Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 962 posts

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#151

Post by coldtea »

bzbarsky wrote: post #112
jahlove wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?

How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? How big do you think the Chromium team is?

>How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be?

I'd say 50 or so people would be fine.

>How big do you think the Chromium team is?

Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#152

Post by i_dursun »

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…

Rust is not a Mozilla product.

It is heavily used at and funded by Mozilla but they have almost zero influence over the direction of the language.

Actually, this kind of perception is the reason that they have been recently talking about forming a Rust Foundation.

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/01/09/towa...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#153

Post by Yoric »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #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. Mic…

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

How would Mozilla fund this?

> And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m).

Where do you find this? At the moment, Mozilla doesn't have a CEO, only an interim CEO, are you sure that's her?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#155

Post by kelnos »

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 doesn't just include salary; there's also equity comp, benefits, payroll taxes, etc. That can sometimes cause an employee's total cost to be at least 2x their salary.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#156

Post by save_ferris »

_-david-_ wrote: post #133
Sammi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

I don't think I have seen any marketing material from Mozilla. I have seen some Chrome marketing though.

They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#157

Post by zozbot234 »

crazypython wrote: post #129
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.

They're transitioning quite slowly, a sibling comment mentions https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components this page. Even accounting for how they're obviously prioritizing their efforts to get the best bang for the buck, there will be a lot of critical C/C++ code in Mozilla products for a pretty long time.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#158

Post by dgellow »

rogueresearch wrote: post #120
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…

>The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs Heck, the burden can be shifted to users! But then you might not have so many users in the future. :(

That seems to work for Microsoft so far.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#159

Post by malachismith »

dman wrote: 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...

To be clear... this charts the comp of ONE person at Mozilla (the Board Chair - and now interim CEO).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#160

Post by thatfrenchguy »

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.

Given their results that person is clearly not worth that money. I’d feel terrible as a CEO laying off those people while not docking my own pay.
Post reply on HN