My Summer at Mozilla • Hacker News Board

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#41

Post by yeukhon » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 6:39 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #31

Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks. I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative. That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not bl…

(disclaimer: summer intern here) It doesn't matter how MOCO spends money. If no one want to bid the search engine list on Firefox, then most of the revenue will be gone and MOCO cannot operate anymore. FxOS market is not going to generate a lot of revenue at the moment. If we talk about investment, it will take at least a few years to make good revenue. And that revenue will still be really low compare to what Google, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon are paying combined.

If Google thinks they have 95% they probably can give up on us, but I don't think that day will ever come in the next 10 years. Also, while MOCO is a corporation, its mission is not to make money. MoFo came up with MOCO because MoFo members wanted to be good citizens. They wanted to pay taxes to avoid stupid tax allegation. Read Mozilla history and you will have a good laugh.

If we fail, we will restructure ourselves. You can't guarantee Google will be around forever. We just have to do what we have to do today. If we are always worrying about money, we would not be building anything. There wouldn't be any startup because half of their customers will either move on or use another service.

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#42

Post by marcamillion » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 7:06 AM UTC

eshvk wrote: post #10

I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analy…

Do you get to keep your laptop after - or do you have to give it back at the end?

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#43

Post by callahad » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 7:49 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #31

Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks. I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative. That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not bl…

You're probably over-weighting the trip to Paris, which sounds ridiculously extravagant. Fortunately, we were able to do it on the cheap since the majority of attendees were already living in or traveling through the region. The local Mozilla office which was able to host us during the workday. Opportunistic hack weeks ftw.

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#44

Post by lmartel » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 7:50 AM UTC

staunch wrote: post #31

Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks. I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative. That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not bl…

There was a great TED talk a while back about this. [1]

People talk about nonprofits being "irresponsible" when they behave like for-profit corporations: advertising, perks for engineers, whatever. And yet the for-profits do these things because they work; advertising gets sales, perks get you better engineers (and it's usually cheaper than just bumping up salaries, because macbooks are shiny). If these things don't work successful corporations will stop doing them, and if they DO work we should stop giving nonprofits shit for doing them too.

That said, your point about Mozilla in particular coming crumbling down is interesting--I'm not sure I disagree. However, if they need smart people to pull them out of the hole, offering free macbooks isn't a bad way to do it.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#45

Post by tekacs » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 7:52 AM UTC

marcamillion wrote: post #42

eshvk wrote: post #10

I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analy…

Do you get to keep your laptop after - or do you have to give it back at the end?

You get to keep it.

(source: comment below and friend who interned at Mozilla)

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#46

Post by marcamillion » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 8:08 AM UTC

tekacs wrote: post #45

marcamillion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you get to keep your laptop after - or do you have to give it back at the end?

You get to keep it. (source: comment below and friend who interned at Mozilla)

That's hella cool.

This post makes me want to work at Mozilla!

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#47

Post by AYBABTME » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 9:01 AM UTC

ryanseys wrote: post #21

AYBABTME wrote: post #20

Cool to see you had fun this summer, now you can come back and give a talk about things you worked on at our Ottawa Ruby/JS meetups!

I'll be back in January to do just that!

Ah, I'll be gone in January =S

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#48

Post by gerv » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 9:14 AM UTC

frewsxcv wrote: post #13

eshvk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure where you are going off on the parent post. Also, I don't particularly know what you mean by "exceptional job". However, let me describe a few thoughts I had whilst there (not the submitter). 1. Mozilla's mission is just as important as random company making the pipes more efficient for sending cat/twerking/whatever videos. They are a non-profit and are operated as such. 2. They have some incredibly int…

RE point 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

As that article points out, the Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation and therefore shares its public benefit purpose.

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#49

Post by zobzu » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 9:45 AM UTC

st3fan wrote: post #17

iblaine wrote: post #16

Seems like there is a growing trend by tech companies to spoil interns with the hope of improving HR. This is great and by all means take advantage of it.

Interns are not spoiled. They are simply treated like any other regular employee. I am not sure what you mean with 'improving HR'. Did you mean 'PR' ? Because Mozilla's HR department is doing a pretty great job.

I don't think regular employes get to keep their laptops :)

Re: My Summer at Mozilla

#50

Post by shrikant » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 10:24 AM UTC

eshvk wrote: post #10

I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analy…

Clearly they take that sort of thing seriously - they're hiring for a "Privacy Technologist": https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oJOkXfwy