daily lives and proudly putting your intolerance to their views on display, you just make them angry and more entrenched. That kind of demonization might feel really nice (when you're on the giving end of the stick), but it works against liberal values in the long run. Where do you think Trump and Brexit came from?

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