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Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

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Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#61

Post by tmpz22 »

marcinzm wrote: post #58
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, acqui-hires benefit the company far more than the employees who get moved to a different company. The first time I was acquihired, my compensation actually decreased because they kept my base salary and rewrote the bonus structure such that it was impossible to hit previous payouts. Meanwhile, my prior company received a large payment for the transfer of our team. Ironically, the new company was pay…

As I see it, there's no requirement for you to take the aqui-hire and it's on you to ensure you are fairly compensated (no one else). So take it, interview, get an outside offer and then quit. Or don't take it, get fired, interview and get an outside offer. An aqui-hire is an option and more options are always good as long as you remember that which option you take it solely up to you.

In practice though if the benefiting company doesn't get their way there are plenty of social and financial penalties they can levy: you won't get any severance, unemployment, or possibly even a referral. You may be ostracized by your former team, mentors, and management. You may find your access rights and equipment revoked before you can collect/remove any personal artifacts from them. You may have less productive conversations with HR/legal afterwards.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#62

Post by [deleted] »

syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#63

Post by olalonde »

qppo wrote: post #21
syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I 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…

surely you have a better example of your gripe than closing a GH issue on the logo design... the whole conversation on your end seems petty and toxic, at first glance.

I thought so too until I saw the existing logo... https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/master/WASI.png

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#64

Post by reader_mode »

tmpz22 wrote: post #61
marcinzm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see it, there's no requirement for you to take the aqui-hire and it's on you to ensure you are fairly compensated (no one else). So take it, interview, get an outside offer and then quit. Or don't take it, get fired, interview and get an outside offer. An aqui-hire is an option and more options are always good as long as you remember that which option you take it solely up to you.

In practice though if the benefiting company doesn't get their way there are plenty of social and financial penalties they can levy: you won't get any severance, unemployment, or possibly even a referral. You may be ostracized by your former team, mentors, and management. You may find your access rights and equipment revoked before you can collect/remove any personal artifacts from them. You may have less productive…

Is this a post from the 90s ?

Who is working in a team worth acquihiring and then plans on being on unemployment benefits or has trouble finding a new job ? And I can't remember the last time someone asked about referrals ...

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#65

Post by daniel-cussen »

marcinzm wrote: post #60
0xffff2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's somewhat irrelevant without data on what percentage of acquihires are poorly implemented.

Most aquihires are "take it" or "you're all unemployed." Since some money > no money the aquihire is inherently a benefit to the employee. You still have the option of not taking it and being unemployed. Or taking it and then looking for a new job. But you have more options and more income than if it didn't happen.

An acquihire is also a solid opportunity to end your participation on the team. It's perfectly acceptable to stop working somewhere after only a month because the company got acquired. For similar reasons if the acquiring company presents you with a contract (I think there was an article about this, a noncompete?) they want you to sign as a condition of continued employment, it's very different than if they presented you with that contract as a condition of hiring you normally.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#66

Post by reitzensteinm »

syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I 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…

By attempting to trademark WebAssembly you've outed yourself as a hostile actor.

You don't then get to go and complain that the community isn't treating you well. They're right not to trust you.

You use Oracle's JS trademark as precedent, but that's woefully ignorant of how it came about. JavaScript was not a four year old open standard when Oracle came along and scooped it up. JS was a Java branding deal between Sun and Netscape.

If you want to contribute to build something good, because a strong wasm community is in your best interest, drop the attitude and don't make any more moves to sabotage the project.

If you want to lawyer up and try to exploit the fruits of the community, then do that. But you need to pick a lane. I don't see Larry hanging around HN complaining about how people are treating him on GitHub.

I don't have a dog in this fight. Prior to this thread, I didn't know about you, your company, or anyone in all these links you've posted except I remember reading a post by Lin Clark once.

I wrote another post that I deleted pretty quickly when I realized how aggressive it sounded. But it wasn't trying to be aggressive, just convey the hostility of what you did and how you should expect people to react.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#67

Post by seg_lol »

syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I 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…

It has always felt like wasmer was trying to be the NPM of the Wasm world and stake out a defacto monopoly position.

I don't have much data around that, happy to be proven wrong. But we don't need more corporate control over package managers and code-reuse ecosystems.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#68

Post by warent »

reader_mode wrote: post #64
tmpz22 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice though if the benefiting company doesn't get their way there are plenty of social and financial penalties they can levy: you won't get any severance, unemployment, or possibly even a referral. You may be ostracized by your former team, mentors, and management. You may find your access rights and equipment revoked before you can collect/remove any personal artifacts from them. You may have less productive…

Is this a post from the 90s ? Who is working in a team worth acquihiring and then plans on being on unemployment benefits or has trouble finding a new job ? And I can't remember the last time someone asked about referrals ...

Anecdotally I have 5 years professional experience and every time I'm looking for work people have always asked for at least 1 referral

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#69

Post by nullifidian »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #8
syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I 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…

RISC-V is from a significantly differing category. A category for WASM doesn't really exist yet, there is nothing else like this -- a relatively low level bytecode language with high-level features such as nominal types, garbage collection, modules.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#70

Post by seg_lol »

chubot wrote: post #23
fwsgonzo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely understand your second point there, because I'm not necessarily talking about full-system emulation. Just userspace emulation. So, why can't RISC-V be a sandbox? It's just loading a normal ELF into a virtual memory. The first point is news to me, but I suppose you can build anything you want in an open ISA too. It looks like each object is like a shared object with an import and export table that c…

The wasm paper covers these issues, and is short and pretty readable: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14979605902538775... tl;dr security introduces a lot of design constraints that RISC V doesn't have. section 2.3 on structured control flow: WebAssembly represents control flow differently from most stack machines. It does not offer simple jumps but instead provides structured control flow constructs more…

I think if you did RISC-V you would have to convert asm -> wasm so that you could recover the CFI information.

You can send anything down the wire to the wasm env provided

1. It can instantiate wasm itself

2. Your (whatever) to wasm compiler is small enough and outweighs the downsides of on device compilation (to wasm)

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