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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#681

Post by saghm »

zelly wrote: post #171
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 webs…

> 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.

Not sure what was going on with your experience, but I use Firefox on x86_64 machines with far less than 28 GiB of RAM daily and several extensions (including uBlock Origin), and I've never had anything like that happen. I'm not sure how JS-heavy the sites I visit are though, as I don't have any issues, so I don't really pay attention to that.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#682

Post by cookiecaper »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #666
cookiecaper wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be specific: by "common decency", I mean that the CEO should refrain from a publishing an infantilizing and derogatory post about a deceased employee. They should especially refrain from doing so days after the employee's death. Employees dedicate roughly half of their waking hours to the employer, entailing much sacrifice from not only the employee themselves, but also their family. Regardless of the employ…

Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do. And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation? Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be…

> And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation?

No -- employees cause damage all the live long day. There's nothing unusual about that. Furthermore, discretion and secrecy are indispensable components in any professional environment; you don't have to make a publication about negative experiences just because they happened.

If the aggregate effect of an individual's employment is net negative, you start the prescribed HR processes to accommodate, adjust, cross-train, improve, and/or re-assign. If worse comes to worst and none of that works, you'd initiate processes for involuntary termination of employment.

I don't know about you, but personally, I've never seen an HR process that includes publishing a condemnation of a recently-deceased employee's political or religious views.

Hypothetical events that may provoke negative statements from an employer would be things like becoming deceased shortly after being arrested for some well-publicized crime, especially if the crime impacted the employer's business (e.g., money manager accused of embezzlement, arrest goes awry and suspect is killed). "Dying after decades-long battle against terminal cancer" doesn't feel likely to enter provocation territory to me.

> Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be whitewashed.

You're ascribing motives that don't exist here. I don't know Eich and I didn't know Markham. I haven't read extensively about their private views and I'm sure that I disagree substantially with many of them.

Fortunately, you don't have to know anything about anyone's politics or religion to understand that it's incredibly crass for the CEO to a) publicly enumerate the managerial difficulties imposed by the deceased; b) publicly offer negative characterizations of the deceased's net impact on the organization; or c) really do anything except offer condolences and ensure prompt handling of the family's benefit claims.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#683

Post by mcantelon »

burnte wrote: post #545
phonon wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

I knew Gerv, he was a convert to Christianity and as usual for converts to any religion, he was intense and fervent in his belief that he had discovered the ultimate truth. Unfortunately that can lead people to embracing the old testament bigotry more than the new testament forgiveness. Gerv wasn't a bad person, but Mitchell wasn't inaccurate in her post. Yes, Gerv was a great thing for Mozilla, but his legacy is not…

Using an obituary to characterize someone's influence as "traumatic and damaging" is kind of extraordinary.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#684

Post by bzbarsky »

junar wrote: post #537
bzbarsky wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let's do some data-gathering. If I git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git and then run: git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep chromium.org | sort -u | wc -l to get one year's worth of commits as of today (as of rev c43e247d6444 to be exact), I get 1250. If I repeat that with "google.com" instead of "chromium.org", I get 623. So figure ~1800-1900 there. If I git clone https://g…

Note that getting a chromium.org email does not require being a Google employee. https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/become-a-committer

That is true, and I did not claim that the entirety of the "Chromium team" are Google employees, either...

You do need to be a bit more involved than a few drive-by contributions to get a chromium.org email, as far as I can tell.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#685

Post by saghm »

usr1106 wrote: post #271
fencepost wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago. Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime. Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

What do you with a 4 digit number of tabs? How can you even find what you are looking for? (Honest question, no attack) I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with. I also shut down my browser twice a day (2 working locations) and never restore the previous session. I do bookmark some pages, but as a matter of fact I notice that I hardly ever refer to my bookmark…

> I hardly ever have more than 10 tabs open, and aggressively close everything I am not working with.

I must be quite an outlier, because even 10 tabs open at once sounds like a distressingly high number to me.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#686

Post by sfink »

shpeedy wrote: post #328
fencepost wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you clarify "recently" a bit more? Clearly it's after the release of uBlock Origin, but I'm pretty sure that there was a big effort to clean up memory use a few years ago. Maybe it's poor Linux support, I have a distressingly high 4 digit number of tabs open on a Windows box and I don't think I've seen it go past 8gb with multiple weeks of runtime. Edit: Win10 Pro on a Xeon with 48gb ram available

Previously, Firefox was fine on computer with 2GB of memory and hundreds of tabs. Now, 8GB is not enough.

Have you checked how Chrome does with 8GB now?

Sadly, the sites out there have changed far more than any of the browsers have, and not for the better. They load a ton of crap that does not contribute to the value delivered to the user, but instead contribute value to the site owner and the dozen layers of intermediaries in between user and site owner.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#687

Post by chillfox »

klagermkii wrote: post #656
deepaksurti wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many corporate leaders are Peters at work [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I would think the Peter Principle would be better represented if there was someone who was a star on the technical side, but messed up as the CEO in a role they couldn't handle. i.e. if Brendan Eich was CEO and this happened it would be a Peter Principle moment. All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and we…

Just because they might have made excellent middle managers at some point in time does not mean that they would be any good at being executives.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#688

Post by mcantelon »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #454
krn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Characterizing someone as having a "traumatic and damaging" influence seems pretty positive.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#689

Post by [deleted] »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #666
cookiecaper wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be specific: by "common decency", I mean that the CEO should refrain from a publishing an infantilizing and derogatory post about a deceased employee. They should especially refrain from doing so days after the employee's death. Employees dedicate roughly half of their waking hours to the employer, entailing much sacrifice from not only the employee themselves, but also their family. Regardless of the employ…

Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do. And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation? Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#690

Post by inferiorhuman »

cookiecaper wrote: post #682
inferiorhuman wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bottom line: making an unprovoked publication indicating that the deceased's efforts caused damage to the organization as a whole is not a decent thing to do. And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation? Just because you happen to agree with their views on morality doesn't mean that their contempt for their fellow coworkers should be…

> And what if the deceased's actions DID cause damage (e.g. Brendan Eich and Gervase Markham)? Wouldn't that count as provocation? No -- employees cause damage all the live long day. There's nothing unusual about that. Furthermore, discretion and secrecy are indispensable components in any professional environment; you don't have to make a publication about negative experiences just because they happened. If the aggr…

No -- employees cause damage all the live long day.

Yeah, if that's normal to you all I can say is that you're working at the wrong places (or potentially you're the problem). If you want respect in death then act appropriately in life. No matter how talented Markham was, he was also well known for harassing and belittling his coworkers.

If you don't want to be remembered for being a jerk, don't be a jerk. It's pretty simple.

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