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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#451

Post by waste_monk »

sstangl wrote: post #376

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case. I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible fut…

Just curious, what is the breakdown of "classes" of people layed off.

By which I mean developers vs managers vs other assorted e.g. "tech evangelists" or whatever it's called.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#452

Post by bsder »

JohnFen wrote: post #193
save_ferris wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't want to second-guess the marketing team, as I clearly don't know all of the things I'd need to know to do that. But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?

Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#453

Post by BrendanEich »

bearcobra wrote: post #218
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...

This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.

I made a bit over 800K, at the top. Mitchell jumped to 2.5M. Math, do you do it?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#454

Post by cookie_monsta »

krn wrote: post #346
cookie_monsta wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? It reads like an honest appraisal of a person that the author has known for many years (and disagreed with occasionally as humans do)

> Sorry, which bits are incredibly rude and grotesque? I wouldn't say this is how I would like somebody to be remembered after his early death: > Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These vie…

Well maybe not, it depends very much on your value system. Fundamentalists (not saying that Gerv was one, just using that as an example) don't see anything wrong with fundamentalism, or at least their version of it.

Up until the last sentence Gerv probably would have been nodding along happily. If he did butt heads with the wider Moz community over those issues, the last sentence would come as no surprise.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#455

Post by asdff »

Sammi wrote: post #64
tracker1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place. I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component.…

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

Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.

The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.

If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#456

Post by hutzlibu »

dom96 wrote: post #311
shawndrost wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Am I the only one who thinks no single person should be earning more than $1 million per year? especially if they are working for a non-profit?

Not the only one, but you are part of a very small group.

Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately?

The "only" thing that is bothering me with the insanely high salary of CEO's etc. is that they quite often seem disconnected from actual success. Like in this case:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???

(Also, in a ideal world, I think the biggest compensation for a technical product should be for the technical people. And not the lawers.)

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#457

Post by zozbot234 »

sstangl wrote: post #376

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case. I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible fut…

> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.

Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#458

Post by BrendanEich »

Blake_Emigro wrote: post #364
bearcobra wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This chart feels a bit disingenuous given that Mozilla's form990s show Eich's salary tracking along basically the same line until his departure in 2014.

It also doesn't take into consideration revenue growth, which according to the corporation's Wiki page grew much faster and higher in multiples than her salary. As well, according to the same Wiki, "There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid." It would be a bummer to run a company of that size, be dedicated to it for so long, and not have any stake in it. Imagine her…

Wikipedia is unreliable. Perhaps you missed it, but Verizon bought Yahoo!, realized how Marissa's five year default search deal with Firefox was bleeding money as most users reset their default to Google, and Mozilla and Verizon declared the other party in breach in rapid succession. This will go to court, and my money is on Verizon. There will be no balloon payment of the last two years.

The jump in comp in 2017, as far as I can tell, was predicated on the Verizon payments being fulfilled. I hear it was also a quid pro quo for Foundation board members who demanded (order of magnitude smaller) salaries for their work as board members. Perhaps they do a lot, but in past, board members (including me) worked for no added comp.

Mitchell may be worth it, but I'd want more of a turnaround in market share, new revenue sources, or both. Maybe that is just me.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#459

Post by scarface74 »

_kp6z wrote: post #436
sstangl wrote: post #376

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case. I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible fut…

Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.

How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#460

Post by core-questions »

bduerst wrote: post #375
core-questions wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.

Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority. Racial segregation was also legal via Jim Crow laws, and people still hold the political opinion it should still be despite society changing and moving forward. It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.

> Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority.

Then why was it so important for gay marriage to have legal blessing?

> It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.

It is if it becomes the norm (and it has, and it has lead to a Chilling Effect, and the blowback is going to be tremendous).

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