The Economist on Mitchell Baker

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."

Comments

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[headkase]

I think she's proven as a decision maker and project manager although.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[tobiasly]

@ AC and Erebus: please post pictures of your handsome selves for comparison.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[sammy baby]

Jesus. How many male geeks are there that look like shit. Why you would even bother posting something as insidiously stupid as "God damn she's ugly" is beyond me. You give fire to people who say our industry is sexist. Give the feminazis amunition and they will use it. Moron.

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.

[Ckwop]

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:

• Instill good displine.
• Be aware of knowing what's going on an all aspects of the enterprise.
• And above all else, have people you can trust to handle decisions you're not qualified to make

From the sounds of it, she has all three. Hats off to her, I say

Simon

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[ajnsue]

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. A person who is not slick or commercial - becoming an effective leader of a succesful project. Makes you think that competency had something to do with her accomplishments rather that self-marketing.
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.

[smittyoneeach]

In fairness, one data point does not a useful judgement make.
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.

[qray]

On one hand a good leader doesn't have to be an expert in the field. A good leader just has to know where to go to get the right answers and be able to tell crapola from shinola. Then make the right decisions based on that.

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

[spectrokid]

She is not that ugly, look carefully at this: http://www.mozilla.org/press/image-library/people- mitchell-baker.jpg. Her hairdresser however, deserves to get shot without a trial.

Re:Never written any code

[theodicey]

Thanks for filing Mozilla bugs, but no need to rant. You've made a lot of wrong assumptions and assertions.

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, 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!

[mspohr]

Let's see... The Economist posts a complimentary article on a woman who is heading the Mozilla org saying nice things about what she has done to help revive competition in the browser world.

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.