Mozilla lays off 70 • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#461

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

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. :(

i.e. Netscape.

It was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well your operating system could handle a Netscape crash back in the day.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#462

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:46 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #342

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that. It is odd though. I used to remember no one cared what about your Views as long as you were good at what you did. CS was as close to meritocracy as it could have been. It is a shame.

CS was never close to meritocracy (I'd argue that finance is/was historically far closer to meritocracy than CS ever was). Eich was raised in the Valley, got a Master's in CS before he had gotten a job, and was a millionaire and investing in Silicon Valley real estate before he had been working for ten years (he never started a company, and only created Javascript after something like eleven). There are people workin…

I can see that ( finance-wise ). Tbh, I did not know there were this many female bank CEOs until I just checked a moment ago. I was pleasantly surprised.

As for meritocracy, in the 90s no one cared who my online persona was. My persona was about as eye-grabbing as the one I use here. My contributions, for lack of a better term, were dismissed for being crap, which I eventually understood. I think people miss out on that.

As for your point actions and views, I respectfully disagree. You only seem to separate them, because you dislike his views, the resulting words and would like them not to be translated into action. I can understand that, but it sounds .. convenient? You are free to talk about stuff, but the moment you get politically active you get shunned? It seems very backwards to me.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#463

Post by core-questions » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

big_chungus wrote: post #365

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.

You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.

[flagged]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#464

Post by sciurus » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

ntnsndr wrote: post #383

Any word about whether this affects Thunberbird?

AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees have been paid to work on Thunderbird for years now, so there's nothing to cut.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#465

Post by mcny » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #459

_kp6z wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they scaled back their own compensation maybe it would be half of seventy? Better than inadvertently laying off someone you need I would imagine...

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#466

Post by flybyair2038 » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:48 AM UTC

What did Mitchell mean by "Most will not join us in Berlin"?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#467

Post by core-questions » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #288

YorickPeterse wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly he didn't get fired for just not supporting gay marriage, he got fired for donating to some bill that was trying to prohibit gay marriage. That's quite the difference.

Understandable he had to go. Not many people would feel comfortable supporting a product where the profits go in to restricting their human rights.

[flagged]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#468

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

big_chungus wrote: post #365

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.

You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.

You've been downvoted; I sympathize. While you stick to "speech", I think you miss two things, one about speech and the other from a different area of law:

1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Amendm...) on, depending on whose ox was being gored, both left and right have decried "chilling effects" of less than federal censorship effects on free speech. Cory Doctorow had a good piece on this recently:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-for...

Cory covers the full space, including corporate censorship of dissidents of all political stripes, corporate capture via monopolies and market super-powers, etc. Recommended.

2. California has labor law from the New Deal era, which protects employees from being fired or demoted due to political affiliation, participation, or any action including speech:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

So it's not just as simple as your downvoted post seems to say.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#469

Post by summerlight » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:50 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #420

summerlight wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And almost all of them gave up developing their own engine except Apple and Mozilla? FYI, WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple (which would be roughly similar to Blink). And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Thus Apple is investing a comparable amount of engineering resource into Safari. Where are "Other browsers"?

> WebKit itself takes hundred of engineers from Apple WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it. > And this is only for the rendering engine, which is pretty small compared to the entire browser codebase. Not really.

> WebKit does not have hundreds of Apple assigned to it.

Well, it's close to 100, according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059393 ? You can bring up with other numbers to refute this.

> Not really.

Please don't assert this so lightly unless you have any evidence to support it. A rendering engine is just a tiny fraction and you gotta take care of literally thousands of other components to build a modern browser. This applies to Chrome, Firefox and even old good IE. I don't expect any valid reasons why the same logic cannot apply to Safari.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#470

Post by wwright » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #443

wwright wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of his job was to acquire and retain employees, allocate capital, and engage in public relations. Spending his personal money on fucking over other people (with no real benefit to the world), many of whom worked for or could work for him, is a bad sign about those parts of his job. (That may not be an argument for the board to fire him, of course, but it is an answer to “how good is he at his job?”)

Well, how is him spending his personal money anyone's business but his own? Now, you could make an argument that his sort of mob mentality is why people now skulk around behind various trusts, llcs and PACs to any kind of political work other people may dislike. To your point, I guess it really depends on how you define his set of responsibilities, which is a valid point to make. I thought of something very limited (…

He was the CEO, so it was much more than coding. For a regular software engineer (ie, no direct reports) I think it’s a very different calculus.

And it _is_ up to him to decide how to spend his money. But if he spends that money on things that deeply impact other people, it is more than fair for other people to care.