Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Lifeboat

mozillalifeboat.com

121–130 of 336 posts

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#121
post #7

Thank you to the MDN and Servo teams for all their hard work. I wish you well for the future and hope you find a new gig soon.

How do you know which teams were laid off? I haven’t been able to find that information.

An employee tweeted that the whole servo and security teams were axed.

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'revenue' from Firefox was never enough. It's only really just struck me that of course Google funding them made a dependency and 1) made the company grow beyond its needs, and 2) made it not seek self-sufficiency. If Google are stopping the money then FF is like a person with no money taken in by Google and hooked on drugs; once they're kicked out they can't fund the habit and reliance on Google has meant they've no…

>'revenue' from Firefox was never enough I mean I'm looking at the leadership page and all I can ask myself is do you need to pay that many executives just to build a web browser? I'd be fascinated to know how much it costs Apple to develop Safari, a browser multiple times more successful than Firefox judging by Wikipedia. Just a hunch but I'd bet money it's a fraction of the cost of running this bloated pseudo-chari…

yes. if there was someone like Stallman (for all its flaws he seemed to not have waste money on random capitalistic ventures) coming up and forking it, when it finally goes under, I'm happy to pitch in my 5$/month. If it's a charity for god knows what and includes a sizeable PR department: well....

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#123

It's very weird that Mozilla is laying off 25% of its workforce while at the same time spending oodles of cash on its Fix The Internet incubator. I'm not a business major; maybe this is normal.

I don't know the details, but the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation have different budgets and legally have to spend the money on different things (since the Foundation is a non-profit). They can't just move money around like a normal company can.

The corporation can spend money on whatever the hell. That's why they set it up.

You can infer from the foundation tax returns that most of the assets are held by the corporation: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...

It's the assets held directly by the foundation that have implications for their tax status, and they only move assets to that status as necessary.

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#124
post #8

Given how different their missions are, I'm surprised to see Facebook on this list.

The CTO of FB is an ex-Mozillian. There are quite a few ex-Mozillians here, including myself. Despite Mozilla's public posture that FB is enemy #1, the internal technical culture is more similar than different.

What about the ethics culture?

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#125
post #45

I hope the formerly Mozilla employees all find roles quickly, but I suspect that well more than 250 employees have been laid off since the beginning of the pandemic. Is there a particular reason why these layoffs need exceptional response?

I think there's two parts here: 1. These layoffs specifically get a lot of time on HN because people have strong feelings about Firefox, Mozilla's mission and the teams in particular (ie Servo, MDN). 2. Specific efforts like this site are a function of Mozilla's alumni community, which is a function of Mozilla/Firefox's culture. (Or, maybe, past culture?) So it isn't so much that the engineers laid off from Mozilla n…

Specifically, "once a Mozillian, always a Mozillian."

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#127

Element (the company from the Matrix.org core team) is super interested in providing refuge to Mozilla folks - we share the same goals of building the open web, albeit with a focus on open communication. (We'd put ourselves on the mozillalifeboat.com page, but I somehow doubt our Mozilla alumni uses FB... :D) Particular areas that may be of interest include developer documentation (making https://matrix.org/docs/spec…

The links on that page for the names appear go to github, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, so I think as long as the alumni use some online service that can serve as identity you would be able to post on the website itself. Obviously that is at your prerogative, just wanted to indicate it is not only Facebook.

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#128
Some of these are weird.

> What PartnerStack is hiring for: Infra devs, Python devs, JS devs, Product, Marketing

Yet on their actual Lever.co jobs page the only technical role is a Senior Infrastructure Engineer?

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#129
post #128

Some of these are weird. > What PartnerStack is hiring for: Infra devs, Python devs, JS devs, Product, Marketing Yet on their actual Lever.co jobs page the only technical role is a Senior Infrastructure Engineer?

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Lifeboat

#130
post #128

Some of these are weird. > What PartnerStack is hiring for: Infra devs, Python devs, JS devs, Product, Marketing Yet on their actual Lever.co jobs page the only technical role is a Senior Infrastructure Engineer?

That's the reason I added an alumni contact! Careers pages often are a lagging indicator of what jobs are available, which is where the value of a good network comes in.
Post reply on HN