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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I was a contributor 3 years ago and my experience with Mozilla was mixed.

On the one hand, the people are skilled and super nice and I think you do good stuff when working there.

On the other hand you work on big old software projects with all the tools that grew onto them over the years. So if you on the technical side of things, you better like maintenance work, hehe.

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...and, yes there is a legacy problem with old code bases, but one trade-off for interns, contributors, junior developers is that you get to make an impact on a codebase used in a commercial project by hundreds of millions of people. Terrible tools written in anger in 2003 are still in use, sure, and terrible architectural decisions have been made, re-made, then made again over the years. It's the kind of messy any codebase eventually gets to.

This codebase still has life in it though, and the proof is in how far Gecko has come in the last year. Go run Nightly for a bit, compare it to Chrome or current Firefox. It's a big deal.

> Terrible tools written in anger in 2003

lolwat?

Seriously, what was happening in 2003 that made Mozilla employees angry?

Nothing specific. It is being used to convey that the code was written at an emotional high or low maybe when the author was tired or under time pressure to get something that worked.

So if you on the technical side of things, you better like maintenance work, hehe.

It depends on what you work on. The Servo people feel differently ;-)

Data Platform also disagrees.

Which, by the way, we are hiring for a remote position: https://careers.mozilla.org/position/gh/734415

On the flip side, there's plenty of room for writing lots of shiny new stuff in Rust, which is a pretty unique Mozilla opportunity. :)

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