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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#71

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

tapoxi wrote: post #44

Mozilla should just ship Chromium with privacy oriented features. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel and keep iterating on Gecko when its obvious there's less and less demand for it, especially when it costs them so much money. If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.

Firefox is our last bastion of hope against the browser monoculture.

If you think that the new browser monoculture would be any better than the previous one (IE5-6), you are horribly, horribly wrong.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#73

Post by tyingq »

falcolas wrote: post #8

70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact (per TFA). It feels like a better compromise could have been made.

200k may not be overestimated. Employees cost a lot more than their salaries. There's the employer share of payroll taxes, unemployment, health insurance subsidies, 401k matching, training, travel, etc.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#74

Post by andrekandre »

petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

1.5 million divided by 70 employees comes to around 35,000 per year...

is this ceo really worth that considering they aren’t making their goals (who’s responsibility would ostensibly be that of the ceo?)

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#75

Post by jonny_eh »

strict9 wrote: post #43

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years. In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage. But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can…

Especially just after this happened: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/10/mozilla-firefox-update-...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#76

Post by weberc2 »

strict9 wrote: post #43

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years. In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage. But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can…

I wonder if it's improvements in automation or if QA responsibilities are increasingly rolling up into standard developer roles or because the line between QA and dev is blurring (e.g., software testing now requires stronger dev/automation skills so the QA job looks more like standard software engineering)?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#78

Post by demygale »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #54
petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

> is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

I’ll do it for 1.5.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#79

Post by burtonator »

jahlove wrote: post #26

I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?

> Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?

Risk... companies that make too much revenue from one product or too much from one customer risk death.

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