Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
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Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
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Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#2Cranelift coming along is exciting!
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#3My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved!
This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer).
Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable roles elsewhere.
One might argue there's no advantage to the company laying-off people, but they could save on the severance package, and frankly, two companies entering an understanding like this bodes well on other levels where someone could probably explore a "cross-company" job change with blessings of the employers on both sides of the table.
Of course, things like salary negotiations take a hit for the candidate especially, but internal transfers to different teams / location in bigger companies already work this way. May be year-end reviews and code can be shared on a need-to-know basis between the companies with employee consent.
In particular, such arrangements between smaller / crash-strapped companies and bigger / well-funded companies might work out for the good. Then again, you never want the bigger company to start poaching wholesale from the smaller one. May be there's a balance in here somewhere that can be worked out given enough time and data.
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#4I have mixed feelings about this.
In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job.
On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-side Wasm game).
So... how this could be bad? The Bytecode Alliance has been biased since their inception, blocking any attempt of collaboration from Wasmer based on personal bias (I work at Wasmer) and other external entities out of their control [1] [2] [3]. This move is conceding them now a full-control over a standard such as WASI, placing the whole standard at risk [4]
[1] https://twitter.com/syrusakbary/status/1202351432050954240 [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/3#issuecomment-71... [3] https://twitter.com/cjihrig/status/1320763509463015425 [4] https://twitter.com/cjihrig/status/1320761713365581824
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#5My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved! This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer). Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable…
With the sports example... the company "laying off a team" may actually be able to expect a payment in exchange for facilitating the transfer of their well-assembled, functional team to another company. It's entirely possible that wouldn't actually be a bad outcome for everyone involved:
- Source company which is financially strained gets some income in addition to reduced salary expenses.
- Destination company saves on paying other recruiting costs and acquires a pre-assembled team. They're essentially buying a working unit instead of having to build their own.
- Employees avoid the uncertainty of being dropped in the middle of the process (or summarily laid off), assuming the right protections were in place in the agreement.
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#6It's good to see Wasm development continuing outside of Mozilla, but it's a shame that Mozilla seems to be going under.
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#7It's good to see Wasm development continuing outside of Mozilla, but it's a shame that Mozilla seems to be going under.
Yeah, it's now clear that Mozilla focus on Wasm is only on the client-side for the browser.
It seems most of the Mozilla people working on Cranelift are no longer employed to work on it.
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#8I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…
There's always RISC-V :) Nothing wrong with it, or anything preventing it to be just as fast. The only thing it doesn't have yet is a standardized vector-extension, but it's probably pretty close.
We just need JIT support for an embeddable RISC-V emulator, and we're golden. Does it matter what the host language is these days server-side? I suppose there's a higher chance that the WebAssembly standard will adopt some instructions that favor cloud computation now, with these news.
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#9My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved! This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer). Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable…
This is the acquihire model. You don't actually have to do the acquihire.
A company could just offer folks jobs directly (CA frowns on companies working to block employee mobility given employers can also fire folks with basically no notice). But it smooths things to wrap it up in an acquihire.
Startups often get offers like this.
Wasn't there a recent case on HN where google or apple after the company rejected the aquihire just offered the positions to staff directly? I think they got sued?
Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla
#10I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…
There's always RISC-V :) Nothing wrong with it, or anything preventing it to be just as fast. The only thing it doesn't have yet is a standardized vector-extension, but it's probably pretty close. We just need JIT support for an embeddable RISC-V emulator, and we're golden. Does it matter what the host language is these days server-side? I suppose there's a higher chance that the WebAssembly standard will adopt some…
Hm interesting idea... but
- wasm has modules, "imports", and "exports" for I/O and host communication. The glue is one of the harder parts of the problem.
- wasm bytecode is sandboxable with a simple MMU mapping. That's one reason it has structured control flow rather than goto. (And this is why you need a special algorithm to compile C gotos to wasm.) RISC V certainly doesn't limit itself like that.
So I think this idea is glossing over a lot of details... not all ISAs are equal, especially ones meant to be transmitted over the network!