Ouster of Eich shows Valley is sick; and, btw, fuck you, OKCupid

In a WSJ ‘Heard on the Street” video, columnist Miriam Gottfried is interviewed about Brendan Eich, who was forced out of his job as CEO of Mozilla because he had donated $1000 in support of Proposition 8, the California initiative to ban gay marriage:

In doing a search for an executive, you should always be looking, it seems to me, for an executive who matches the culture of your company. Maybe it’s too much to look through every single donation that an executive has given to a certain cause. But you should probably see: Does this person’s culture – and that does include political views – align with the image that we are trying to put out there about our company?

What is so unsettling about these statements is Ms Gottfried's apparent view that an individual's political positions should be assessed when considering his fitness for a particular job. Ms Gottfied does not seem to have any understanding whatsoever of the importance of Mr Eich’s contributions to browser technology and to Mozilla. Rather, the only thing that seems important to her is whether Mr Eich toes the politically correct line.

Brendan Eich created Javascript. He was a principal contributor to Netscape, the company that gave us the internet browser. When AOL dumped Netscape, he helped pick up the pieces and transform them into the Mozilla organization, which reincarnated the old Netscape browser as the new Firefox browser. How could it possibly be that Brendan was not a good match for the culture of Mozilla? He was one of the main architects of that organization, ferchrissake, and his vision had guided it for many years. His political views are completely irrelevant to the question of whether he would have made an outstanding CEO for Mozilla. The simple fact is that all the political correctness in the world is not going to help Mozilla one iota in its efforts to increase market share for Firefox and other Mozilla apps. In reality, the management and board of Mozilla are complete idiots for letting Brendan Eich, who was uniquely qualified to lead them, slip away.

We have entered a new era in Silicon Valley, one where what matters are not meritocratic considerations, that is, the actual qualifications of a person for a job, but rather inessential, accidental considerations, namely, a person’s political and moral views, or the color of his skin, or the set of genitalia attached to him or her. This is sick, sick, sick and it augurs poorly for the future of the Valley.

And, btw, fuck you, OKCupid, the online dating site, for promoting a boycott of Firefox browsers because of their "outrage" over Mr Eich's politics. OKCupid's business is little removed from that of an old-time procurer. For them to assume that they are somehow justified in taking on the role of an arbiter morum is yet another sign of how far our society has fallen.