Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themselves needing to lay off 70 people to save costs on a restructuring.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/16/mozilla_job_cuts/
https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/12175120497160...
Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be Mr Gotcha.
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/
https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.p...
Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo.
We should be taking ethical jobs and who cares if it's Mozilla who said it. They're right about this, even if they're wrong about other things.
People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves.
Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.
Otherwise, you're depriving an ethical organization of your contributions while aiding the competition.
Unless you're entering a leadership role it's very unlikely you'll be changing a damn thing from within, while being corrupted by the surely lavish compensation an unethical company generally can afford to shower on its individual contributors.
Now this is the kind of motivated reasoning I can get behind. I'm not lazy, I'm genuinely heroic!
That won't work.
You do shape your enviroment, but your enviroment also shapes you. Meaning if you go to a miserable place on purpose, that place will just drain you, if you cannot change it completely. And changing a company on your own as a lonely employee ... is doomed from the start and will lead to burn out and depression very soon.
I propose the opposite: ethical people gather together and create organisations and companies to show that things can be done better. Talk and criticism is cheap. Actually doing something better, is much harder. But you need likeminded people around you. If they are all dispersed everyone fighting on their own against a behemot .. will not make things better. All those cold "evil" corporate people? Well, at some point they were humans with ideals as well (in most cases) but got changed by their surroundings.
Generally, “implies a falsehood” is considered to be equivalent to “is false”.
What’s your point?
Changing a company from the inside is something that can only be done by those that are on the inside, hence my qualification that you should only join those companies that you can still stomach and then push as hard as you can in the right direction, rather than to join the very worst organization that you can find in the world, and one that you - hopefully - can not stomach.
Also, there may be a risk of people being more likely to derive in invalid ways when attempting the reductio, like making some hyperbolic statements, exaggerating the implications of a statement, and treating those exaggerations as if they actually logically follow. But this doesn’t make reductio an invalid technique, just one that people can fail to use properly.)
Like I said in the other comment, the objection should be that the derivation of the absurd from the premise is invalid. For example, pointing to the “that you can stomach” part of your claim, and saying that the derivation was invalid in neglecting that part of the statement.
Talking about changing ISIS from the inside as the IT administrator doesn't convince anybody that it's impossible to change an organization from within. It's a poor argument that might win Internet points for being a spicy hot take, especially on Twitter, but it does little to debunk the idea that, eg, an engineer could ethically join Facebook with the aims of elevating the company up, through working on the team to detect Russian trolling rings/Anti-vaxxers/MLM marketers.
Perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from the claim <X> was based on a misunderstanding of the claim <X>, or perhaps their derivation of the absurd conclusion from it was based on some fallacy, or some false assumption.
But reductio is a valid logical step, so long as we have the validity of the argument that the absurd conclusion follows from the premise.
In this specific case, X is:
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"
with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"
What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already
In this specific case, X is:
"Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside"
with the response, Y: "join ISIS' IT department"
What is the refutation of this particular "X implies Y" you would have used instead? Is there one that doesn't require refining X and instead attacks the Y? X is already verbose, and adding additional verbiage does not help the case (IMO)
And when there is no such party?
See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immo...
His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.
I'm not convinced by this argument. The status quo may exist because there are fundamental issues with changing it. Those issues don't go away with wishful thinking. Attempting to change things while praiseworthy may end up do more harm than good. At the best, if it doesn't end up changing the status quo, you just wasted energy, and bothered other people. But much more likely seems to me that we are trading some pros/cons for others, it's not a strict improvement or even an overall improvement.
If one tries to analyze attempts at change that failed there are lots of common patterns. One of them is being ignorant of the fundamental reasons why the issue you are trying to change is the way it is. Being ignorant of the reason behind that makes it much more likely you will fail at your task.
Can you imagine yourself arguing this in feudalism or the USSR?
One wouldn’t succeed in changing this.
Of course, some conceivable changes to the way things are, are both possible to achieve, and are overall beneficial to make.
Some changes are impossible (or effectively impossible) to make, and some are possible but have costs which outweigh the benefits.
I suppose the question is determining, or estimating, which is which.
(Though, I suppose the question isn’t just “what proportion are you right about as to what category they fall under” but rather, what is the average benefit and cost (and I suppose also the variance and other moments?) of your pursuit of the changes you choose to persue.)
You should read about Perestroyka.
No, it is a logical fallacy.
Appealing to "accepted norms" is another case of appealing to authority – except a less verifiable authority, in that case. Ironically, I am currently listing fallacies, which itself does not a good argument make – so I will add to it that that's not what “informal” means; the adjective is merely specifying that it is not a logical flaw, but instead falls into a broader category (such as implying stronger evidence than exists, or something).
Your original argument is flawed, however; it neglects that organisations cannot increase the talent available to ethical companies and decrease the talent available to unethical ones by participating in the job market, and invokes an argument similar to the tu quoque fallacy by implying that Mozilla's actions have any bearing on how good its advice is.
Merely calling out that you used a fallacy (and misidentified at that!) is not a sufficient counterargument alone.
Yes, "informal" isn't "logical", hence the italics specifying as much.
No, my response wasn't a counterargument because what I was responding to wasn't an argument to begin with. There was nothing to defend because nothing of substance was produced.
No, my original argument is not flawed because your counterargument has nothing to do with the concept we've been discussing in this sub-thread.
Allow me to summarize: Mozilla sucks and yes, students should consider ethics in their job search which means they should probably not work for Mozilla.
Mozilla makes the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs.
HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.
Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.
--
It should be incredibly clear how this line of reasoning is fallacious and therefore invalid.
HN user matheweis asserts that Mozilla's actions or past claims are inconsistent with their argument.
Therefore, the reasoning goes, the argument that young people should consider the ethical issues before taking jobs is false.
"""
This sequence strikes me as non sequitur and strawman. That is how "the reasoning goes" when one actually commits tu quoque, but merely pointing out hypocrisy is not tu quoque.
Edit: It's possible that I have not read all of his comments. I'm only aware of this:
"Mozilla wants young techies to consider ethics in their jobs?
Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themselves needing to lay off 70 people to save costs on a restructuring"
My personal hypocrisy doesn't make air travel any better for the planet.
1) Mozilla isn't right or wrong in this case, they just lack credibility on the matter which, again, warrants the type of response that the original and many other commentators here had.
2) Your analogy isn't quite 1:1 with this situation. If you were a railroad tycoon that flew daily to perform business and made a public statement about how awful flying on planes is and how everyone should stop in lieu of train travel, it would be hard to take you seriously and you would be rightfully called out. Mozilla likes to identify itself with the ethical side yet it is no better than the companies it is criticizing, going as far as being partially funded by one of them.
Edit: Sorry if I come across as belaboring, I hadn't read your other post. :)
"Hey, you're asking something unrealistic; people are under the same constraints that lead you to do what you advised against. How can you expect us to operate under constraints even you can't live up to? Isn't that a prerequisite to giving such advice?"
With that said, I don't think executive pay with layoffs is a good example of unethical behavior. A better one would be their behavior in the Looking Glass/Mr. Robot extension [1] or the forced updates via a mislabeled feature to cover their own screwup [2].
If a non-profit is so careless with security to promote their marketing and analytics, why would you expect others to heed less a stronger siren's call?
If someone's gonna downvote me I'd appreciate some color on your choice too, thanks. ;-)
If executive pay was rationally based, that might be true. But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. More likely it would result in someone being promoted to executive and business continuing as usual.
The poaching companies are going to run out of places to put executives long before Mozilla runs out of competent employees who could run the company. In the meantime Mozilla gains a great reputation as a place to work if you want to get poached to a million dollar salary job, so it gains access to lots more competent engineers.
Or at least I think that's the sane argument for why Mozilla executives (and most companies executives) should be payed less. I'm not totally convinced that all the premises are true.
Maybe most people do, but there're also those who are driven by things other than money, and would stay.
Why does it appear to you that way? Research suggests that CEOs are overwhelmingly important and have significant impact on the valuation of a company on a scale significantly larger compared their compensation.[1]
"For example, open-minded and curious CEOs create an entrepreneurial culture, driven and intense CEOs create a culture of results and achievement, and altruistic CEOs create a culture of empathy and cooperation. Second, as a 20-year review from 1993 to 2012 showed, CEOs’ judgment affects key strategic and managerial processes, such as staffing, financing, and marketing decisions. Third, CEOs’ reputations — their public personas — affect company valuations and stock prices.
It has been estimated that 22% of the variability in firm performance can be attributed directly to the CEO. In fact, even when researchers use transcripts of interviews and meeting conversations to infer a CEO’s psychological profile, their ability, strategic thinking skills, and communication skills predict a substantial amount of variability in company performance."
I'd suggest you evaluate whether you base your opinion around CEO pay on data evaluating CEO performance or whether it's just an emotional response because 70 workers being laid off just elicits more sympathy than a CEO receiving higher compensation.
- CEOs having a large impact - we agree here
- It is hard to replace the current CEO with a new one who will be, on average, equal (or better) than the existing one.
It's the second statement which I question. In a few rare cases (e.g. Elon Musk) there is good evidence to support it, but in the case of Mozilla I don't see it.
The research you cite goes both ways. If we can predict who will be a good CEO through an interview CEOs are easier to replace.
Most people on HN are speculating that many (not all!) engineers would be perfectly qualified for the job for instance. Market rates for this sort of person is a few hundred thousand. not a few million.
PS. I believe the relevant organization here is a non profit with 20M in revenue, not the company with 500M, but I could be wrong I don't care that much about the specific example.
I would be more concerned if people who picked fruit were being poached with higher pay. We have no one willing to do those jobs.
I have no problem with that. Let them leave.
Suppose we set a maximum compensation cap of $10M/year in the US. So executives can no longer earn more than $10M/year in total compensation (salary, bonus, golden parachute, etc.).
So a bunch of overpaid execs leave the US. Where exactly are they going to go where they'll 1) be paid more than $10M/year, and 2) actually be able to do these super-high-paying executive jobs effectively (i.e., they need to know the local language, etc.)?
Also, please provide some evidence that the board chair of a non-profit with an annual budget of $20M has a market rate salary of $2M/yr. Note that Mozilla Foundation also has an executive director (more like $250k/yr) and the Mozilla Corporation had a separate CEO and executive team (whose salaries aren't reported in the Mozilla Foundation form 990).
But hey, someone with more knowledge of Mozilla than you or I should really be the ones defending this. Maybe some are reading this thread and don't mind chiming in?
If you're a company in desperate need of a turn around, you're not going to have a lot of luck in finding a great CEO unless you offer a competitive compensation package and a guaranteed payout.
That's why you see failing companies' CEOs walk away with big packages. They won't get a good CEO unless they offer comp comparable to other companies they could work for.
Unfortunately, Mozilla seems to be focused on everything except for making Firefox better than Chrome.
This feels like a misleading question to ask. There are plenty of disputes about "market rates" for both groups, so the premise isn't one I'd agree to. Market rates are decided by these decisions, not the other way around.
If Mozilla was able to get adequate leadership at the rates that didnt grow faster than rank-and-file wages, that would have been a more ethical decision overall. If more companies did the same, market rates would reflect that. Unless you think there was no such leadership available at that rate, in which case we simply disagree.
Either remove the donation website, or find execs who are driven not by money and market rates, but by changing and improving society.
I think the latter types of execs, would work better, for making FF popular and increasing revenue. The idea that only execs that need lots of money (market rate) or they'd jump to another company, can do a good job, seems weird to me.
I've understood that in theory the Donate-to-Mozilla thing doesn't donate to the execs — but in practice, I'd say yes it does (to some extent at least).
> which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs?
I think (guess) the opposite. That they could all have kept their job and Mozilla could have hired more.
Whatever else I might say about Mozilla as an organization, the people who are part of it have their hearts in the right place. The ethical messaging is sincere.
I actually passed on an offer from Palantir when I went to work for Mozilla in 2010 (I left in 2015) and I never once doubted I made the right choice. With those two options I'd absolutely do it again, Mozilla management issues notwithstanding.
We can certainly disagree on what should and shouldn't be restructured itself.
Above is a quote from the guide released by Mozilla.
Some readers might be confused by the Mozilla organization when trying to reconcile its public statements with its own corporate behaviour.
Given the concerns some folks apparently have about Google, e.g., privacy, AI, harassment, etc., according to the Mozilla guide, consider this hypothetical.
What if a company's staff were concerned about their employer having a major contract with Google. What should they do?
Should they walk out? What if their salaries are paid indirectly by Google, i.e., almost all of their employer's revenue comes from the Google contract?
Mozilla Corporation derives almost all of its revenue from a contract with Google. Executive salaries are funded from Google payments, with lesser payments from Baidu and Yandex for the Chinese and Russian markets, respectively.
According to one report, without the deals it makes with search engines, Mozilla could not survive for very long.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pa...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-firefox-survive/
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea...
Mozilla Foundation purports to be fighting for user choice and privacy. At the same time Mozilla is automatically sending web search queries to Google, by default, without requesting user consent, in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
Why is this the NLRB's business? As I recall, the controversy at Google was because some guy published a manifesto on the company's internal communications systems, and this caused a lot of arguments on those internal chat boards. I don't really see why Google doesn't have a right to police their internal employee communication systems and keep them from devolving into political arguments. Their systems, their rules.
This wasn't about a few employees having a conversation at the water cooler; this was about internally-used social media systems that everyone in the company could see. What employees say in small-group or private conversation is one thing, but I don't see how Google is obligated to give employees a platform to spout their political views in front of the entire company. Most other companies don't do any such thing.
When they settled with the NRLB, Google said in their press releases that the agreement made no mention of politics.
The terms of the settlement required Google to clarify its policies on employees exchanging information related to compensation and organising, not its position on employees expressing political views.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...
Also, arguably it's not mutually exclusive to suggest people to consider where to work, at the same time executives make larger income. On the outside, clearly the board of directors thought the increased income was worth it. As we have limited insight, I don't think we should assume an unethical intent.
Finally, I don't know which 70 jobs were cut, but presumably it was that their skills were determined to no longer necessary to the business. Tough luck, but to the remaining employees, it's ethical to lay them off.
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, and Mozilla Corp is private held wholly by Mozilla Foundation. No one is getting compensated in forms of equity. All compensation plans are salary and cash bonuses.
The data from the tweet matches the numbers from public IRS filings of Mozilla Foundation. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ for the most recent report.