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Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#101

Post by bduerst »

vondur wrote: post #70
petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

What I don't understand is why they chose a lawyer to run a software development company.

An open-source software development company, which is influential on web standards.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#102

Post by dman »

diegocg wrote: post #92
the_duke wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a tiny part of Firefox is in Rust now. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components .

Also, Rust code can have security bugs. Memory safety bugs are not the only kind of bugs.

Do Mozilla execs understand this?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#103

Post by Nextgrid »

stuff4ben wrote: post #11

Besides donating and the as-yet-to-be-released VPN service, how else can we support Mozilla? I don't see anything they're actually selling and I hate for stuff like this to happen.

From what I heard from other HN comments, donations don't actually go to the browser's development, instead they go to auxiliary projects of (IMO) dubious value like community outreach, etc.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#104

Post by disordinary »

raister wrote: post #10
ameshkov wrote: post #2

Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456 This is about 7% of all their employees. People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked. A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-... > In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Ba…

It was Microsoft (or other company I don't recall) that every 5 years would lay off 5% of its work force (the least capable or productive people) - this would cause those that remain to work harder next year. Then, they would open positions. Rinse and repeat.

Microsoft used to do stack ranking which puts everyone on a curve and ranks them against each other but they got rid of it when the regime at the top changed.

This sort of ruthless management is a way to destabilise the workforce and disrupt the team. What I've often found is management might cull the worst performing people but the best people follow them voluntarily because of the toxic culture, and then there's the fact that the worst performing person in the best performing team might be better than the best performing person in the worst performing team.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#105

Post by metajack »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #58
petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.

They were not the CEO until a few months ago. They aren't even Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. They are the chair of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#106

Post by nordsieck »

aaomidi wrote: post #84
EduardoBautista wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.

There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him. Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.

> There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him.

There are 2 parts to the job of CEO:

1. Sales

2. Incentive engineering (overcoming Goodhart's law)

There is very little about software development expertise that will help with either of those endeavors.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#108

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

tapoxi wrote: post #82
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is our last bastion of hope against the browser monoculture. If you think that the new browser monoculture would be any better than the previous one (IE5-6), you are horribly, horribly wrong.

I don't understand that argument, IE was a closed source browser, Chromium is BSD-licensed. If anything the closest comparison is probably the widespread use of Linux.

BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive.

Imagine this: Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos), and cites this as an excuse to close sources. Then, it starts updating it's own websites with specific code that can run properly only in new (proprietary) versions of Chrome.

Of course, outcry in tech press, but average Joe User does not care, he just needs stuff to work. Then, developers say, screw it, we just need stuff to work for users. Just like they did in 2004. This is a very crude model, reality will likely be more subtle, but I hope you get the idea

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#109

Post by kyllo »

asdasdasdasdwd wrote: post #65
walshemj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General Electric was famous for doing this is the problem is you cant keep doing it every year. Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review. I know some on at a big UK company who was bucking for a promotion and they blew through 1 Mill and 15 Man years for no good reason.

> Also people just game the system and only do what will get them a good review. Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review? This reminds me of the xkcd comic about the bots starting to have constructive messages to avoid spam filters. Mission fucking accomplished.

You get what you measure, for better or for worse.

But what tends to happen with stack ranking is that people only do what their direct manager values and rewards in the short term, and avoid other work that really needs to be done, or what the actual customer wants. Your boss becomes your only customer. You invent redundant new shit because that's more impressive than fixing your existing shit that's broken. This can be incredibly damaging to the quality of the product, and also to the careers of anyone the boss just doesn't personally like for whatever reason. It creates a monoculture of like-minded, demographically similar people who suck up and shit down.

You even can see pathological behaviors like managers purposefully recruiting low performers as sacrificial lambs to offer up at the next review time.

Companies got rid of the rank-and-yank system in the last decade or so for a very good reason.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#110

Post by _2d30 »

aaomidi wrote: post #84
EduardoBautista wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that is an unreasonable salary for the CEO of a highly influential tech company. CEO pay for other large tech companies is much higher.

There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him. Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.

than her
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