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Comment by subtra3t | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find a reasonable comment that did not immediately insult Mitchell Baker.

I'm no fan of Baker, but the least we can do is wish her best wishes and hope for a great future for all parties involved. I didn't like her when she was CEO at Mozilla, I don't like her anymore now that she isn't CEO at Mozilla but that doesn't mean I have to resort to shallow attacks on her character. I expect more from HN.

Edit: Corrected mistake about Baker no longer being at Mozilla. Thanks to @M2Ys4U.

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Hard for a community of devs to sympathize with a leader who did not admit to their own incompetence and instead of stepping down fired 250 devs while giving herself a raise.

She was simply a parasite and her character is being attacked because her character is fucking awful. With enough money for her family to live comfortably on for eons she fucked with hundreds of lives while driving a business into the ground.

What I don’t understand is people’s blind worship of the upper class and their entitlement to firing hundreds of people while boosting their salary while being incompetent and how they deserve to have nice things said about them when they leave the company they exploited.

I agree, and I'm not one to believe that a CEO should be paid peanuts for the level of responsibility and time commitment it takes to be in that position, but that's assuming the CEO is actually taking responsibility for the performance of the company. If goals are repeatedly not being met the CEO should be the first to take responsibility and take a pay cut or fuck off. If the United States value merit, incompetent CEOs should be held to a higher standard than a rank-and-file employee.

> but the least we can do is wish her best wishes

I wonder how many times in a row it would take of you being fired by the CEO who completely mismanaged the company, while massively increasing their own salary multiple times, before you stop wishing them well.

In fact maybe the problem is that you are wishing her well. She's exploited other people enough to be doing well enough on her own. She doesn't need anyone to wish her well. Maybe the least she deserves is to not be doing well at other people's expense. What about those people?

Being nice isn't always the right answer. When people do bad things, there should be negative consequences for them, otherwise that signals to them that their behavior was appropriate. It wasn't. You are doing the morally wrong thing by wishing her well.

She's not leaving Mozilla, she's returning to her old position of Executive Chair

Sorry, my bad. Thanks for correcting, I've edited my comment.

No. She isn't entitled any “best whishes” or respect whatsoever when she's been draining Mozilla's money straight to her own pocket “to cover the needs of her family”. Parasitic behavior deserves shaming, that's it.

I hope people are less judgmental and more compassionate toward my and your errors. Shaming, IME and in my belief, is a toxic act in service of the attacker; it makes the situation worse, and even the attacker feels worse and is degraded (though they feel powerful).

Eh this only goes so far. Obviously none of us are embedded into her brain and know exactly what she's thinking, but there's a huge difference between making a mistake because of a misjudgement, and siphoning money off while laying of developers. One of those is something that could happen to you or I, the other is something you or I would have to intentionally make happen.

> siphoning money off

That implies fraud. Was Baker ever accused of that?

People are paid to manage organizations, which includes firing people. It's not a job failure necessarily. I do think Baker is/was overpaid.

Shame is how our societies function. When someone acts outside of the norms of the society they are shamed. It is healthy and normal human behavior.

Murder and violence and lots of other things also are involved in the functioning, but that doesn't make them good. What makes shame healthy?

IME, and in the view of many experts, it generally has a poor effect.

> When someone acts outside of the norms of the society they are shamed.

Are the norms so sacrosanct? How do we innovate or have dissent?

Draining dozens of millions of dollars may have even worse effect on Firefox.

I don't believe that her past actions need to be taken into consideration when wishing her the very best for the future.

This is slightly unrelated to the point I was trying to make, but I don't think us commentors are entitled to make passes at her character or doubt her motives. Perhaps from your position it seems like an objective fact that Baker was engaging in morally dubious acts (I personally don't think so) but that still doesn't give you (or any of us!) a right to judge her. We do not know her personally so I don't think we have any right to shame her at all. That's just my opinion, I know its controversial, feel free to argue.

Argue is the wrond word there, it makes it seem like I'm silently judging you from a higher pedestal (though I suppose this entire comment gives off that impression) but if you have any questions feel free to ask me. Again this makes it seem like I'm in a position of superiority, I don't know of a better way to phrase it.

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