Gen linked me to a recently posted article detailing an old interview from November, 2005 with Google’s Eric Schmidt.
It was a great read, but Gen brought it to my attention for a specific reason¹:

Wired’s Vogelstein: You’ve talked before about how flying your own jet helps you manage. Explain. The reason I’m intrigued by it is because the only other guy I know who flies a jet is (Oracle boss) Larry Ellison. But you can look at Larry Ellison and understand how the machismo associated with flying a jet translates into Oracle’s culture. I don’t get that same sense of machismo talking to you about flying.
Schmidt: It’s helped me in the following sense. The difference between what I do normally every day and flying a jet is that when you are flying a jet people can actually die—right now. So while it’s very hard for any actual human harm to come in this hour with you, when you fly a jet that’s very possible.
And so in the jet training, and they do this whole thing called cockpit resource management, CRM, there’s a whole protocol about how you handle life and death matters, what are the rules, and people pay attention and you would too obviously. I mean, it’s a natural human thing. And by the way, people who don’t pay attention don’t pass, they literally fail them.
…
And the other rule, and this is particularly true in difficult training situations, is it’s “What’s next, what’s next, what’s next, what’s next.” Your eyes have to be constantly moving, and literally to the second.
And the problem, of course, is at the end of this you’re very tired, but I think it’s a reasonable metaphor for high tech management. The moment you let your eyes relax, there’s something else coming. And by the way, it’s okay for you to say you don’t like that, but if you don’t like it, then you can’t succeed in it.
So we’re always on. Everyone is on their e-mail 24 hours a day, you know, people work at midnight on a Saturday night, that kind of thing, and it’s expected.

Me being… well… me, I find his analogy interesting and, of course, apt… except for one aspect, which I think is not only a false analogy, it turns out to be an extremely dangerous one.
[This is the part in the post where I'd normally go to a cut, but I think this is a relevant issue,² so I won't for this episode.]
In his answer, Schmidt accurately describes the pressures related to preparing for and executing proper Cockpit Resource Management during a flight; as he says, life is faster in a jet, but CRM is something even us lowly piston-pilots have to take into account on every flight³.
I think Schmidt does a great job of trying to convey the attention it takes to focus and fly with proper CRM; the way he describes it, it makes me believe he’s referring to The Scan, which I can attest to from experience can be tiring from flying by for as little as half an hour⁴. Even flights on severe clear days, I’ve often come home and fallen right into bed.
Where his analogy falls apart is his conclusion: “So we’re always on. Everyone is on their e-mail 24 hours a day, you know, people work at midnight on a Saturday night, that kind of thing, and it’s expected.”
Now, how many of you would want to get on a plane at midnight on a Saturday, flown by pilots who’d be up flying since 8 am?
Any takers?
Yeah, me either.
I obviously don’t know under which rules Schmidt flies his jet, but commuter and “on-demand” operations—your standard chartered flights— are governed by part FAR Part 135, which specifically limits the amount of flight time a pilot can have in a year (1,400 hours), a quarter (500 hours), and two consecutive quarters (800 hours).
The regulations go into further detail about how much time a pilot must “rest” for before they can return to flying duty. FAR 135.267 has all the gory language for unscheduled 1-2 pilot crews.^5,6
This may seems common sensical, but what I find particularly interesting about the issue is there have been a number of recent⁷ rulings that require carriers to include “reserve duty” against the limits: “We have consistently stated that reserve duty is not rest when the reserve flight crew member must maintain accessibility (via telephone or pager/beeper) to the employer and there is a present responsibility to work.”⁸
So describing our industry as “So we’re always on … and it’s expected” is an awful analogy to being a (safe) pilot. If you interpret the analogy to be to “a pilot responsible for the safety of his ‘airplane’⁹ and ‘those on board’¹⁰, it’s factually incorrect.
Another concept taught to pilots starting during the initial rating¹¹ is a concept called Aeronautical Decision Making.
It’s the FAA’s fancy way of describing the part of being a pilot that says “You know what? I only got three hours of sleep and I haven’t had anything to eat in the last 8; maybe flying a plane isn’t the best thing for me to be doing right now.”¹²
Obviously, when hacking on code, the decisions (typically) aren’t life-or-death. But the law of (quickly) diminishing returns still applies.
I don’t buy the (implied?) supposition that “being on” at “midnight on a Saturday,” and generally 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays included, makes you a better decision maker.
Or a better leader.¹³
I can’t imagine it particularly enhances one’s ability to execute.
Buuuuttt… I’m not the CEO of the most successful company this generation. I’m not a CanythingO… or, heck, even a businessperson for that matter.
I do know one thing, though: it certainly doesn’t make you a better pilot.
_____________________
¹ Which I actually didn’t know about Schmidt…
² Which I’ve pontificated on before.
³ So it turns out that you fall out the sky at the same 9.8 m/s whether you’re in a Cessna or a Gulfstream…
⁴ I’m told, however, that like running, it’s a skill you build a tolerance up for.
⁵ FAR 135.265 has (even stricter) dutytime/rest requirements for scheduled operations.
⁶These sorts of rules exist for air carrier operations as well, but of course they’re covered by a different FAR, Section 121.471.
⁷ In the last decade.
⁸ Quoted from a 1999 Department of Transportation ruling on the matter.
⁹ “Company.”
¹⁰ “Employees?” “Shareholders?”
¹¹ And reviewed heavily during most BFRs and safety seminars.
¹² A surprising number of pilots lack this little voice of preservation in their heads, and I think we all tell it to shut up from time to time, with varying implications on safety.
¹³ Confusing human beings for the baremetal in your data center seems… problematic to me.

I made a post last week, ostensibly about my experiences with Google Wifi. It was actually about much more.

It had an umlaut in the title, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when it didn’t show up on Planet.m.o, thinking maybe foreign languages caused inter-Planetary indigestion.

After some debugging, we found that Planet’s parser was indeed crashing, but not on my blog.

I filed a bug to track the issue and within minutes—go go Gadget Mozilla Community—an… interesting configuration change was pointed out.

This change, which turned out to be the reason my post didn’t make its way onto Planet, raises a couple of important issues which, from what I can tell, haven’t really been raised or addressed heretofore:

The first is how editorial changes are made on planet.m.o, and how those changes get communicated, not only to those publishing to the feed, but to those reading it.

In my case, I was not notified that Planet’s seemingly de facto (and sole) editor, Tim Rowley, had added the filter.¹ I’m not entirely sure how planet filtering works,² so adding filters to my blog without telling me effectively removed my blog from Planet’s feed, because there’s no way I would know which “magical keywords” I needed to use to get my content onto Planet now.

In looking at the (admittedly short) planet.m.o config history, it looks like I’m not the only one who’s been silently censored: numerous people have been completely removed from Planet, without being given any notification or even a detailed explanation.³

In the bug, others have noticed community members’ blogs missing from the Planet feed, which begs the question: just how many blogs were removed because a single person decided the content contained in those blogs wasn’t what he (or his office⁴) was interested in reading?

It leaves me wondering “how much content, Mozilla-related, or otherwise am I missing from members of our community?”
The second obvious issue this raises is “What content is appropriate for Planet.m.o,” and, slightly related, “How do we enforce that content policy?”

Obviously, this is a fairly gray line, with lots of opinions on the subject.

For myself, I write about a myriad of subjects, which tend to fall into “very Mozilla-related,” “technology/web-industry related,” and “not-at-all Mozilla-related.”

Personally, I enjoy reading content on Planet that isn’t necessarily (or maybe not directly) Mozilla-related; I see Planet as a community resource that illustrates the Community—what its working on, what its interested in and worried about, its trials and successes, how it relieves stress, what big changes are happening in people’s lives that may affect the community—not merely the browser-and-related-projects and the code-that-goes-in-one-end and the bits-that-come-out-the-other.

Surely we could reduce Planet.m.o to a listing of fixed bugs and posts about what features we’re working on and when releases are available. But doing so would remove the human face of our work, sucking the humanity out of the Mozilla Project. A feed that lacks these elements would serve to imply that we’re all just a bunch of code-robots, hacking 24 hours a day, who don’t [need to] have families or hobbies, who don’t [need to] require sleep, and who don’t need to be treated like we have lives outside of our work on Mozilla.

Not only would that be a tragic and depressing face to put on our project, it would be an insulting one.

I understand that not everyone may agree with me, though. For my own part, I have often written about topics not particularly Mozilla-related. I’ve continued to write about these because I’ve received numerous comments on IRC and in person saying they really liked a particular post. Sometimes it’s been about why Digg and Slashdot users screw us. Sometimes it’s been about flying.⁶

To be clear, I’m not saying that a more open policy of content on a space like planet.m.o does not require some consideration and respect for the forum their content is being featured in. I take special care to my non-Mozilla related posts in the “extended post” section, making it easy to skip over if the first paragraph doesn’t grab your attention.⁷

In some cases, I try to use the same title, so it’s really easy to skip in the feed reader. This is not about forcing people to read content they don’t want to read. And you can be sure that if I’d gotten a couple of “Geez, man… stop with the stupid open letters“- or “I really hate your Gimp Art ™“-comments, I would’ve found another outlet for that particular content. But that hasn’t been the case.

In fact, it’s been quite the contrary.

Immaterial of the feedback from readers in the Community, I find myself experiencing a paralysis over writing anything now. It’s been communicated—without being given the respect of being emailed or otherwise talked to— that I’m “allowed” to write about Mozilla, Firefox, Gecko, and Tunderbird. I find myself thinking “Well, I don’t really have anything to say about those four specific topics. So I guess I won’t bother writing anything,” mostly for fear that this stuff really is boring and no one wants to read it.

That’s a [hopefully?] unintended chilling effect of someone striving for “a lightweight process,” but it nonetheless exists, and it’s not very pleasant.

I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to solve the problem; there are lots of possible solutions⁸, but I am sure of one thing: the silent filtering and dropping of content needs to stop.

The unilateral implementation of editorial policy that has not been discussed and is not posted anywhere needs to stop.

And the conversation about what’s appropriate for our community needs to be had, not avoided.
We’re the Mozilla Project; we have a history of doing better, and we can do better.

__________________________
¹ But, being among only three people being filtered, I guess I’m in good company.
² Does it filter subject titles? Tags? Posts? Blog comments? What? I actually spent some time Googling for this, and never did find a clear explanation.
³ In Pink’s case, it is especially ironic that every single post he’s made since he was removed for “very little Mozilla content” has been about Camino and/or Mozilla.
⁴ Pinkerton refers to a scary situation “when voices in the community can be turned off like a faucet at the whim of people at a corporation.” I think this is somewhat confusing, because when we talk about “a” or “the Corporation,” we’re typically referring to the Mozilla Corporation. Tim Rowey works for IBM, not MoCo.^5
5 And I think it needs to be said: I have no doubt in my mind that there would be rioting in the virtual-streets if someone at MoCo were asserting this level of editorial control-without-input over a resource like Planet.
⁶ But if you read between the lines, it’s actually not, which is why people said they like it; it actually applied to the Mozilla project in a usually-tangential way.
⁷ Which, of course, turns out to make it a [useful] challenge for me, the writer, to grab your attention, using only a single paragraph!
⁸ This whole problems screams out for a solution addressed by that Web 2.0-ey concept of semantics; this seems like a solved problem, what with tags and feed readers that can filter, based on tags. I would gladly tag my posts with an agreed-upon tag, so that those not wanting the strictly-not-Mozilla-stuff could filter. In fact, I already do, but “blahblahblah” isn’t a very standard tag.