They have an open position in my area but their Glassdoor reviews are really mixed. It seems like a great company with a great mission but I worry it's a sinking ship and I'm not interested in changing jobs too soon in the future.
Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
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Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#2It is a sinking ship. That's evident. The actual question is, are they ever going to run out of money... well, handouts?
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#3It is a sinking ship. That's evident. The actual question is, are they ever going to run out of money... well, handouts?
Can you back up your opinion with links?
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#4Working for Mozilla would be a dream job IMO. Who cares what Glassdoor says? It's one of the few techie corporations out there actively working to make the world an eensy weensy bit a better place. Go work there. Go go go go.
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#5I've been at Mozilla four years, working on operations security, and I still consider it the best job I've ever had.
I worked in banking and a few startups before joining Mozilla, and neither the culture or technology were ever great. Mozilla has both of these things, and a mission statement that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning (work for mankind, not for the man).
Is it a sinking ship? Only if we're not up for the challenge of fighting back corporations that want to lock the web being walled gardens. Time will tell, but someone should fight the good fight, even if it's a lost cause.
Plus, you get cool t-shirts, and work from home, which is definitely a lifestyle improvement for me.
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#6Surely it depends what you're working on there? There'll be projects that are mostly-ignored and slowly dying, and projects which are core to the organisation's goals.
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#7It is a sinking ship. That's evident. The actual question is, are they ever going to run out of money... well, handouts?
Can you back up your opinion with links?
Main project is a sinking ship (cf. % of usage), most of their big projects have failed and closed in the last years (mobile, email client, persona, etc), they are caught in a major rewrite of their main project that may never end. It's a matter of time they stop getting funded.
This is my opinion; it is what I believe will happen, based on past and current events. Of course I might be wrong, or not.
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#8I've been at Mozilla four years, working on operations security, and I still consider it the best job I've ever had. I worked in banking and a few startups before joining Mozilla, and neither the culture or technology were ever great. Mozilla has both of these things, and a mission statement that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning (work for mankind, not for the man). Is it a sinking ship? Only if we…
This is exactly what I was hoping to hear. I have frequently been looking at careers.mozilla.org
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#9I've been at Mozilla four years, working on operations security, and I still consider it the best job I've ever had. I worked in banking and a few startups before joining Mozilla, and neither the culture or technology were ever great. Mozilla has both of these things, and a mission statement that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning (work for mankind, not for the man). Is it a sinking ship? Only if we…
All this "we make the world a better place" is actually the most annoying thing for me as a user. Every time I open Firefox (not so often anymore), I get some "save the world"-spam on the frontpage.
Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?
#10They've made some bad decisions, but it seems that they've managed to right the ship again, with the latest releases of firefox getting rave reviews and some really exciting technologies slowly taking shape.
Firefox has been widely panned the last few years, but that may have been somewhat harsh, and ungrateful to Mozilla as an organisation.
Yes, Chrome has been running laps around them. But that's mostly the result of Google's willingness to outspend them.
There are currently two platforms that have/had the potential to significantly harm Google's cash cow of search ads: iOS and Facebook. A lot of the time that was previously spend on the "open web" suddenly moved into these platforms. Sometimes, apps replaced search, such as for purchase decisions, where people started searching in the Amazon app instead of google.com.
That made Chrome the single most important technology for Google: they needed to push the browser to be competitive with iOS and whatever Facebook was doing. Playing a game, or streaming movies needed to be as fast, easy-to-use, and safe as doing those things with native apps. Developing for the web needed to be as attractive as developing for native platforms.
In that situation, it's no wonder that Firefox lagged behind–the world's best, and richest, software company was developing a browser, with what is likely to be a budget limited only by the diminishing return of ever-larger teams.
There's really no guarantee that Google's incentives will forever remain to be aligned with the users' as they are now. To pour all this misguided disappointment on Mozilla and gleefully cheer their demise is foolish, because sooner or later, it will be important again to have an independent, open, OSS browser.
It's also somewhat illoyal, considering Mozilla's past accomplishments for the web.