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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?

#51

Post by _dark_matter_ »

k__ wrote: post #33

I was a contributor 3 years ago and my experience with Mozilla was mixed. On the one hand, the people are skilled and super nice and I think you do good stuff when working there. On the other hand you work on big old software projects with all the tools that grew onto them over the years. So if you on the technical side of things, you better like maintenance work, hehe.

Data Platform also disagrees.

Which, by the way, we are hiring for a remote position: https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/734415

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#52

Post by gcp »

bjpbakker wrote: post #44
dan1234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but Safari. It greets me with a blank page, which is just how I like it.

Huh? Since when is the default start page of Safari not apple.com? Or did you change it manually?

I get some tiles with the most popular websites. So actually the same as the new tab page in Firefox.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#53

Post by zerr »

gcp wrote: post #49
zerr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got this information from Mozilla HR who clarified this with the hiring manager, for the country in Europe.

Ok, so one country in Europe is excluded. This is quite far removed from "remote hiring limited to some particular countries". A large part of Mozilla's workforce is spread out through Europe, so there can't be too many exceptions.

"... only available in particular countries which doesn't include your country, unfortunately..." was the message from HR.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#54

Post by malmsteen »

Jdam wrote: post #9
jvehent wrote: post #5

I'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.

poor little thing

#firstworldproblems

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#55

Post by callahad »

Like any large company, your experience will vary depending on your manager.

I've been with Mozilla for five and a half years. It's not all been roses--I've weathered a team disbanding and a bad manager--but in the aftermath of each, I've ended up in a better place, and I feel like there are still ample opportunities for me to grow technically and inter-personally.

It feels good to work for a non-profit that's directly defending the neutrality and interoperability of the Web itself, both through advocacy and the direct action of building a modern browser that's competitive with products produced by, literally, the three largest publicly traded corporations (by market capitalization) in the world.

Not only does the mission feel good, the salary and benefits are competitive, and the remote / autonomous / trust-driven culture is worth its weight in gold. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything to work here, and it's fulfilling work.

Is the ship sinking? I don't think so. Our marketshare percentage has lagged behind market growth, but our absolute user numbers are stable and significant. We're back to focusing on core product improvements, and multi-year experiments like Rust and Servo are paying enormous dividends. If you've used Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Dropbox, or npm in the past year, you've hit code written in Rust. We're also racking up wins in other areas: LetsEncrypt started at Mozilla, and Google's recent abandonment of Native Client was a direct result of the work Mozilla put into asm.js. WebVR and A-Frame.io are taking on a life of their own after incubating at Mozilla. And I'm very, very encouraged by the improvements we're landing in Firefox 57 and beyond: there's plenty of room for growth, and we're aggressively pursuing it.

Mozilla was a turbulent place a few years ago, but the past two years have felt better than ever. Join us!

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#56

Post by Grue3 »

gcp wrote: post #31
nsebban wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It definitely is a fight worth fighting. And most people will agree that having several good web-browser options is important. What bothers me is the strategy that Mozilla used, to try and compet…

giving Firefox users a browser that looks like, and feeling like Chrome. Yawn. What did we do this time? Make it faster? Follow platform guidelines or modernize the design style? Adopt an extension model that can be combined with replacing the browser internals? Use rounded tabs? No wait, scratch that, they're square again.

Made it impossible to use add-ons like Tab Groups, making impossible to use the browser with many tabs open (just like Chrome, but you can't open many tabs in it anyway because it eats so much memory per tab).

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#57

Post by zbraniecki »

I've been working, in various forms, on Mozilla for 17 years now. I've joined the project as a volunteer back in 2000, and ended up working full time since 2010. I worked in multiple roles during that time, mostly as an engineer, but spent some time working on contributor relationships, contributor tech and some market analysis even. I've worked remotely for most of that time from Europe, but am working from San Francisco for almost 4 years now.

My personal experience has been very positive. I'm working full time on projects that impact the shape of the Web, I have good work-life balance and incredible number of highly challenging problems to solve.

I've been with Mozilla since they were a 40 person startup, through the crazy days of releasing Firefox 1.0, sudden growth during Firefox OS days (I spent 2 years working on it!), and now I work on Firefox 57 and beyond. It's been a great, if bumpy, ride and I can't stop enjoying it :)

I've seen bad culture fits, I've seen clusters of bad management and projects that "felt weird". People who got into Mozilla through those usually ended up leaving, but I'd say it's a vast minority of cases.

And wrt. "sinkin ship" - It depends on us. Working for a non-profit has some downsides. We need to stay open, inclusive, some things happen slower, we get much more "negative feedback" from people who feel more entitled to judge our work etc. But it also comes with some huge benefits. I never optimized anything at Mozilla for profit, our leadership sees money as a tool, and we can focus on what we solve with the tool. Some of my long-standing projects are way too "altruistic" to ever exist at Google, Apple or Facebook, because they don't impact the revenue stream. We can and use the Mozilla Manifesto to reason about decisions all the time, and thanks to all of that - the Web community really supports us. So, if we can get amazing products, we may not have the marketing budget of big companies, but we have the support of the global community. And releasing amazing products is something that depends on us, not any external factor. Right now we're pushing for Firefox 57 and I do believe we're on the right track to succeed (yes, I disagree with Andreas :)).

My take is that if you have the "NGO" muscle in you, enjoy spending a lot of time on big problems, like the open-source community model of work (which we drift towards with most projects, although there are pockets that are slow to open up) and are not money-driven (not because they pay bad, just because you can get better money as a hired gun at some corpo ;)), Mozilla is worth giving a try :)

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#58

Post by hutzlibu »

gcp wrote: post #42
amelius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time, avoid the whole problem and make the browser layout more user-configurable (in an easy way).

I think there should also be a switch to make it faster.

Sure, sarcasm helps.

I think he meant a few checkboxes, for choosing things like round corners etc. which should not be too hard. Really necessary?

Maybe not, but you should realize, that you have a shrinking core group of users, while liked Firefox because they could modify it the way they wanted - and therefore did not liked it, when frequently changes broke their setup.

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#59

Post by cpeterso »

vanderZwan wrote: post #28
dao- wrote: post #23

Come help us prevent the ship from sinking. :) I've been at Mozilla for ~11 years, worked from home for many years, now splitting my time between the Berlin office and home. I feel good about the work I do and don't intend to change jobs anytime soon. There have been some leadership / management issues but it's not all bad. Admittedly some people (e.g. those working on Firefox OS) were effected more than others.

> the Berlin office There's a Berlin office? Wait, what am I saying, of course there's an office for an organisation like Mozilla in privacy-obsessed Germany. ... are they hiring? EDIT: Yes! https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/

Mozilla just moved into a larger Berlin office:

https://blog.mozilla.org/places/2017/04/27/new-berlin-office...

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Berlin_Office

Re: Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days?

#60

Post by vertex-four »

Grue3 wrote: post #56
gcp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

giving Firefox users a browser that looks like, and feeling like Chrome. Yawn. What did we do this time? Make it faster? Follow platform guidelines or modernize the design style? Adopt an extension model that can be combined with replacing the browser internals? Use rounded tabs? No wait, scratch that, they're square again.

Made it impossible to use add-ons like Tab Groups, making impossible to use the browser with many tabs open (just like Chrome, but you can't open many tabs in it anyway because it eats so much memory per tab).

IIRC, the author of Tab Groups threw their toys out of the pram when told the extension model was changing and that if they needed a feature, they should post on bugzilla. I don't know quite what's happened since then.

EDIT: Looking at bugzilla, looks like the author of Tab Groups decided he was going to put together a report about a year ago, and then never did, so Mozilla doesn't even have any documentation of what functionality would be necessary to implement it, and there's currently nobody interested in implementing it.

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