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Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#121

Post by asperous »

falcolas wrote: post #94
asperous wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bower's 1970 book "Managing the Resource Allocation Process" discusses how in reality it's the other way around. Leadership often struggles to manage the company strategically. Often how employees are measured (in this case looking at who was let go) drives strategy. For example, if a company states privacy is it's #1 goal but bonuses on revenue generation, privacy efforts may go nowhere. With that in mind I think th…

If it's the employees who are really driving the company strategy and focus... the board needs to fire the everliving fuck out of the leadership (and optionally find the nexii of communication at the employee level and promote them). It's quite literally leadership's primary job to set the strategy and focus of the company. It's what they're being paid to do. If they aren't doing that, they need to be let go.

It's a balance. Leadership does have a role here (and in some organizations like the military it is more strictly top down). But in most companies leadership can at most set goals, incentive behavior, and approve budgets and projects and it's ultimately up to the employees to implement and adapt strategy

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#122

Post by UnpossibleJim »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #89
echelon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is perhaps the best thing to come out of any corporation in years. Protobuf, Envoy, Kubernetes, ... -- I struggle to think of anything better for our industry than Rust.

You could feel that Rust as a programming language is the greatest thing to ever happen to computer science, the big question for a corporation’s C-suite is can it make money. I’d assume (perfect possible that I’m wrong) that Rust does nothing but cost money for Mozilla. This is not to say I think it will be cancelled or force to expatriate and become a separate legal entity, but management is beholden to shareholder…

I'm a Rust fanboy, let's state that at the beginning. It does, however, have a slow production adoption even though there is a fairly quick developer adoption (much to my chagrin). I think it would do better to become it's own entity in light of this news, and the fact that it doesn't really get managed by Mozilla anymore anyway.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#123

Post by Spivak »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #55
WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #39

I'm looking forward to some paid products from Mozilla (including the vpn). Privacy focused personal zeroknowledge cloud things are needed. I'd love to have a more elaborate version of Firefox Sync that worked across chromium (and I'd pay for it). The obvious calendar, mail, etc. I'd pay for a zeroknowledge hosted Berners Lee Solid service. Do this stuff and I'll pay well for it.

Why do you want sync with chromium? Firefox syncs just fine with Firefox on any platform, including mobile. Just use it everywhere, no?

But then your bookmarks only live in Firefox which isn't always convenient. NextCloud Bookmarks, Floccus for browser sync and an API to add them everywhere else is really nice.

I get that Pocket exists but the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth -- paying $5/mo to remove ads in a bookmarking service that should just be a built-in feature of sync is gross.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#124

Post by zozbot234 »

asdasdasdasdwd wrote: post #65
walshemj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General Electric was famous for doing this is the problem is you cant keep doing it every year. Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review. I know some on at a big UK company who was bucking for a promotion and they blew through 1 Mill and 15 Man years for no good reason.

> Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review. Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review? This reminds me of the xkcd comic about the bots starting to have constructive messages to avoid spam filters. Mission fucking accomplished.

> Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review?

Nope, because incentives are not aligned to that extent. The whole point of a company is that it's not a pure market where incentives are everything by definition; it's a rather more complex organization and these often rely on "soft" constraints as better sources of drive, guidance, cooperation/coordination etc. If you're relying on "hard" incentives (like firing the 'worst' 5% no matter what) you'll invariably distort behaviors in ways that are hard to even predict, and are almost never what you really want.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#126

Post by [deleted] »

ameshkov wrote: post #2

Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456 This is about 7% of all their employees. People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked. A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-... > In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Ba…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#127

Post by melling »

minikites wrote: post #90
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 Change the number and this will apply to most CEOs. https://www.glassdoor.com/research/ceo-pay-ratio/ According to these numbers, CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees.

How much harder do software developers work than coal miners?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#128

Post by csdreamer7 »

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 disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#129

Post by crazypython »

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…

Mozilla uses AFL, which is a genetic algorithm that tests code paths. They are also transitioning to Rust, which will give them a much bigger safety guarantee over most of their code and a much smaller audit surface for the rest.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#130

Post by madamelic »

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.

Like cutting the CEO's bonus for her obvious failure.

I hate that layoffs like this can happen, no executives take blame and they continue to make 4, 5, 10x what those laid off made.

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