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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 1 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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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ameshkov ◴[15 Jan 20 20:49 UTC] No.22058363[source]▶
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.
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Hydraulix989 ◴[15 Jan 20 20:54 UTC] No.22058439[source]▶
Remember the PR disaster they had when they bundled Pocket?
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1. endorphone ◴[15 Jan 20 21:25 UTC] No.22058829[source]▶
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.