Mozilla lays off 70

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 Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision

edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.

From the 2018 State of Mozilla annual report: With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

I don't know why, but for some reason, I was thinking there were about 600 of them. Thanks for the link, I've edited my comment.

I'm surprised they're laying off security and QA, considering how focused on privacy and security their marketing campaign seems to be. In the last 6 months, I think 90% of cases where I saw Mozilla mentioned were about how it's the 'hot new browser' for the privacy-concerned. Although, perhaps, that's more to do with a good marketing team and less with a sprawling security department? Would love to see some expert opinion on what this means for the company's current trajectory.

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.

See: stack ranking

Perhaps Rust is delivering better than expected results.

Only a tiny part of Firefox is in Rust now.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components .

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.

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. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.

I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.

They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.

Note, the fatal mistake in Microsoft’s case was not laying off the bottom 5%, it was laying off the bottom ranked people WITHIN small groups, even if said groups were doing very well.

If you’re going to lay off the bottom x% every n period of time, it might be fine. But you’d better be damn sure your metrics are good (sales comes to mind though even then there’s a lot of ambiguity). If you’re dropping the weakest performer in groups you’re not only going to create the most toxic environment ever, you’re going to lay off plenty who are probably middle of the bell curve.

Microsoft’s plan was, in addition to being unwise, just poorly reasoned statistically.

Totally, I'd be a lot happier if they cut efforts on the branding side of things and strengthen the technical one.

it also makes for a miserable work environment

The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

> 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.

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?

> 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.

Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.

The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.

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

I see a big gap in the market when it comes to self-hosted Office 365 or G Suite alternatives. Microsoft Exchange is a beast both in terms of complexity as well as licensing cost, and I think most small/medium orgs don't actually need the complexity which is why they're going towards G Suite which is a less complex product to manage.

I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.

Do Mozilla execs understand this?

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.

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.

> Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review?

Nope, because incentives are not aligned to that extent. The whole point of a company is that it's not a pure market where incentives are everything by definition; it's a rather more complex organization and these often rely on "soft" constraints as better sources of drive, guidance, cooperation/coordination etc. If you're relying on "hard" incentives (like firing the 'worst' 5% no matter what) you'll invariably distort behaviors in ways that are hard to even predict, and are almost never what you really want.

I don't think I have seen any marketing material from Mozilla. I have seen some Chrome marketing though.

They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.

I think they don't do that any more. For one thing, it was too easy to game the system by hiring lousy people as targets for the next year's firings. And if a group was all good people... you ended up firing someone anyway.

I don't want to second-guess the marketing team, as I clearly don't know all of the things I'd need to know to do that.

But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?

> The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers

Sadly, I agree.

I find it sad because I haven't personally found any modern browser that I'm happy using.

> Wouldn't doing a good job earn a good review?

If only life were that simple.

I kinda disagree, as a huge Mozilla fan. I think their technical development is fine, if not fantastic (especially for all they're doing with WebRender/Servo).

Personally I'd like to see them roll out paid privacy products. Like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. I currently pay for that, and if Mozilla rolled out a similar service across the Firefox ecosystem I'd gladly pay for that too.

Marketers are usually pretty good at selling themselves.

If this was easy to do, Office 365 and GSuite wouldn't have a lock on the market.

IBM can't even be bothered to try anymore - they sold off the carcass of Lotus a while back.

Is it though? Tesla is very light on traditional marketing, while its competitors are spending heavily.

Nothing changed. People are the same.

I've seen firefox ads in the subway in Paris. Mozilla is absolutely paying big bucks for marketing.

Tesla also has a product that basically sells itself

I thought this was an interesting take on the review process from an xoogler:

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

This is usually what people do say of successful marketing campaigns. Note, that Musk is a walking ad.

Unless they really were redundant, firing QA/Security/Release engineers strikes me as an act of desperation. Cutting back on those disciplines will really jack up the interest rate on your tech debt.

I'm not saying their development isn't fine, but they're laying off the people that support development... which will make it worse, when they're spending far in excess of that cost in marketing and imho not even getting the best value out of that space.

Which is partly why Mozilla is in a better position than most, being mainly tech and open-source at their heart. They are making enough off of search that they could create a product then sell/saas it themselves.

Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.

Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.

The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.

If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.

But this is a game they could never win, if they try to compete against google on marketing.

Where Mozilla could have the upper hand, is the idealistic community. They would do the marketing, if FF would align with their goals ... which seems to be more and more a problem.

I was really alienated when FF tried to sell me advertisement as a feature some time ago. Those moves destroy trust. "Ah, so just another bullshit company. No thanks. Why should I support them?"

But the community and people who actually love open technology, privacy and the internet and don't want to hand it all over to google, facebook and co. are still there.

> That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Why does that sound like a good demographic? Sure, cover that group, but not at the expense of the much, much larger demographic of "ordinary people".

That demographic can cut you checks with 7 digits or more.

"Ordinary people" earn you nothing unless you vacuum up their personal information.

Tesla has Musk who has become extremely popular, he's probably better than whole marketing department with good funding.

If you believe that Mozilla has no chance in the marketing game against Google, then maybe this is proof of Google's monopoly position and maybe this will convince you it is time for antitrust action against Google.

I think a lot of us came to that conclusion years ago, and that's why we want to like Firefox. Unfortunately I have not yet ascended to my rightful throne as emperor of earth, so I cannot simply snap my fingers and command the dismantling of Google.

If Mozilla were throwing resources at a legal battle against Google, I'd be skeptical but interested. But marketing? I've never seen a paid advertisement for Firefox. Where the hell is that money even going? They should have purged their entire marketing staff after that "Mr Robot" advertisement debacle, but instead there was little other than half-hearted apologies.

I started using chrome originally 10ish years ago because the company tech person said it was good and fast (I was not in tech at the time). I think you’re right.

(I use Firefox now)

Firefox got where it was by being faster and less bloated than the current alternatives at the time. Then it lost its way completely and Chrome was that and took all the market share. There’s a theme here. People like fast browsers that just work and don’t do a lot of extra crap. If Firefox ever wants to take market share this is a great time to do that with how bloated Chrome is becoming and how much privacy it constantly encroaches on. If Mozilla is smart it will figure this out and go for the kill. Is Mozilla smart? I keep trying to use Firefox and every time I go back to Chrome (or Brave or Safari on my phone) because Firefox is too slow, it changes radically every version, and things just don’t work right in it that do work on other browsers. I don’t need marketing, I just need them to make the browser better. I’m the target audience; I want to switch!

> I'm not sure why they don't (...) concentrate on community outreach from the developer side.

Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.

Firefox users don't cut checks, though. What Firefox needs is a much larger number of users. How wealthy they are isn't terribly relevant.

I seem to recall some article about their expenses a couple years ago, and that their marketing department and budget exceeded development and infrastructure combined.

Rust code integrated into a C/C++ codebase can have memory safety bugs too unfortunately.