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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#81
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?

Nowadays, a small team is simply not enough to develop a browser and keep up with the competition. Unless you fork Chrome, of course.

Indeed. Even Microsoft decided to give up their own browser, and they have plenty of money.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#82
post #44

Mozilla should just ship Chromium with privacy oriented features. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel and keep iterating on Gecko when its obvious there's less and less demand for it, especially when it costs them so much money. If Firefox was actually gaining share I'd feel differently, but I'd rather see Mozilla switch tech stacks than fizzle out and die.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#83
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…

I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place. I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component.…

It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#84

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#85

I find it interesting they are laying off 7% of their staff while hiring new developers. I say this as they had a job post in DC recently saying we could join their growing company. Are they growing or retracting?

Maybe it's like a controlled burn. Get rid of a bunch of low performers or those who they don't really need currently, hire quickly into what they do need.

It hasn't been my observation as a daily driver of Firefox that Mozilla needs a lot less QA.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#87
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see the compensation their board members and execs are claiming.

Because the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, this information is public, at least partially! The latest numbers are from 2018. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo... Check out page 7.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a sign for other employees that they need to focus on the things that can help Mozilla actually earn more and not just be a good guy. It may sound horrible, but considering their market share dynamics it makes sense.

Remember the PR disaster they had when they bundled Pocket?

It wasn't so much of a disaster as a poorly-considered move.

Speaking of Pocket, the Pocket you see on the fresh Firefox instance often provided me interesting, enjoyable articles. I went to sign up -- keep this good stuff coming, I thought -- to learn that Pocket demanded the social element, requiring that I link up with other Pocket users to drive my feed. Yet it had done a great job without that, and now had turned completely stupid.

Which of course is by design to drive engagement, and it is absolutely obnoxious. Fuck social as a trend. If the only way a network gains users is by trying to make them pitchmen to other people, the network should die.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#89
post #60
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you cut, say, Rust?

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 shareholders, not the tech community at large.

And yes I know that Rust does receive some corporate funding from other entities, but it is still a Mozilla product.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#90

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…

>is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company

Change the number and this will apply to most CEOs.

https://www.glassdoor.com/research/ceo-pay-ratio/

According to these numbers, CEOs work 204 times as hard as regular employees.

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