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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#181

Post by epage »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #89
echelon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is perhaps the best thing to come out of any corporation in years. Protobuf, Envoy, Kubernetes, ... -- I struggle to think of anything better for our industry than Rust.

You could feel that Rust as a programming language is the greatest thing to ever happen to computer science, the big question for a corporation’s C-suite is can it make money. I’d assume (perfect possible that I’m wrong) that Rust does nothing but cost money for Mozilla. This is not to say I think it will be cancelled or force to expatriate and become a separate legal entity, but management is beholden to shareholder…

I'd go the opposite and say that Rust is a competitive edge for Firefox to beat other browsers, architecturally. There were things they tried and failed many times to do to improve Firefox's performance and it wasn't until Rust that they were achievable.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#182

Post by jimbokun »

jen20 wrote: post #37
jahlove wrote: post #26

I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?

Would you cut, say, Rust?

How many people are they paying to work on it?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#183

Post by bob33212 »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #128
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.

It would be interesting to see if the CEO bailed if her pay was cut in half. Many CEOs are not in a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. So they can walk away if you cut their pay without looking like an asshole. Then the board is stuck looking for a replacement who will accept 1.25M and the expectation that it could get cut again if the company doesn't turn around.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#184

Post by Yoric »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #150

Some of my friends are affected; does anyone have advice from experience that could help?

1. Don't panic.

2. Your worst enemy at this stage is depression/exhaustion. Sport and social life are important to keep this at bay.

3. Brush up your CV, your interview skills.

4. Organize cross-reading of CVs, simulate interviews for each other.

5. You may need to go through numerous interviews. It sucks.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#185

Post by throwaway123x2 »

dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

It's crazy how much FF's marketshare has dropped. It's such a great browser.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#186

Post by newnewpdro »

mffnbs wrote: post #161
Thaxll wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust has nothing to do with QA things since most bug are business logic / UI / UX related. QA don't test for those kind of errors.

In my experience, that’s the exact sort of errors that a QA team our position tests for.

Their comment meant that QA don't test for the kinds of errors (safety) rust protects against.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#188

Post by joshmarlow »

dullroar wrote: post #57
kevingadd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. When I worked there, the Foundation (non-profit) owned the Corporation (for-profit). If you donate to Mozilla it's going to the non-profit org.

Would be interested in hearing more about your views on this. I use Firefox and Thunderbird almost exclusively, and every time I think about donating money I then remember all the wasted time and effort they've poured into what seem to be pipe dreams over the years. I WANT them to succeed. I WANT there to be an alternative on the desktop to Chrome (now that Edge is basically rebranded Chromium), and on iOS to both Ch…

Not the person you're responding to, but my thoughts - Mozilla could be serving a role similar to academia in that doing work that's not profit based allows one to explore more widely. Those results can be shared with the community. Rust is an example and I imagine there are others.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#189

Post by shawndrost »

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…

The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profitable source of the $368 million in Foundation assets that parent cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

I understand why people are generally peeved about executive compensation, but this conversation is very rote and this is a particularly flamebait-y framing of it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#190

Post by Yoric »

tapoxi wrote: post #139
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive. So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. > Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos) This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary blob. This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there…

> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.

That's the point: competition is necessary. If Mozilla adopts Chromium, there's no competition anymore. Google can afford to make all the choices.

> [...] > If there was a healthy ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers then one vendor not playing by the rules would have limited impact.

Unless that vendor is also behind ~100% of the development, in which case nobody else gets a meaningful say.

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