Really though, all I needed to see was the phrase "jump on a quick call" to form an irrationally strong opinion. That phrase instantly warms my entire body with rage.
Then later, if it comes up again, they can just say "well we discussed this in a call previously and decided it was best to do it anyway" cutting off discussion and not presenting the reasoning.
It suggests a decision can be reversed with a quick call, which questions one’s choices or conviction. As if to suggest the choice was made without considerable thought and care. It’s such an unserious tone to a moment that’s very serious to the other.
I guess it acts as a mirror of sorts though, because that's precisely how this decision appears to have been made in the first place. But it's clear that whoever represents Mozilla there is already assuming the fault lies with the person that just got kicked.
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel ...
That may seem like an apology, but it's more a dismissing their issue as "that's a you problem".
It would be such irony if they asked GPT to reword it to a more polite tone though...
It's almost always (like this time) "I'm sorry you feel that way, please spend more of your free time<EOF>", and sometimes (like this time) "[we're doing it anyway but maybe we'll make some changes]".
It feels insulting because it is insulting. The decision has been made, they just want to not feel bad about you being insulted.
So, even in the best "sorry we screwed up" scenario, the quick call covers their butt and let them leeway to backtrack as needed. That's also part of why we viscerally react to opaque meetings IMHO.
Oh no, both parties understand that the call isn't open to the possibility of changing the decision, it's just to manage the emotions of the person who's being run over by it.
I was impressed. They actually did make their position clear, and in public, whereas I was trying to smooth things over in private. Me trying to influence and cajole behind the scenes was insult to the risk they took by putting themselves out there.
A good lesson in respect.
It seems like someone who has no awareness of the problem, who wants to learn more about the problem, and the fastest way for both parties is over the phone ASAP rather than through a bunch of emails.
When software goes wrong, you need as much information as possible to figure it how to fix it.
The lead realized that Mozilla doesn't care about their opinion (they did this without discussing with them) nor do they care about the work they were doing (by replacing their work with machine translations). A "quick call" doesn't solve this.
Generally speaking, orgs aren't trying to replace high-quality human translations with lower-quality machine translations. They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though. Getting the balance right requires fine-tuning. And fine-tuning requires a quick call to start to better understand the issues in more detail.
that's the problem. stop thinking about the org and think about the person. these are volunteers who feel taken advantage of, being met with corporate jargon
fly out and take him to dinner if you actually give a shit. or write a check. a "quick call" is so insulting
A quick call is a courteous first step. The other person might not have time for a long call, so you want to show you're respecting their time. Then you follow it up with a longer meeting with the relevant engineer and manager, etc. "Taking someone to dinner" is not the first step here. The way to show you care is by trying to understand the situation before anything else.
There is no world in which this is insulting.
I doubt "take them out to dinner" is the right solution in this situation, but any attempt at redressal must understand the above point and acknowledge it publicly.
"Ask for forgiveness rather than permission" is far from universally true, and carries massive cultural baggage. You cannot operate within that framework and expect all humans to cooperate with you.
Had I been thrown in this situation:
"Dear Marsf,
I'm sorry that sumobot was introduced to the Japanese SUMO community without consultation. I have disabled it, and the development team are working to undo the changes it has made. We will revert articles to how they were on 21 October. Contributions made since then by the Japanese community could be retained in the staging system, where they can be approved or rejected. Please let me know whether you would like this, or would prefer them to be discarded returning the whole system to the 21 October.
We very much appreciate the Japanese SUMO community's contributions and your work as locale leader, and we hope it can continue. Sumobot will remain disabled on the Japanese translation. If, with some changes, it could be useful to you, we can discuss that here, or schedule a meeting if you prefer.
Thank you"
In this exact situation, before sending I'd check it with my Japanese colleague.
Suggesting that such an offence can be resolved by a "quick call" is extraordinarily disrespectful. A courteous first step would have been to apologise profusely, revert the damage that the bot did, and ask to set up a call to discuss what it might take to re-enable it in the future.
The steps that you describe might well be taken after the "quick call" gathers more information and figures out the people to escalate it to.
You are being entirely unreasonable in what you are demanding. This isn't a response from the Mozilla CEO. This is sometime in customer service, responding to a short post in a forum. Their response is entirely appropriate as a first step.
> They are often trying to put machine translations in where there are no translations, though.
And at what point are all of the translations done by machines and the work the community is doing no longer needed? At the very least, the nature of their work will change and I think they're not interested in participating anymore.
Let's just assume it is how you say it is. (The only assumption I am not willing to make is that people at Mozilla are already convinced it was a bad idea after all.) What in your opinion would be the right move now, after they rolled this bullshit auto-translator out and pissed off a lot of people in the community, including a major contributor for the last 20 years? Surely they could just ignore him and go on with this auto-translation initiative (BTW, thay don't even have to worry about whatever he wants to "prohibit" to do with his translations, because he waived off his rights by posting them). Would it be better than trying to set up a call and discuss things, try to find some compromise, gather a number of recommendations she may then pass onto people working on the auto-translator initiative (because surely this Kiki person, whoever she is, is not the sole person responsible for this and cannot magically just fix the situation)?
I think it's clear that Mozilla wants machine translation to take a bigger role in producing localized content, and this new process will be a large shift in the way things have been done. I think it's fair for Mozilla to do this, but I also think it's fair for the maintainer to be upset with this decision and no longer want to volunteer his time to clean up slop.
The initial response feels premature and tone deaf which is why people are irked by it.
Given that Mozilla "shot first" so to speak, the onus is on them to take action first e.g. disable the bot, revert changes to articles, etc. Only after doing this can discussion on a path forward happen.
Because a lot of people in this thread are whin… ahem, expressing their discontent with Mozilla, as we all usually do, but I've yet to see anybody to propose anything realistic at all, let alone better than ask an offended community member for a call and at least to try to talk it through and establish what could be some actionable steps to remedy the situation.
In Japan? Sincere appology followed by resignation.
No, the Japanese absolutely do not set up a call to discuss things after you've scerwed and disrespected them. They respectfully give you the cold shoulder.
Mozilla should not be surprised if their market share dwindles in Japan after this.
Are you serious? First, make a decision without consulting anyone, foist it on people that don't want it, then 'try to find a compromise'? If you care about people, you consult them before you make a decision, not after they've been burnt by it.
There many, many translating teams. When they designed this, it would be normal to consult with some of them. Not every single one. Maybe they sent some plans to every team and many of the teams never read them. Maybe the plans were hard to understand.
People aren't perfect. Setting up a call to discuss things is how you start to fix things.
Seems that this is exactly what Mozilla did? And Microsoft, and Reddit, etc.
Companies are absolutely falling over themselves to replace high quality human translations with lower quality machine translation. I’m not sure how a hacker news poster could miss this trend.
How would you handle updates to an article? Would you blindly replace all existing translations or would you notify the maintainers and wait for them to get around to it?
I wouldn't be surprised if orgs blindly opted for the first, which also means that a single spelling correction would be enough to overwrite days of work.
I don't disagree with your statement, but I read the sentence: "Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?" with a similar gross reaction as the OP comment did.
Reading that in response to Marsf's original message of airing grievances and feelings of disrespect towards his work felt entirely tone-deaf and corporate in nature. Especially in context of this being in response to the Japanese team, where Japanese business communication norms are often at odds with the American standard.
You might think that this method of communication is inefficient, but the heart of the matter seems that the Japanese team finds the very emphasis on efficiency as disrespectful when it comes at the cost of the human element of respect.
The person is a "Support Community Manager" in Indonesia if you click on their link. They're not the CEO of Mozilla who is supposed to be an expert in intercultural communication. I think you're being kind of harsh on someone who is presumably not high-level and just trying to do their job and get more information to be helpful.
Moreover, OP chose the very thread as the venue, and attempting to switch it to a different, intransparent one is a disservice to the community. Community is very important context of this message, and the response seems to validate the proposition that it's really the end of it, per the subject of the thread.
This is completely backwards. The CEO is not expected to manage intercultural communication. You know whose job that is? The community manager.
The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan, but managing local contributors is absolutely a job for the community manager and not the CEO.
Sorry, you're wrong. Intercultural communication is very much a core skill for the CEO of a global organization. They're expected to know how to communicate appropriately so some international deal doesn't get torpedoed due to a faux pas.
> The community manager for Indonesia wouldn't be expected to manage communication with Japan
Right. So on that, we agree.
Very bill lumbergh energy.
No, he didn't. I'll repeat a comment I made elsewhere:
The problems are nowhere near actionable. A lot more information is needed. E.g. literally the first bullet: "It doesn't follow our translation guidelines". OK -- where are those guidelines? Is there a way to get it to follow them, like another commenter says works? Does the person need help following the process for that? Or is there a bug? Etc.
These are the things a call can clarify. It's the necessary first step, so why are people complaining?
> Calls require focused attention which if you are used to multi-tasking are a huge drain.
Solving important problems requires focused attention. Which is why you get on calls to solve them when they're urgent and important, and not something that can be multitasked.
People don’t have a problem with real-time communication via audio or video in general. They have a problem with the suggestion that it’s a trivial issue that can be easily fixed by "jumping on a quick call."
The point about there being a "fairly in-depth" description of the issues isn’t that there’s nothing more to discuss - fixing those issues would obviously require talking through the specifics. The point is that this is a real problem that requires action and commitment, so suggesting it’s a non-issue that can be clarified with “a quick call” comes off as dismissive and unproductive, whether that’s intentional or not.
Where are you getting this from? Nowhere is it suggested that a quick call will resolve it. You're inventing that. The actual text is:
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
This is the first step towards fixing something. Understanding it.
The idea that this is dismissive or unproductive is frankly absurd.
"Your AI just deleted 20 years of my hard work"
"Let's hop on a quick call so we can truly understand what you're struggling with".
The response doesn't acknowledge the severity of the problem at all and the wording of "what you're struggling with" suggests that the original poster is somehow at fault (or too dumb) for "struggling" with Mozilla's terrible decisions.
This is the kind of reply you'd get if you contacted Dell tech support because your computer is not turning on.
I assume it didn't. I can't imagine it's not versioned.
> The response doesn't acknowledge the severity of the problem at all
Offering to escalate to a phone call immediately seems to acknowledge the severity to me. Not really sure what you want here. The person came in with complaints, the response is to dig into them over the phone. That's ideal.
> the wording of "what you're struggling with" suggests that the original poster is somehow at fault (or too dumb) for "struggling" with Mozilla's terrible decisions.
This is a bizarre interpretation. I read it as validating that the person is having a rough time. There is zero indication of whose fault it is, or that it has anything to do with intelligence. That's coming from you, not the text. The fact that you are reading empathetic wording as an insult to someone's intelligence baffles me.
If I failed to make myself clear, at a minimum, presenting me with a list of things needing clarification is helpful for me to take the time to prepare.
"Hop on a call" is to me almost always shorthand for "I don't respect the issue enough to attempt to organize my thoughts ahead of time, but I'll ramble about it and let you pick my brain." Or in the most malicious cases, the other party is seeking plausible deniability.
In my experience it's not that way 100% of the time, but it's damn close.
- No apology
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining". Maybe not what the person meant but how anyone is going to read it.
The original sin here is Mozilla just enabling this without any input from the active translation community.
This isn't a new problem, loads of Japanese translations from tech companies have been garbage for a while. People sticking things into machine translation, translators missing context so having absolutely nothing to go on. Circle CI, when they announced their Japan office, put out a statement that was _clearly_ written in English first, then translated without any effort of localization. Plenty of UIs just have "wrong text" in actions. etc etc.
Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing.
- No "we stopped the bot for now"
"We're sorry for how you feel" is enterprise for "we think you're whining".
Anyways the point is just that one side of this relationship here clearly cares about the problem way less, and _even when presented with that fact_, does not even pretend to be actually sorry for the damage they are causing.
This is just a single initial reply from a "community support manager" in Indonesia. It's not from the Mozilla CEO or the leader of the project. They surely don't have the power to stop the bot. But what they can do is find it more over a call, and then who to escalate it to. Then maybe it does get turned off before it's fixed or changed.
You seem to be confusing someone in customer support with someone who holds power over entire projects. I don't understand how you think a customer support person should be able to just turn off software across the globe in response to a single short message on a forum with few details.
I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I think the CSM should be fired for the message. I just think it's bad comms.
Here are some alternative choices:
- post nothing, figure out more internally (community support is also about vouching for people!)
- post something more personal like "Thank you for posting this. I'm looking into who is working on this bot to get this information in front of them". Perhaps not allowed by Mozilla's policies
- Do some DMing (again, more personal, allowing for something direct)
But to your point... it's one person's message, and on both sides these are likely people where English isn't their native language. I'm assuming that community support managers are paid roles at mozilla, but maybe not.
And like... yeah, at one point you go into whatever company chat and you start barking up the chain. That's the work
Regardless they are representing the company. If they aren't the right person to respond - they should not have responded and kicked it up the chain/over the fence to the right person - instead of responding by offering to waste the complainants time on a call with someone you are asserting is not the right person to be handling this. Supposing you are correct about their position, it makes their response far worse, not better.
It is true both they and the person they are responding to are marked as "SUMO Locale Leaders"... but it seems rather clear from the context that is not the role they are inhabiting in their (non) apology and request for a "quick call" with the complainant.
The language they use is certainly not the language a peer would be expected to use either.
Your knee-jerk cynicism saddens me. If someone doesn't want to help, they generally just ignore. They generally don't suggest hopping on a call ASAP. When they want to call you is when they're taking it seriously.
No it is not. The particular phrasing that was used I have never seen used in any other way than to be dismissive towards people.
> Your knee-jerk cynicism saddens me.
My cynicism isn't knee jerk, My cynicism stems from roughly 20 years working as a developer, being in and observing the industry.
> If someone doesn't want to help, they generally just ignore. They generally don't suggest hopping on a call ASAP. When they want to call you is when they're taking it seriously.
Not if it gets noticed and talked about on forums. It is then used as damage control.
> My cynicism stems from roughly 20 years working as a developer
That saddens me. It seems like you've worked at some rough places, I'm sorry. But they're not all like that, and I wish you could see that.
> Not if it gets noticed and talked about on forums. It is then used as damage control.
I don't see how it's going to work as damage control. Can you explain how? Either it helps resolve things (good), or it doesn't and people keep complaining in the thread. I don't see any scenario where it controls damage. Damage control is things like locking a thread or shadowbanning. Not offering to call.
I'm really sorry you see everything through such a cynical lens.
I suspect that you didn't understand the subtext of the conversation. If you aren't used to dealing with it, you will take the comment on face value, if you are like me that had to deal with it most of my life, you won't.
> That saddens me. It seems like you've worked at some rough places, I'm sorry. But they're not all like that, and I wish you could see that.
I got paid well enough. I prefer to be a gun for hire and deal with the reality. I actually prefer these environments, I can assume everyone around me is a snake.
> I don't see how it's going to work as damage control. Can you explain how? Either it helps resolve things (good), or it doesn't and people keep complaining in the thread. I don't see any scenario where it controls damage. Damage control is things like locking a thread or shadowbanning. Not offering to call.
I am sure other people have explained this to you. However it is extremely simple.
1) Feign concern. This fools enough people so it gets quieted down.
2) Call up, pretend to care, person calms down as they feel like things are being addressed.
3) Do nothing.
4) It gets forgotten about, person that initially instigated complaint doesn't bother following up.
> I'm really sorry you see everything through such a cynical lens.
I don't see everything through a cynical lens. I see communications of this type as cynically because they have almost always been disingenuous.
I suspect you're inventing a subtext that simply isn't there.
> I actually prefer these environments, I can assume everyone around me is a snake.
Again, I'm really sorry. That's a very, very sad thing.
> I am sure other people have explained this to you. However it is extremely simple.
This process you're describing doesn't make any sense. People who are quitting a volunteer position don't get fooled. They're not going to feel like things are being addressed if they aren't. They tend not to forget, but rather tell others, write long blog posts, share them on social media, etc. If the phone call doesn't try to address things but just ignores them in a call, it only adds fuel to the fire. It wouldn't be a good strategy.
> I see communications of this type as cynically because they have almost always been disingenuous.
And I'm sorry. If you think an offer to delve into a complaint over the phone to get more information is a cynical ploy, I really am sorry. It seems like there's nothing that could convince you someone is really trying to help, because of the lens you're choosing to interpret everything through. And because of the lens you've chosen, it seems self-reinforcing, which makes it extra-sad.
No I am not. I don't appreciate being gas-lite about this.
How this office politik is used is covered in blogs, covered on YouTube. My parents, friends and colleagues are aware of it. Maybe you need to open your eyes.
> Again, I'm really sorry. That's a very, very sad thing.
Stop apologising, I find it patronising and insincere, even if that isn't your intention.
BTW. I've done the best work under those circumstances, I got paid a lot and it made me HTFU, which helps with personal growth.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/HTFU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)
> This process you're describing doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense. You are assuming they care if the get a small amount of negative press about it. They don't.
This will be forgotten about within a week, even by most people commenting even here.
> And I'm sorry. If you think an offer to delve into a complaint over the phone to get more information is a cynical ploy, I really am sorry. It seems like there's nothing that could convince you someone is really trying to help, because of the lens you're choosing to interpret everything through. And because of the lens you've chosen, it seems self-reinforcing, which makes it extra-sad.
Firstly. Speaking to me like this is quite honestly patronising. I am quite capable of doing value free analysis.
Secondly, The sort of language people are complaining about almost always been used as a way to deflect valid criticism back on person making the critique. Almost always for disingenuous reasons. Feigning concern about my cynicism doesn't change that fact.
In any event I am tired of being patronised by you.
>> I suspect you're inventing a subtext that simply isn't there.
> No I am not. I don't appreciate being gas-lite about this.
It's not gaslighting to simply disagree. So please don't throw around accusations like that. Subtext is by definition open to interpretation.
I wasn't trying to be patronizing, and I certainly wasn't "feigning concern". Again, that's the response of a cynic who refuses to believe that sincerity and good intentions are possible. But you are making it clear you don't want to continue the conversation so that's fine.
Second, this "community support forum" isn't just a corporate help desk. It's a forum for community supporters of Mozilla, an open source organisation for which community contributions are hugely important. Mozilla can't just fuck over parts of it's community and expect that to be business as usual.
In a company you should never ever "quick call" someone (especially on a group forum) who has presented a genuine list of grievances against whatever you're doing, unless you're subtly trying to pull rank to override those grievances.
> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I feel that's subjective. Personally, I both receive and distribute information much more efficiently via written text.
Text also has the added bonus of being redistributable which is extremely valuable in collaborative scenarios.
The fact that the preceding apology was absolutely awful does not help. "I'm sorry for how you feel" is wrong, since nobody asked them to react to "feelings" but the clearly delineated problems with the automation that Mozilla rolled out.
Asking to discuss something like this over synchronous voice comms is basically asking to go off the record and handle things privately. Sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's what the correspondant wanted they would have asked for it.
These three things combine to tell anyone who is paying attention that this is damage control, not meaningful engagement, and it's offensive to act this way toward someone who has put this much time into your project.
Instead it is usually a PR tactic. The goal of the call requester is to get your acquiescence. Most people are less likely to be confrontational and stand up for themselves when presented with a human - voice, video, or in person. So, the context of a call makes it much more likely for marsf to backpedal from their strongly presented opinion without gaining anything.
This is a common sleazy sales tactic. The stereotypical overly aggressive car salesman would much rather speak to you in person than via email even though the same information can be conveyed. It is also used in PR and HR situations to grind out dissenters, so it comes off in this context as corporate and impersonal.
It was this exact part of the conversation that touched me negatively too. marsf expresses some very valid criticism that, instead of being publicly addressed, is being handled by "let's discuss it privately". This always means that they don't want to discuss, they just want to shut you down.
This stuck out to me as rude. I would never say that to someone on my team who expressed serious concerns, far less than this person quitting after years of dedication.
I would offer an apology, explanation, and follow up questions to understand more in public, then say I’m happy to set up time to talk privately if they would like to or feel more comfortable.
Very much so, and I'm German ;)
In my experience, and in my feeling as someone reading such things, you need to tone-match. The resignation message was somewhat formal, structured and serious in tone. Replying in such an informal tone means that you are not taking things seriously, which is insulting. Even more so because that informal answer is public.
I'm tone-deaf by culture and by personality. I often make those kinds of mistakes. But a public resignation like this is a brightly flashing warning light saying: "this needs a serious formal answer".
For the reasons I stated above, the response comes off as faking understanding to manage a PR issue rather than genuine empathy and possible negotiation, but I am often wrong about many things.
If they truly think they're in the right, they can discuss it in public, like the poster already did.
There might be an element of personality there. I was texting with a real estate agent (for apartment rental, not purchase) in China once, when he decided that as long as we were talking he might as well call me. He didn't bother mentioning this to me beforehand.
Of course, all I could do was hang up on him. It's not like I could understand what he said. And I don't think that was especially difficult to foresee.
So he wasted some time and seriously annoyed me in the most predictable way possible. Why? Not for any reason specific to the situation. Maybe there's emphatic training somewhere that says "always call". Or maybe the type of people who become salesmen have a deep, deep instinct to call.
And I've learned that there is a reason to make a call besides the publicity aspect: A call (and I mean call with voice and possibly video) forces immediacy. It puts both parties on the spot. Or rather just the party being called, because hopefully the caller did prepare for the call. Also, this immediacy enables rash and uninformed decisions, whereas asynchronous communications enable more deliberation and research. In sales, you don't want deliberation. You want to get this over quick and easy. And if you've dealt with a long long email chain that goes back and forth quibbling over minutiae, a call can reduce this kind of indecisiveness and inhibition.
So I see this whole thing as insulting in even more ways: A "quick" call means that it is an unprepared one. Also emphasized by the lack of real topic or agenda beyond what the original post already stated. No way forward for the other party that is possible to prepare for. No prior chain of communications, so if the call is really the first reaction in the first short email, this means "you are unimportant, I don't want to waste time, let's get this over with".
Also, in many cultures (I've only had to deal with European ones, so no idea if this really applies to the rest of the world), setting a stage is important. There is a cultural meaning to CC-ing a manager, to inviting more people than necessary to a meeting, or to do things publically or in private. A bigger stage formalizes things, gives importance, emphasizes seriousness. A smaller, private stage can mean the opposite: you might want the other party so safe face, because what you are going to tell more informally them is that they fucked up. You might want to get them to agree to something they could not easily agree to in public. Announcing publically, that there should be a private meeting is the worst of all kinds: Basically, this signals to the public that this person fucked up and is getting scolded, more serious than a totally private scolding, less serious than a totally public one. Why else would you widely announce a private meeting invite?
I don't know if the resignation in the original article is really a final resignation or rather some kind of cultural signal. I've seen that kind of drama used as means to an end, just think of the stereotypical italian lovers' discussion where both are short of throwing each other off the balcony, just to get very friendly a minute later. But in any case, whether it is deliberate drama or a genuine resignation, the necessary reaction has to be similar: You need to treat it as if it were a real resignation publically and respond with all the usual platitudes that they are very valuable, you are so sorry to see them go and you'd do almost anything to keep them. Then you privately meet in private and find out which one it is, and maybe fix things. It is a dance, and you have to do the right steps. If you don't know the right ones, at least think hard (you have the time, it is email) on how not to step on any toes. The Mozilla people failed in that...
More specifically, she's used a level of formality below what would be appropriate for most communication between strangers. Someone speaking in an official capacity (almost anywhere) who went much more informal than that would be at serious risk of getting fired. There's a similar effect to what was complained about in this meme tweet: https://xcancel.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594
> Can websites please stop the trend of giving error messages that are like "OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!"
Forced cheerfulness and fictional intimacy are a bad call as a response to "after having 20 years of contributions overridden without warning, we can no longer work with you". That's true regardless of whether the complaint is meant as a dramatic opener to a negotiation or as a severing of relations.
'I'm sorry that our actions caused such distress' come a bit closer to being a true apology.
Importantly, 'if' was changed to 'that'.
It’s that the complaint is descriptive on 5 or so actual problems and a couple of impacts that stem from them and the response doesn’t address any of them, it just looks like an attempt to take this issue out of the public space.
> I'm so sorry about this. We definitely screwed up here and want to
> fix things. We want to chat to you in a call if you're able?
> We will stop changing things, issue a moratorium on AI while we
> figure things out. You and communities like yours are central to
> our entire existence and purpose at Mozilla.The only thing to ask for here are some clarifications and expanded explanations so that the original text does not get misunderstood. If the Mozilla representative does see such potential points he can perfectly ask for them publicly.
1. "Hop" and "quick" suggests very simple matters, so to text-based people like me it doesn't really make sense why we wouldn't be able to resolve this matter asynchronously over text.
1b. Alternatively, the matter isn't actually trivial, so we should've had a proper meeting with other stakeholders instead of the caller debating me solo in a "quick" call.
2. I'm in the middle of something important or just hit my stride, and the caller is completely derailing my train of thought instead of just scheduling a meeting.
2b. The worst outcome is when I agree to "hop on", but the caller has gone AFK within 5 minutes of sending their invitation, so I'm just quietly seething by myself in the call.
3. The caller and I can't understand each other's accents so I'm trying to accommodate for the both of us by communicating through text, and I find it difficult to bring this incompatibility up without getting fired. I also had a caller who always whispered at his laptop mic so I had to turn up the subwoofers to have a chance of understanding him.
But we should point out that "quick" doesn't exist in Kiki's message. I think that goes back to point #1 about how the specific word "hop" can imply that the issue is trivial. Or maybe we're all going insane over unnecessary ad-hoc meetings.
Unrelated: I hate to appear anti-remote work, but I've noticed that remote workers tend to send more of these ad-hoc invitations, even more than getting tapped on the shoulder in the office. Are you all doing well out there?
When you're remote, you don't have that context, so everything you need from somebody has to be either scheduled (with the overhead and delay that entails), or potentially randomizing. When you need 5 minutes of somebody's time, it can be hard to do that in a respectful way. (Personally, I do try to do a "do you have some time today that we could talk about X," and try to handle stuff over text with coworkers who prefer text.)
I'd add the following at an even higher priority than those you shared:
0. Folks whose first, and often only, reply to text comms is "quick call?" are often just unwilling/unable to organize their own thoughts and instead seek to offload the cognitive load by "talking through" the issue which just results in unproductive and circular discussions.
> Unrelated: I hate to appear anti-remote work, but I've noticed that remote workers tend to send more of these ad-hoc invitations, even more than getting tapped on the shoulder in the office. Are you all doing well out there?
I chortled at this! I have made the same observation and I have the same question.
“Sorry for your feelings” comes off as dismissive and avoiding taking ownership for the lost work and years of volunteer contributions.
And they’re happy to eat up more of that person’s time, probably ask them to explain all over again. Also it seems they don’t think it is worth a long call… just a quick one.
In the end it may boil down to some strong hatred for AI, this seems to be very common recently and "I prohibit to use all my translation as learning data for SUMO bot and AIs" certainly points that way. If that is the root cause then it may be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of both sides.