The Economist on Mitchell Baker 122
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a
story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit. You perhaps know her as
Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox." From the article: "Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer--her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."
Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure which is sadder: the troll saying that she's ugly, or the rebuke of the troll in which the word "feminazi" is used unironically.
Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated. (Score:3, Insightful)
She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed.
There's this view in the tech world that in order to be head of a great software development house you have to be a geek. This is rubbish.
Developing what it takes to be a great software company is just the same as being great in any other industry. It take three things from a leader to mak this happen:
From the sounds of it, she has all three. Hats off to her, I say
Simon
Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated. (Score:5, Insightful)
This and the sentencing of Ebbers and other CEO's makes me think that maybe the Earth is slowly being returned to its correct ethical axis
Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated. (Score:3, Insightful)
What was the mental/physical context of the interview? How much lead time did the interviewee have? How many on-camera hours had the interviewee logged prior to the debacle in question?
I'm reminded of teh 1992 vice-presidential debates, when now-deceased VADM James Stockdale looked horrible on camera. Yet, all nonsense aside, he was an impeccable of leadership and courage. Say what you will of Perot.
The fact that she's performed as a trapeze artist indicates no small personal courage, if nothing else.
Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand good leaders generally don't parade their short comings for all to see. It's unfortunately she doesn't have more confidence in herself.
--
Q
Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Never written any code (Score:3, Insightful)
David Baron is, in fact, writing enormous amounts of code. He is close to being finished with rewriting the entire reflow system of Gecko (= progressive page loading).
Mozilla Foundation is no longer developing future versions of the (1.7) suite. A different team of developers has taken it over, and renamed it SeaMonkey. So complaining about their inability to fix a Suite-only problem is fairly pointless. If it's a problem with the Core (shared between Firefox and Suite) then reproduce it in firefox and let Mozilla know. Otherwise, get in touch with the Seamonkey developers by email or IRC or whatever, it's not hard.
And if you have a problem with your bug being auto-resolved [mozilla.org], just go ahead and reopen it again. The auto-resolver was supposed to clear up rotten bugs that weren't real or were fixed by other code changes, not actual replicable bugs.
Friday is troll day! (Score:5, Insightful)
So far we have...
- she's ugly
- she's socially inept
- she's a lawyer
- she has a bad hair cut
- she's obviously "not a leader"
- she's not a geek (this was posted as a bad thing)
- she doesn't care about the code
- she only cares about marketing
- Mozilla never fixed my pet bug (several times).
- the software crashes on me every day
Back to your basements, little boys, or your mother will spank you.