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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll do it for a cool 800k.

I hope you are joking. If someone said I'll do full-stack dev for 150k instead 400k at google, how would you take that question?

If the position wasn't that challenging to begin with, like this one, I'd hire them!

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#142
post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

Wow. This makes me wince. My mind is making an emotional connection here to the .org fiasco and recent posts about "the internet of yore". Something(s) odd, unethical seems to be brewing/happening.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#143
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.

Rust has nothing to do with QA things since most bug are business logic / UI / UX related. QA don't test for those kind of errors.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#144

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.

And average Google engineer work 15x harder than average WalMart employee in US and 200x harder than laborer in India.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#145

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…

I mean, Mozilla brings in $450 million a year in revenue and manages $600 million worth of assets.

If she's able to increased the revenue or efficiency by just 1% then she's paid off almost twice her salary.

edit: Fixed pronoun, apologies.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#146
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…

It sounds organizational. The one reference to QA is that the leads were let go, which might mean that the teams were re-orged under a product aligned structure.

There is a lot of "shift-left" emphasis out there, but ultimate their is a conflict of interest problem. I think there's no need to go beyond the "we are losing money" explanation and QA is considered more of a cost center.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#147
This feels really bad. I feel she seems to be hinting that they are cutting people in case they lose revenue.

As others have posted their financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon.

Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Microsoft cut their QA people for Windows. Windows 10 to this day still has update issues.

I do agree that Mozilla needs more products to stay competitive. Especially when the Google docs team doesn't fix issues that make Google sheets very frustrating to enter data into with Firefox. Just listen to Linus(TechTips) complain about Google Calendar issues when he pays for the commercial version of GSuite.

I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite?

Still, when you introduce new products, that is when you need Q/A the most.

However, Pocket is not one these products. I disable the pocket button on every new Firefox install I do. They have an entire page on it in their financial statement.

And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Nintendo's management took a pay cut during their Wii U years before the Switch. And that is what management in general should be doing well before a layout.

The Mozilla steering committee certainly didn't consider this when "we plan to eliminate about 70 roles from across MoCo... ...(were) considered as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting exercise only after all other avenues were explored."

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see the compensation their board members and execs are claiming.

""" For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations. This approach serves to reinforce our mission-first orientation. Consistent with market best practice, at least 70% of compensation for senior leadership is “at risk” and tied to individual and company performance. """ The CEO (Mitchell Bake…

given the lackluster performance of firefox in recent years, and 70% being performance based, how has this number gone up? ($2.5M in 2018)

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#149
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?

One metric of power that has been constant throughout human history is the number of people you are in charge of. You'll find this to be the most common measure of power across all of industries, militaries, cultures and governments.
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