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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#581

Post by Polylactic_acid »

core-questions wrote: post #471
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its exactly the same as avoiding a company which uses slave labor in some 3rd world countries. No one wants to be funding these actions.

You're seriously likening the inability of gay people to go through the motions of a marriage ceremony to children being subjected to slave labour? That's the falsest equivocation I have ever read.

I'm comparing avoiding a company because of human rights issues with avoiding another company because of human rights issues. Its understandable for a well adjusted person to not want to fund either of these things.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#582

Post by Thorentis »

__jal wrote: post #263
Thorentis wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Conservative != bigot/anti-gay. We do have a brood of reactionaries attempting to blur that distinction like they always do, but there are plenty of conservatives who do not share that particular bias.

Bigot: a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions. (http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/bigot)

I have met plenty of bigots on both sides of politics. But immediately trying to call me out on labeling this man a conservative by saying he is actually a bigot is, ironically, bigotry itself.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#583

Post by catalogia »

minikites wrote: post #482
jaywalk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees That's an interesting (and ridiculous) way to spin the numbers. One doesn't have to work x times harder to bring x times more value to a company.

So you're saying success isn't a function of how hard you work?

Value isn't solely a function of effort, no. Some activities are more fruitful than others. This is a universal truth by the way, not simply a property of our current economic system. If I work up a sweat driving nails into wood with a hammer, that won't make whatever I'm creating stronger than if I used an electric screwdriver or nailgun.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#584

Post by Aperocky »

lizzard wrote: post #230

Well, it's been a truly amazing place to work, and I've enjoyed it so much, right up until being laid off today. Really the smartest and coolest engineers I've ever known and the best community! I have had my hand in shipping every version of Firefox since around version 30 and it's been great. Especially working in such an open environment. Onward to the next adventure.

As someone who jumped from chrome since quantum came out, I can't appreciate Mozilla enough, sadly things are not made to last...

I'm guilty too having used such great tool but haven't directly contributed anything.

But from what I hear, it seem the layoffs are directed not by technical reasons, and amazing people were let go. In this case, I fear for the future of firefox, which are not well protected or funded like the open sourced titan Linux.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#585

Post by Aperocky »

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. :(

> The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs

This in itself is a not a problem, coming from an oncall minded company. You take care of code you write and you're given time budget to KTFLO.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#586

Post by craftinator »

SEJeff wrote: post #162
crazypython wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American Fuzzy Lop? It's a fuzzer. I've never heard of a fuzzer described as a genetic algorithm that tests code paths, but that is technically correct. A fuzzer is not going to replace unit tests or good SDLC, which often involves QA.

GA's are a good generative path for fuzzers; at a low level that's exactly what they do.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#587

Post by inferiorhuman »

Aeolun wrote: post #484
scarface74 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is 70x a strange multiple for an executive to make? I’m sure I’ve heard stories of more. That said, I doubt the executives at Mozilla make north of 7M

Well a bit further down Mitchell Baker is being skewered for making $2,500,000 annually. I'd assume that the multiplier at Mozilla is much, much lower than 70x.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#588

Post by tssva »

celticmusic wrote: post #576
simias wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm pretty sure Brave is FF.

I'm more than pretty sure it isn't.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#590

Post by zelly »

roca wrote: post #333
zelly wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is good at everything except making browsers. rr is the best debugger I've used. I wonder if there's a way for them to monetize Rust. It seems impossible to monetize a programming language without owning a platform e.g. Microsoft (*.NET), Apple (Swift), Borland (Delphi), JetBrains (Kotlin). FirefoxOS for mobile with Rust as the first-class citizen would have been huge for them. Maybe it's not too late. Take n…

Hi, I'm the architect of rr. Mozilla is very good at making browsers. Making browsers is incredibly hard and it's amazing that Firefox is competitive with Chrome given a fraction of the development resources Chrome has. Mozilla has made some big mistakes, but so have the other browser vendors. It's easier to brush over your mistakes when you have an ocean of resources and market power.

Thank you for rr, once again. Great tool. I hope to contribute one day, as soon as I find an itch to scratch.
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