Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful.

When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance.

I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.

Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?

The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.

Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.

Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job? How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?

Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?

What a sad waste.

So, I don't really know the context of the stuff you're writing about, if you would please indulge me...

> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion.

I honestly am not aware much of that.

> FirefoxOS anyone?

I can't tell if you're unhappy they started that project or unhappy they stopped it. I'm guessing you're unhappy, so I'm going to go along with the guys that were involved on that project for the rest of your post.

I am curious though, since you seem to know so much about Mozilla driving itself into the ground, do you know the resources that were spent on FirefoxOS?

> The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.

I know that Andreas Gal was disliked, but how was he unskilled and what did his position have to do with the nature you're speaking of?

> Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.

How did you asses that Andreas Gal was under qualified and under performing?

> Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job?

Mitchell Baker is one of the oldest closely related employees to Netscape, Mozilla etc. She is very much the original culture of company. Her particular focus is the overall business aspect of operating the organisation rather than the technical. The technical work would have been people like Andreas Gal.

> How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?

That's not her sallary, that comes from compensation. Compensation is based on looking at what other similarly sized companies, usually in the same sector are paying based on similarly skilled people. Companies do not want to lose their CEOs etc. What might suprise you is that she's being paid at the lower end of the scale, and this is because she's a CEO sourced internally.

If Mozilla were to replace her with an external CEO, they would likely end up needing to pay vastly more. The compenstion paid is usually pegged to performance. While the company might have not done well as a whole, there are likely things this person has navgiated the company through that you did not see? But, if you did, please share.

> Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?

Mozilla is following a common technique to help bring stability to the company when one or more revenue stream starts struggling or drying up -- It is diversifying income. Mozilla appears to be a very R&D sort of company, so they seem to be doing what you see companies like Microsoft Garage or Alphabet do and try to create their own 'start ups' without the company bit to try to innovate new products. Hence where FirefoxOS came from.

Many people originally scoffed at the idea of Apple doing a phone.

Honestly, and I mean this with full sincerity, your response is exactly the point.

You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.

Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.

Mozilla without Firefox is dead. Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue. Zero. It was and is a giant waste of time.

And so here we are. Years wasted on what could have been real honest and creative attempts at monetization from competent leadership. They had 10 years to figure it out. Instead they played with whatever new shiny toy fell in front of them.

It would be a hilarious joke if it wasn’t so sad.