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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 2 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.616s | source
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sstangl ◴[15 Jan 20 23:42 UTC] No.22060115[source]▶
I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.

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_kp6z ◴[16 Jan 20 00:22 UTC] No.22060406[source]▶
Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.
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deepaksurti ◴[16 Jan 20 03:51 UTC] No.22061537[source]▶
Many corporate leaders are Peters at work [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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klagermkii ◴[16 Jan 20 05:26 UTC] No.22061913[source]▶
I would think the Peter Principle would be better represented if there was someone who was a star on the technical side, but messed up as the CEO in a role they couldn't handle. i.e. if Brendan Eich was CEO and this happened it would be a Peter Principle moment.

All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and were then misplaced as CEO.

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BrendanEich ◴[16 Jan 20 06:50 UTC] No.22062198[source]▶
Read the link above. The Peter Principle does not require change from tech to mgmt — it simply describes promotion above one’s level of competence.
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klagermkii ◴[16 Jan 20 07:29 UTC] No.22062353[source]▶
Yes, I'm just using tech as an example. It still requires them to be excellent in any one field and then move into another field on the basis of that excellence, but then fail to have the excellence carry over to the new and different discipline.

None of these people show some kind of original standout excellence in a different field that was lost in their transition to Mozilla leadership roles.

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1. sgift ◴[16 Jan 20 07:44 UTC] No.22062423[source]▶
I think your comment falls into the same trap that Mozillas leadership probably fell into: Middle manager and top management are different, even if they look superficially the same. Not every good team lead or even department lead is a good fit for being part of a companies leadership.
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2. uxcolumbo ◴[16 Jan 20 08:18 UTC] No.22062572[source]▶
Can give some examples or do you know of any blog posts, books etc that talk about this in more detail?