A Personal Message [about Brendan Eich’s donation to Prop 8] | Hacker News Reader

A Personal Message [about Brendan Eich’s donation to Prop 8]

blog.mozilla.com

15 pointsvgnet3 comments

I don't understand how something being "personal opinion" or "political belief" makes it beyond the purview of your professional life. I know a lot of people think that their work is "just a job" and has nothing to do with ethics, but it's different for me. My work and my ethics are tightly bound, and it's extremely important that any organization I work for operates in a way that's consistent with my ethics.

As such, if my CEO is funding a campaign to curtail human rights, then that matters to me. My participation in an organization is based on a certain amount of trust... trust that my co-workers are going to act on behalf of the organization--on behalf of me--in a way that I can be proud of. I can't monitor every one of my co-workers, so building trust is a necessity.

Brendan's funding of Prop 8 tells me that he is not, in his professional duties, capable of extending to LGBTQ members of the Mozilla community the respect that I think all people deserve. And therefore I could not have faith in him as my CEO.

I realize that many people would have the exact opposite opinion, and I respect that. We're all entitled to our individual political and ethical views. But the notion that we should separate them from our professional life strikes me as intensely wrong.

Edit: I want to add that were Brendan to engage the discussion of his donation, to listen to the criticisms and dig into the issues, and take them seriously, I absolutely could regain trust in him as a CEO. But as it is, with him writing the issue off as a non-issue, I could not.

I agree with your opinion that the ethical and moral background of a person does transcend the barrier between personal and professional life. While I share your disappointment, I feel this leads to a larger problem than any of us would like to acknowledge. We're here (and Brendan Eich is here, by extension) because we share a common interest in technology and startups. From time to time it's necessary to remind ourselves that this is our only uniting quality. Just because I'm a secular guy that doesn't mean this is a given as far as any other member of the geek community is concerned. I'm probably not the only one to be occasionally surprised and dismayed when a fellow HNer casually expresses $insert_fundamentalist_traditional_value$. But it's worth reminding oneself that we don't in fact have a shared moral value system here, not even when it comes to basics.

I'm making this observation because I don't think the actual donation is the central problem, it's Mr Eich's deeper seated belief system which some of us find appalling. But this and many other belief systems like it are quite common, it's just a facette that usually stays hidden during the normal flow of geek-to-geek interaction.

I think the whole tech sector would just disintegrate if we started compartmentalizing based on world views.

I remember when I was working at a startup, I somehow got into a discussion with an employee who firmly believed that I (and in fact the majority of people working there) would be going straight to hell to be tortured for all eternity. Not only that, he admitted that he was convinced we all deserved to go to hell and said the notion was filling him with a strange mixture of joy and pity. The thing is: we all got along great. This guy was always super nice to everyone, there was no way to tell from the outside. I decided then and there to just accept this and move on. Apparently, it's possible to work together (and even be friendly) even with the guys who are secretly wishing you harm. It's sad and depressing, but it works.

Here's Brendan's post on the subject: http://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/

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