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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 3 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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falcolas ◴[15 Jan 20 20:44 UTC] No.22058292[source]▶
70 employees, at a grossly over-estimated cost of $200,000 a year each (QA "leads" would probably cost a fraction of that), would cost Mozilla about $14M to retain. They are retaining their $43M budget for blue sky research intact (per TFA).

It feels like a better compromise could have been made.

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dangwu ◴[15 Jan 20 20:50 UTC] No.22058376[source]▶
Cost per employee can be much higher than their compensation. Maybe around 25% higher.
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falcolas ◴[15 Jan 20 20:52 UTC] No.22058412[source]▶
Yes, I baked the employer tax and non-monetary compensation into the $200,000 estimation.
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dangwu ◴[15 Jan 20 21:00 UTC] No.22058513[source]▶
If most of their employees live in high COL areas like Mountain View, CA, then the 200K figure seems very fair. Maybe even low.
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1. falcolas ◴[15 Jan 20 21:07 UTC] No.22058583[source]▶
They don't appear to, however. For another response, I was looking at their 2019 financials, and for the Mozilla Foundation unit, 60 employees cost about $11M. I stand by my guesstimate of $200,000 as a high estimate.
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2. sciurus ◴[15 Jan 20 21:19 UTC] No.22058727[source]▶
I expect the foundation (which is largely non-technical) to have much lower average compensation than the corporation (which is predominately engineering-focused).
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3. falcolas ◴[15 Jan 20 21:34 UTC] No.22058929[source]▶
That 11M would, however, cover a lot of the leadership and directors, who are among the highest paid employees of the company.