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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#231
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.

There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him. Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.

Running a company such as this is like living in a shark tank. Powerful, convincing people are going to lobby you to do what they think you ought to be doing. See the recent privatization of .org for how things can go wrong. You need the right person at the helm with strong convictions.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#232
post #76
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)?

I agree with the concept that it is turning into something else, as I see DevOps/SRE/CI/PM people doing QA work through trying to just make the thing go. It just is leaving a lot of gaps in longevity, complex setup, and building tests either manual or automated to do that better. In the last dozen or so teams I've interfaced with this is just getting worse as I'm seeing lots of situations where things like backup/restore breaks from the last hotfix, upgrade a system a few sequential versions, and only covering X-1/X critical features in ordinary testing. These are things that a traditional QA team would cover after it burns the business/org in one way or another, but since it's not a core focus of some of these people covering parts of the same role it's leaving a lot of not-obvious gaps in a lot of groups.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#233
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other browsers do just fine with significantly fewer engineers.

Like who for instance? Basically only Blink, WebKit and Gecko are usable non-toy web engines these days, and they're all backed by big companies with deep pockets and many engineers. Opera's long gone, now it's a chromium fork. Internet Explorer is gone, now MS uses a chromium fork. The hype new browsers like Brave and Vivaldi are just chromium under the hood. It's like the difference between making a Linux distro an…

I am responding specifically to the claim that Mozilla is short on resources because Google has a thousand people working on Chrome.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#234
post #76
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)?

Developers are just turning into glorified hatracks at this point, and the results are discouraging. It's no wonder that people burn out when they are expected to do ever more and more with less.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#235
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...

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

Creating a language 20 years ago doesn't mean you're responsible for everything the language produced. If javascript didn't exist something different would have taken it's place and produced just as much value.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#236
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...

It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

It is definitely a great browser. I think the market share dropping has a lot to do with browser lockin on specific hardware, and site-specific apps being used more and more. We are losing more and more of the open, public infrastructure of the open web.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#237
My friend used to work for Mozilla. She said she has never had a more boring job. She said there was no work to be done, her boss was remote and never asked her for deliverables. She was well paid with a 40% cash bonus and she would go on yearly boondoggles. I told her she should stay but she couldn’t bear it so she left after 2 years.

She said part of it was that they couldn’t save money because they were a non profit so all the money they got they had to spend, which caused over hiring.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#238
This article and thread has put a baad taste in my mouth regarding Firefox.

But like Tesla, I still want Firefox to succeed. I'm not sure I'll donate again however. They seem to be just fine on their own.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

Read more about his background and you'll see why. Cancel culture is definitely real. (There was a post here from WSJ the other day about it - wasn't great since it was more of a whinge, but there are some legitimate examples of "cancel culture" happening, and they are increasing in the tech industry). tl;dr he was fired for having conservative beliefs, and nobody in the valley would touch him. So he went a founded B…

Don’t sanitize it, he was fired for being anti-gay.

That should make it a little clearer why funders won’t touch him (and many won’t touch his new work).

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#240

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…

The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profit…

Why not do if for less, if you are so dedicated to the supposed Mozilla cause? It is a non-profit after all. Random non-profit: Goodwill (way bigger than Mozilla) CEO makes $1,114,375[1]. PETA's CEO makes $31,285[2]. TOR Project executives receive $0 compensation[3].

[1] https://paddockpost.com/2018/02/03/executive-salaries-at-goo...

[2] https://www.peta.org/misc/how-much-money-does-ingrid-newkirk...

[3] https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2017-TorProject-For...

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