He took a rare example of a mission focused and open source tech organization and turned it into just another proprietary silicon valley cash-grab grift.
That alone should be reason enough to fire him and not look back.
Sounds like he fired every single employee on the spot. I can see the logic behind redirecting the site to a static asset when you have nobody to manage it.
This is called being "promoted away" to do no harm, when firing is not an option for some reason. This time he had blind luck; the project could have been scrapped, as most actually end up. Everybody and their dog was implementing a browser in those days but never saw daylight (ISP sw depts 4 sure).
It fired people with high technical capacity who worked for the well-being of the web. People who worked at Rust and Servo. And he still has the courage to celebrate.
I suspect what happened here was Rick was the type of personality that defined himself by being the person who solved problems. He probably wasn't a genius, he was probably just senior and experienced.
He didn't want it to end up like this, I bet. I bet he didn't expect it. He didn't know how to say no, and even worse: no one knew that he should. Rick had no peers or management that could even faintly empathize. They didn't get that there was simply too much to do.
Rick's first and biggest mistake was long before his absurd outbursts: refusing to admit the project was too big before it was too late. Instead he imploded and started saying stupid and offensive things. He defined his identity by his ability to solve problems but no matter how much he tried, the problem seemed to get worse.
He got fired. He even deserved to be fired, I think. Because part of being the technical adult in the room is NOT letting it get that far out of control.
The ugly part is that it seems no real lessons have been leared by the org. Instead of recognizing the obvious lack of technical management, they're spreading the responsibility across the entire org. Intead of owning their business logic they called up vendors and sold it to them. Instead of broading the scope of the business with these added capabilities early on the entire business is now balanced on top of a pinhead of those few cases.
Everyone made terrible mistakes. And it seems like no one learned from them.
Yes, I suppose so, and yet the largest software company in the world fell into his feckless, fumbling hands because of who he was, not what he could do; and may never regain its footing.
Well, he started the movement and got it very far, with the dominant OS using his foundation's license. Despite his limitations. There is no one in the movement who should have the authority to sack him.
At the time he was viewed as critical to the project. They indulged him. A very steady stream of very good devs leaving the company occurred because of such invented rules and irrational behaviour. He was a truly great dev, but a fairly insane architect and gatekeeper.
The General anecdotes he gives later in the thread line up with their stated reasons for firing him: he hired another person to do the same project (presumably without telling them), and he gave two different board members different opinions of the same person.
Those sound like good reasons to dislike him and not trust him. But ultimately we are right back where we started: they still aren't good enough reasons to suddenly fire him the way they did.
I've always thought his blaming the digg developers was pretty classless. He was in a leadership position, he needed to lead.
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