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Leaving Mozilla

emilykager.com

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#171

Post by BlueTemplar »

renewiltord wrote: post #7

There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same. Cater to them at your own risk.

You don't think that "not wanting the GAFAMs to own the Internet" might also be a reason?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#172

Post by passivate »

_qulr wrote: post #157
passivate wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I cannot judge what is good for you, and neither can you for me. Its an individual choice, not something that is forced upon. The point is, 40 hours/week is a completely arbitrary number. I enjoy working extra hours, it allows me to work on multiple projects simultaneously that I otherwise couldn't do in an 8 hour day. If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan. N…

> If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan. 1) Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls (for the second time) at age 36. I suppose in tech with rampant age discrimination, that's also when you're expected to retire after burning yourself out... 2) Michael Jordan made enough money that he could have retired even earlier. No employer was forcing him to work. He did…

We're on a tangent with Jordan, so I'll just let it go. I don't fundamentally disagree with you, I'm just having a discussion. If you work more and produce more, you should be entitled to benefits from that extra work. If as you said, things are just transactional and nobody cares about you, then you should want to extract as much monetary value as you can for your work.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#173

Post by sundarurfriend »

acdha wrote: post #91
fireattack wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's more like she directed her frustrations at the users ("haters") instead of the other way around?

No, that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted. This is a common hazard of visibly working in open source and it's caused a lot of people to decide it's not worth being involved in a project.

> that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted

Context for those who don't use Firefox on Android: the "whining" was people complaining that Mozilla had replaced a stable working product with what was clearly an inferior version, with less functionality (no addons) and less stability (this is the first version of Firefox to repeatedly crash on Android, in about a decade). Framing it as "different decisions than they wanted" is disingenuous and misleading. (I'd been a regular Firefox user for about a decade on Android, but have had to mostly switch to Brave because of this update. That's how bad it is.)

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#174

Post by _qulr »

passivate wrote: post #172
_qulr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Michael Jordan wasn't such a workaholic would he still have become 'The' Michael Jordan. 1) Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls (for the second time) at age 36. I suppose in tech with rampant age discrimination, that's also when you're expected to retire after burning yourself out... 2) Michael Jordan made enough money that he could have retired even earlier. No employer was forcing him to work. He did…

We're on a tangent with Jordan, so I'll just let it go. I don't fundamentally disagree with you, I'm just having a discussion. If you work more and produce more, you should be entitled to benefits from that extra work. If as you said, things are just transactional and nobody cares about you, then you should want to extract as much monetary value as you can for your work.

This is missing the broader context: workers are competing with each other for jobs and promotions.

If one worker finds that they can achieve a competitive advantage by working more hours, then other workers will copy that strategy. They may have to copy that strategy whether they want to or not, just to get jobs. Suddenly, working overtime is no longer the exception, it's now the norm, expected. And in that situation, the workers don't benefit, only the employers benefit from the expected overtime work. And then you have a culture of overwork and burnout in the industry. Employers may not care, because they can exploit you for a few years, until you burn out and are incapable of working any more, at which point you quit or get fired, and the employer moves on to the next employee. This situation is not to your long-term benefit at all, because you have to take a lot of time post-burnout making no money.

This is why all workers need to take a stand and not allow employers to exploit them, not to agree to work unreasonable hours. Your career — indeed your whole life — is a marathon, not a sprint. Trying to run a marathon in a series of sprints is not an effective strategy.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#175

Post by sundarurfriend »

ekager wrote: post #108
leereeves wrote: post #41

> I first joined Mozilla as an intern during my change-career journey mainly because I had taken one Android class, knew some Java, and applied on a whim at the right time to hit the recruiter’s inbox. Is it that easy to become an intern at Mozilla?

Sorry, how many years of experience with professional software development do you expect your interns to have?

It's clear from the other person's responses that they don't mean it as a jab (which you seem to have taken it to be). Many people have a mythical idea of needing to be a superhuman developer to get any position at a big name tech company. Reading this seems to have made this person realize that such positions might be not as out of reach as they assumed, and they were expressing surprise about that.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#176

Post by acdha »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #173
acdha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted. This is a common hazard of visibly working in open source and it's caused a lot of people to decide it's not worth being involved in a project.

> that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted Context for those who don't use Firefox on Android: the "whining" was people complaining that Mozilla had replaced a stable working product with what was clearly an inferior version, with less functionality (no addons) and less stability (this is the first version of Firefox to repeat…

I described it as whining because it was coming from people who were ranting a lot but weren't contributing to the design or development. You’re painting a somewhat dramatic depiction but even if was true there’s nothing showing that the team wasn’t genuinely trying to deal with some technical debt and make a better browser.

We still see the same dynamic on most desktop Firefox release threads here where someone will be very angry that Mozilla doesn’t let them direct development and will go strangely silent when asked how they’d deal with that problems which lead to those decisions in the first place.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#177

Post by renewiltord »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #171
renewiltord wrote: post #7

There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same. Cater to them at your own risk.

You don't think that "not wanting the GAFAMs to own the Internet" might also be a reason?

I'm sure they say that but they attack the people advocating their cause so often that I doubt it. You see, there's no range on their responses. DuckDuckGo using a favicon service without thinking about it would be as evil as Google intentionally using HTML5 Local Storage to bypass cookies.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#178

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj »

floatingatoll wrote: post #144
glsdfgkjsklfj wrote: post #75

> the constant stream of negative comments from unhappy and rude users during the work week and outside of it was extremely draining This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users ". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports fr…

No. Abusers are responsible for their abuse. This is non-negotiable. The people on the Internet chose to be abusive. That's their fault . That is never anyone else's fault, period . > the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once othe…

I did not read the article as people actively calling the maintainers names. But just showing dissatisfaction that their day-to-day work was disrupted without warning by a browser feature changing.

And arguing about actively offensive people, i agree is moot and not the point of my comment. But those will exist regardless if your project is big enough, unfortunatelly.

My comment is about people disliking (in a sociably manner) the work made by open source corporation like mozilla, and that demotivating the paid coders. That is totaly on mozilla.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#179

Post by sundarurfriend »

fireattack wrote: post #97
acdha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's her reaction _after_ a bunch of non-contributors whined that the project team was making different decisions than they wanted. This is a common hazard of visibly working in open source and it's caused a lot of people to decide it's not worth being involved in a project.

Ok, that makes sense. It's an eye-opener for me that people would do that. I can't even name a single developer for any software I use, let alone find and harass them on social media.

These people probably didn't know her either. The tweet probably got picked up by someone and retweeted in the tone of "look at this Nero playing fiddle in the bath while our browser is burning" or similar outrage, and became viral from that. Twitter is a weird medium because of things like this - it's meant to be a personal stream-of-consciousness medium which is commonly used for honest venting from a vulnerable position, but is also a public medium which makes it inherently not a safe space for such vulnerability.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#180

Post by JustSomeNobody »

ekager wrote: post #104
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are always more sides to a story, and hearing another side doesn’t mean you think whatever they have done is “okay.” > Harassing someone because one doesn't like an update to a piece of software Harassment is probably never okay butneither is directing obscene gestures at people.

Hi! Emily here! Added some more context in a footnote in the blog post about this "obscene gesture" and the harassment after the fact. TLDR: The amount of disgusting harassment I received was unbelievable and could never be justified as a reasonable reaction to an "obscene gesture"

From someone who only uses the basics that a browser has to offer (simple is better), I just wanna say, I don't mind the update. I rather like it. Thanks for the hard work.
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