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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Like it definitely wouldn't have been worth it. Playing some weird self-sacrifice game to save a few highly skilled employees that will absolutely be able to find work elsewhere is silly.

Yes the whole situation sucks, layoffs are never fun. I'm sure this decision was genuinely hard for her to make and she doesn't need to self-flagellate to prove to anyone that she cared.

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> Playing some weird self-sacrifice game to save a few highly skilled employees that will absolutely be able to find work elsewhere is silly.

Silly or not, it would have shown that Mitchell Baker is a leader. This way it shows that she is not.

Guess what happens to organizations without a leader.

The layoffs themselves show that Mitchell Baker is a leader. Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do. Assessing the reality of their market position, examining their future opportunities and revenue streams, and positioning the company to still be around in 10 years sometimes means deciding that the people you have currently aren’t the people you need to ultimately be successful and stay in business.

You should never give a CEO a pay cut for doing their job and making the hard decisions to help keep the company in the black.

> Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do.

Seeing up close and personal several CEOs that laid off people, I saw very little evidence of that. Some even happily talked about vacations and buying yachts, when not in employee company.

I feel sorry that your life has been surrounded by people with so little empathy.

It's a popular claim that 1 in 5 CEOs is a psychopath. I don't know if that's true, but I'm inclined to think it wouldn't be such a popular claim if it weren't somewhere close to the truth. CEOs who don't seem to give a damn about the wellbeing of their employees aren't particularly rare.

Trust me, if I could decide this, my life would be all rainbows and sunshine :). At least for a long while.

Here's how a leader acts: https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator...

Something to consider here too is that Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla for over 5 years ending late 2019. Mitchell Baker only took over within the last year.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name...

While I was getting ready to reply and say that most of my comments in this thread talking about the CEO were meant as general comments not referring to a specific Mozilla CEO, I went and read the Wikipedia Page for Mitchell Baker, so while you are correct that she took over from Chris Beard as CEO, there is also this bit of history to consider:

> When the Mozilla Corporation was launched as a taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation on August 3, 2005, Baker was named the CEO of the new entity. In addition, she joined the Mozilla Corporation's Board of Directors, though she also kept her seat on the Mozilla Foundation's board, as well as her role as Chairperson.

In 2014, she wrote this piece[0] (while she was not CEO, but Chair), justifying putting ads in Firefox.

[0] - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/02/13/content-ads-cauti...

It appears that she has been setting the direction at Mozilla for a really long time, CEO or not.

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