Reduce every Mozilla executive's salary to a reasonable amount and you are set. No need for massive layoffs.
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
671–680 of 1001 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…
> inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls. That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity. EDIT: I made a claim that the reader's reaction depends on what the reader is thinking, and six people claimed I was wrong, which means they can read minds. Nice. Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.
> That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity.
Or that depends entirely on how the reader is used to seeing buzz words the whole time used in unrelated contexts. You know, not every mundane thing is life bears relation to high ideals.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#673[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
To a large degree Mozilla is given equal treatment to other companies who is struggling financially. People are emotionally (and some economically) invested in Mozilla, and the announcement are clearly not calming those investors.
A common pattern I see when companies are struggling is that the refocus back on the core product. They cut side projects, they move away from what ever broad vision plan that got them into the current mess and refocus narrowly back to a handful profit earning core products.
The reaction to Mozillas announcement would likely look very different if instead of talking about go beyond the browser into a different world they would had done the opposite and refocused efforts exclusively to the handful of products that bring the core of users to Mozilla. Such announcement would clam people and make them hopeful that firefox would gain a strong competitive edge in a time where chrome only get older, slower, more privacy invasive and heavier practitioner of dark patterns. Some would naturally complain that their pet side project would be discontinued, and there would likely be people lamenting the loss of the advocacy work, but users would understand that sometimes a company need to go back to the core product in hard times.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#674I say it again:
- I can support Mozilla today if I know the money goes to fix and improve Firefox
- For almost everything else I'll prefer to send the money directly
I sent a reply back to the last fundraising email I got and they still cannot promise that the money will go towards Firefox.
To me however Firefox seems to be their biggest chance of achieving their mission:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."
For this reason I find it deeply ironic that donation money somehow cannot be used to develop Firefox when that should be the core purposes.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…
> casual users are more numerous and less demanding. That makes zero sense. Why Mozilla seems to be axing the Servo division? The only part that actually catered to casual users? Also by introducing a VPN and Pocket Premium is for casual users how?
Why does that make zero sense? It sounds like you actually agree that Mozilla doesn't cater to casual users.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…
> never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Truth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Power users are a multiplicator. If your products satisfies both, you win as it gets recommended by said powerusers.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#677> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce — approximately 250 people of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point. This is a humbling recognition of the realities we face, and what is needed to overcome them. What a load of…
You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr. She gets paid about $1m/yr which includes performance incentives. So if she just gave up her whole salary she would only have to fire 96% of the people let go today. C suite members raking in high salaries is the tiniest most insignificant issue when it comes to a large orgs finances. In most large orgs if C sites…
> You do get that the total compensation for 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr.
In 2018 she received almost $2.5 million comp from Mozilla. Assuming that her comp has not decreased since then, that would be 25 FTEs (according to your numbers) that she could have chosen not to fire at no other cost than her compensation. Do with that what you will.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#678What kind of commercial products Mozilla have? I am not aware of their offerings beside Firefox and Thunderbird.
A VPN, 'Pocket' and now Firefox Relay
vpn.firefox.com
getpocket.com
relay.firefox.com
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#679[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…
Mozilla seems to continue a self-destructive path. Chrome/Edge already got the casual users, now Mozilla risks loosing its main userbase just so that they can take a taste of being popular again.
While I find the corporate speech slightly annoying this is not even close to being my main issue with Mozilla. I am more concerned with the complete disregard for privacy that Mozilla has (even if we ignore telemetry and the normandy backdoor that you need to fiddle in about:config to disable and you make sure to check for new about:config options in every update [some of them are even hidden by default!], there have been privacy issues reported on bugzilla for years that have gone ignored), along with limiting the options that the user has (no option to ignore hsts, userChrome.css being killed, webextensions being limited, etc), making rushed decisions (such as the move to webextensions before the api was mature enough for the extensions to move over), the lack of openness (despite being promised years earlier the pocket server code is still closed), the general disregard about their main project (some bugzilla issues in firefox are old enough to vote), wasting money on designers (the ui is fine and it has been fine for quite a while, it is as if they want to find ways to mess it up just so that they can justify their wages), and the lack of care given to less popular platforms (such as linux).
> Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?
It does not seem that way after the mr robot and pocket scandals. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947681
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#680Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
"new focus", "new mindset", "organizing ourselves differently", "new structure", "thinka bout a different world". These are all euphemisms for death. Why don't corporations simply be straightforward and say "We are facing imminent death and we need your financial assistance if you don't want a Google-monopolized world"? This "changing world" fluff is a huge turnoff for people actually wanting to help Mozilla's missio…
This, yes! I had to scroll quite a bit to find it. I don't want them to change all that much. Making Firefox seems hard enough...