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Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#171

Post by zelly »

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…

If there's anything they need to axe, it's the Gecko team. Just replace it with V8. The whole layout engine too--replace it with Blink. It is inevitable, so might as well get over with it now and save the wasted human effort and $$$.

I tried to use Firefox recently. It leaked 28 GiB of RAM on x86_64 GNU/Linux with no extensions except uBlock Origin. Happened a few times over the month whenever I visited JS-heavy websites. Never had that happen with Chromium, which runs through megs of JS like butter.

Wouldn't it be nice if an experienced browser dev team maintained a privacy-oriented libre version of Chrome (without manifest v3, sync, and all that trash). Or should they keep doing what they've doing and make the best pro-privacy browser that no one ever uses except indirectly through Tor Browser.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#172

Post by Yoric »

dangwu wrote: post #13
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.

Cost per employee can be much higher than their compensation. Maybe around 25% higher.

It can actually be 100% higher in some countries.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#173

Post by ww520 »

Mozilla should provide products and services that are one level above the cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GC) since it doesn't have the scale and datacenter resources to compete. Mozilla should provide at the product level that's consumer facing.

Mozilla can focus on online related communication and collaboration products. Some examples: email, messenger & audio/video conference, online identity, and security.

Email - make a web-based and an offline version.

Messenger & audio/video conference - can be easily tied in with the browser.

Online identity - people and company pay to have verified online identities and brands.

Security - encrypted communication/email/message, anonymous services, vpn, etc. SSL, domain name, DNS.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#174

Post by mintplant »

jakearmitage wrote: post #52
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?

I also don't understand why they keep pushing useless services.

Because otherwise they're almost entirely reliant on search partnerships for funding. Which means Google, i.e., their biggest competitor.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#175

Post by lucb1e »

throwawaypa123 wrote: post #114
dangerlibrary wrote: post #68

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?

Sure, I'll do dev for 150k if they're fine with me remoting in from Germany. Currently earning a third of that as security consultant which is on average better paid than developer afaik. I could retire at 37 instead of 47.

You see, I'm fine donating money to a lot of places because I feel like I earn a lot (and I earn about 50k/year, not 150k and I never expect to earn 400k). The Internet Archive, Climeworks, OpenStreetMap, a local hackerspace, random sites or tools that I found useful, etc. But when I see that we need a hundred thousand average-sized donations to cover the cost of a single employee in a non-profit (what is even the definition of that word if not to not turn out profit to its owners?) then we're all just financing a pretty face instead of the product we love. One can argue all one wants about it being the market value or competitive offers or whatever, but if you are only in it for the money, Mozilla should not be the company for you. I'm not financing that. This is also why I don't donate to Wikipedia: the money doesn't actually go to Wikipedia the platform.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#177

Post by D-Coder »

raister wrote: post #10
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…

It was Microsoft (or other company I don't recall) that every 5 years would lay off 5% of its work force (the least capable or productive people) - this would cause those that remain to work harder next year. Then, they would open positions. Rinse and repeat.

I think they don't do that any more. For one thing, it was too easy to game the system by hiring lousy people as targets for the next year's firings. And if a group was all good people... you ended up firing someone anyway.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#178

Post by kps »

melling wrote: post #127
minikites wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You write 16 lines and what do you get?

Another CL and technical debt.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#180

Post by summerlight »

coldtea wrote: post #151
bzbarsky wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/contributors

This list has 400 pages of contributors (~8000 people). Even with a very conservative assumption in that only 10% of them are full time developers, it's still 800. This doesn't even include other derivative projects and non engineers.

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