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I also only have public information, but the sense I've gotten was that Twitter had an embarrassing problem, with high-profile accounts being compromised, and Jack personally hired Mudge to fix it, with Mudge reporting directly to Jack. This set up Mudge to essentially be the parental supervision for Parag, which chafed / pissed Parag off. Then, when Parag became CEO, Mudge was out, having not accomplished much because Parag was actively hostile to the interference.

Again, conjecture based on what I could extract from the froth, but mundane enough for me that alternatives (shocking displays of X) start requiring extraordinary evidence.

This. Parag's retaliation for having his toes stepped on

I don't think your comparison is apt. Mudge isn't some loose cannon. He worked for the US government as a program manager for DARPA from 2010-2013, then for Google from 2013-2020. You think he looks "corporate" now, just look at his government portrait on his Wikipedia page from a decade ago.

Point being, Mudge is a very well respected cyber security professional, not some "hippy hacker" from years past. Which makes me even more willing to give his accusations weight, because this is not a case of someone who doesn't "get" corporate environments.

I didn't mean that he was a "hippy hacker." Maybe you misinterpreted that, from my story (BTW: Ken Kesey was no slouch, either). My apologies for being unclear.

But he has definite history of being quite willing to speak truth to power. Not having had any personal interactions with him, I can only go on the [many] stories I've heard.

It looks like you're reading several things into GP's comment that he did not write. At least I read it completely differently. I.e. that perhaps Mudge's alleged failure was "not playing ball" regardless of what the particular game might have been in that corporate environment, at that particular time, under/beside those particular execs.

> It's actually a bit ... heartbreaking ... to see him looking so corporate, but we all age, don't we?

He's stated that you can work to change the system from the outside or from within and he chose the latter.

That sounds like an interesting story about Ken Kesey, but I can't find any references to it. Have a source?

Well, I was there. I think they had the party in some offsite venue. I remember a courtyard, with the Magic Bus, parked in it.

I'll see if there's any kind of historical document. Apple's earlier WWDCs were not the high-production-value events that you see these days.

They often had celebrities give keynotes and speeches. They had Douglas Adams and Harry Anderson.

To add: It was likely in the early 1990s. I remember who our evangelist was (who told me about the fight).

It was pretty campy. The staff dressed up in tie-dyes (and some had wigs), and handed us strings of beads, as we came in.

> I doubt he was fired for being bad at his job. But I'll bet he was fired for getting in people's faces.

As head of X, maintaining good relationships is part of your job. It's actually the biggest part of your job.

There's a common anti-pattern that goes like this:

1. A higher-ranked person (e.g. Agrawal) is screwing up in some way (e.g. not addressing security issues)

2. A lower-ranked person (e.g. Mudge) tries to get the problem fixed (e.g. addressing the security issues)

3. The higher-ranked person refuses, and it turns into a conflict

4. The lower-ranked person gets blamed for "not maintaining good relationships" or "being hard to work with" or something like that.

See this article: https://lethain.com/hard-to-work-with/

To be clear, maintaining good relationships is very important. Good relationships are the lubricant that keeps the machine running smoothly; if someone has poor social skills or doesn't make an effort to maintain good relationships, they'll cause unnecessary friction, and they'll end up wasting time and effort on a conflict when they could have solved by problem by maintaining a better relationship.

But, not every conflict is an unnecessary conflict that could have been solved by maintaining a better relationship! Sometimes people refuse to fix problems, and the only options are to apply pressure to them or let the problem go unfixed. Sometimes "lack of lubricant" isn't the reason the machine is broken.

(One way to see this is to note that Agrawal did not maintain a good relationship with Mudge. If maintaining good relationships is part of the job, did Agrawal fail at his job? Or do you think only the lower-ranked person is responsible for maintaining good relationships?)

When you make someone head of security, there are a handful of ways they can go about it:

* They can be utterly ineffectual, ideally while looking good in the press and maintaining good relations across the company. The latter is easy when you never have to ask anyone to do anything.

* They can be effective, which requires the ability to draw on and coordinate resources far beyond security. Their ability to do this is reliant entirely on the support and backing they get from the top. This will make people angry, because it's inevitably going to lead to reshuffling priorities and making choices people dislike. It's possible to maintain good relationships while doing this, if you have strong backing and you at need to convincingly be empathetic about people's feeling while they do what you security and privacy demand.

* They can be ineffectual while trying work across the org and negotiate without backing. Eventually this just pisses people off because you're constantly asking for things and they just want you to go away.

As a security leader, your ability to maintain good relationships while being effective is contingent on how much backing you get. If you're not backed sufficiently, you cannot do both, and then you have to make awkward choices.

The ceo might want you to be a doormat in order to make them look competent. The board, and the users, might disagree.

Yes and no.

There’s many facets to these types of jobs, and these types of teams.

I suspect that he was a “known quantity,” when he was hired, and acted as he was expected to act, by the person that hired him.

Jack Dorsey had his own issues, and pleasing him may not have counted for much, after the new folks took over.

I do have issues with declaring that someone at that level is being fired “with cause,” especially someone that knows where the bodies are buried. This goes double, for someone well-known for doing well in other environments. Usually, there’s some kind of “golden handcuffs,” and the firee simply “leaves to spend more time with their family.”

Regardless of his faults, they set themselves up for this. From here, it appears to be a rather petty personality spat that may end up hurting a whole bunch of folks.

So yes, you are correct, but the person at fault may not be Mudge.