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Comment by sstangl | Hacker News Reader

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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Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.

That's cool.

For others who are interested in who's the parent is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal

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.

How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?

If they scaled back their own compensation maybe it would be half of seventy? Better than inadvertently laying off someone you need I would imagine...

Is 70x a strange multiple for an executive to make? I’m sure I’ve heard stories of more.

That said, I doubt the executives at Mozilla make north of 7M

Well a bit further down Mitchell Baker is being skewered for making $2,500,000 annually. I'd assume that the multiplier at Mozilla is much, much lower than 70x.

Hardly any executive is just getting paid 7m in cash. They are typically paid in financial instruments that are time locked for several years. The media however, will go bananas on reporting about how they are paid crazy amounts when these instruments are finally unlocked, ignoring the tax implications, the lack liquidity and massive risk involved, and also just how much the rest of the market has increased during the time period of those instruments being locked.

When you pay yours executives a modest amount using such a method, it's often very feasible for this to be a massive windfall at the time of maturity (e.g. $1 options becoming $6, etc.).

Mozilla has no equity so they make up for it in cash.. well for executives mainly. This makes for lofty salaries

For a single executive yes. But all of them combined could add up to 70x

Mozilla has way too many VP and above employees that are useless (check what the once VP engineering, then interim CTO, then fellow is actually doing for instance). They should let go a few, but as far as I know, none has been fired. Gotta keep getting twice the bonus percentage as regular ICs...

You mean ekr yea? I don't know what he's doing either or why he's been promoted along the way. Nobody really knows.

No, not ekr. There's much worse.

Many corporate leaders are Peters at work [1]

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

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.

Just because they might have made excellent middle managers at some point in time does not mean that they would be any good at being executives.

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.

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.

You are introducing a change of “field” where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle talks only of skills from lower level position being insufficient for competency at higher level. No change of field in the standard definition. I’ve read about, heard, and used the PP for decades without any change of field or tech vs mgmt being required to use the phrase correctly. It may be that higher level management requires training in a different field from lower, but in many firms it does not exclude promotion from below. Some of the best CEOs confound the PP to rise from the ranks.

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.

Can give some examples or do you know of any blog posts, books etc that talk about this in more detail?

Through the bank my experience is that a technical background with someone growing into a leadership role ultimately creates better results. People whose only skill is "leadership" tend to perform pretty badly.

But the Peter principle, doubtful if it even can be taken seriously, doesn't say anything about this specifically.

I don't know anything about Eich, but I don't really see how he would have been bad for Mozilla as a CEO. He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.

All that aside, that the execs at Mozilla get millions and they still lay off 70 people is bad leadership. Really, really bad leadership. And the recent focus seem to underline that failure in my opinion.

Mozilla has done incredible things for the net and technology. Sadly, I think this is subject to change.

Surely the Mozilla execs don't take millions? And beg for charity??

I know Mozilla Corp/Org are technically split, but if one head of Cerberus ate all the food surely it doesn't still need feeding.

they do take millions. the money they take is basically from Google's search deal (thought technically a few other sources too).

The money you donate only goes to the foundation, which does not pay the exec, so any donation does not actually go to exec. The donations are required for the foundation to function at all, regardless of how well the corporation does.

to be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a hack though, because really mozilla functions 100% like a corporation even if they had a real foundation inside. its just a way to ensure that the board is Mitchell Baker - not a bunch of people who want the company to profit. this has good and bad sides, and right now we're definitely seeing the bad sides: exec get paid 800k to 2500k (Mitchell), senior devs get fired for making - i bet, 100k to 300k.

foundations are made to be places where you make the world a better place without having the "i want to make money" motto and that's not what Mozilla does. Mozilla wants money to pay execs and keep on surviving. Many other foundations have similar hacks (or arguably, scams!). The other advantage is that the foundation side does not pay tax of course.

> He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.

As far as I know, he never expressed what his “views” were. People just found he donated $1000 (which was .002% of the total funds raised) towards a proposition opposing same-sex marriage. There didn’t seem to be anyone who had worked with him, regardless of orientation, who felt uncomfortable with him, or were even aware of it. His contributions having an effect were gated by a democratic vote, and his financial contribution was so small that I can’t imagine it having a substantial effect on the outcome.

To me the fact that he had the maturity to restrict his political discourse to the same means available to any other voter, to his private life, and was discreet enough that nobody knew about it for years, made him look better. Mozilla is supposed to be making the internet accessible to everybody, even people who hold conflicting views.

The quote comes to mind:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Thanks. Today i learn something new

> for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.

>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

What's the alternative? Google? Not really better even if this disappoints about Mozilla.

Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent Mozilla's.

But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.

Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

You know better than anybody the size of the task of rolling a homemade engine. Is this some vaporware promise or does Brave already started something around this idea?

Not Brendan, but I don't think anyone doubts that Brave would break from the Chromium homogeneity if it were practical to do so.

Production-quality browser engines are not basement projects. Even Google waited until they were the big kid on the block to undertake the project. Per Wired at [0]:

> "The browser matters," CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. "When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, 'We should build our own browser,'" Schmidt says. "And I said no."

> It wasn't the right time, Schmidt told them. "I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war," he says.

Piggy-backing on Google's engine for the time being is effectively turning the Goliath's momentum against itself. If Brave gets a sustainable revenue model and good-enough market penetration, I'd have every expectation that they'd feel liberated to take more direct control over the platform.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2008/09/mf-chrome/

May be in the future web will be simpler?

My theory: browser of the future will need to support wasm and webgl (well, not webgl, but something similar, providing fast and safe interface for GPU). Of course along with smaller standards like fetch api, but that's manageable.

Most of the useful websites will utilize those tech to build their UI from scratch without using of HTML, CSS or JS.

And HTML, CSS and JS engines could be just another wasm blob. For example parts of chromium engine adapted and compiled for wasm. So it's like jQuery.

That just sounds terrible for both SEO and accessibility.

I'm not sure "chart our own engine course" necessarily means "roll our own engine".

The more influence Google gets over the web standards, the more they will steer it in order to raise the barrier of entry for web engine makers. It will also get them more and more power over what can be commercially viable on the web. Making it easier for them to set the rules for everyone on the web seems directly detrimental to your business. As time passes by for Brave to became "big enough" (supposedly to develop a 2020 state of the art web engine), the complexity of starting a new engine from scratch would continue to grow.

It seems that keeping Gecko up to date with the web standards is the only way to have an concurrent implementation for mid-term. This will get more and more difficult to do the more marketshare Blink gets, since it gets easier for Google to shoehorn whatever they want in the web standards by first making it a "de-facto" standard by implementing it in Blink.

This happens already, e.g. AirBnB deploys new content that breaks in Firefox (perhaps not totally; could be cosmetic or a corner case). Webdevs do not test in low share browsers.

Find "slow forking" elsewhere to see my response to your concern that we would have to make an entirely new engine from scratch this year or next. That's not the threat. We strip out Google tracking already and work in W3C to keep them from jamming premature standards through -- if they try turning any such on without other browsers agreeing, we will disable.

To stay in the martialistic metaphor: In this fight you merely wield the weapons your opponent forges for you. If Google decides to dull your edge in the fight for privacy, you have little influence to sharpen it again.

The only reason you are even able to fight this battle is because of the existance of Firefox. All of the Chrome based browsers are toothless tigers without Mozilla.

I am a for-real founder of Mozilla so spare me. I poured 16 years into it, including a bunch of coding as well as recruiting key talent, managing, and strategic decision making. We restarted the browser market when conventional wisdom said it could not be done. This enabled us to restart web standards (WHATWG => HTML5, ECMA-262 new editions). We did that (not you, unless I know you from old days).

But Google is a monopoly now and has tied its browser to its other products to take over adjacent markets, or buy other companies that pioneered such markets. Mozilla depends on Google for most of its revenue, and on a declining (traffic) basis. Reality requires acknowledging my and others work on Mozilla but not dying on that nostalgic hill. Especially not with such arrant mismanagement as is going on there now.

I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.

PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.

Brave isn’t making an OS or network (yet), but the browser is still critical, to the degree that bigs spend billions on their own, and now privacy law and user blocking demand are reshaping the $330B+ online ad ecosystem. That is a good place to start fighting for the user, imho.

"User" is a perfect encapsulation of the mindset we need to leave behind. For the people who use web browsers, Google's ad tracking is the least of their worries. Here's Schneier:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/facial-recognitio...

Oh come on -- that was a Tron ref and no offense to the clueful (which includes people on HN).

If you want to boil the ocean before helping people in an important segment of the population, good luck. Or were you just being defeatist?

On FirefoxOS, of course gal cjones shaver & I launched it (not quite with all the other execs on board) to address the next billion internet users. I’m glad it worked out but sorry the place and name are KaiOSTech — it was Mozilla’s to see through but they faded.

On engine futures, slow forking works, that is how chromium/Blink emerged from from WebKit. New engines taking lots of capital may happen, probably when there is a massive Bell’s Law device class shift. To argue for others without deep pockets dying on the last war’s hill is to wish those others ill (whether you mean it or not). Users deserve better browsers, and the big user value fight is truly a level up from the engine.

Privacy is not using Google's engine.

I would have given Brave a more serious try if it weren't for that.

(although I very much dislike the payment system, presented as an alternative to the tracking privacy nightmare the web has become. I'm not paying for the difference, that's ridiculous. I saw what they did to the web, I'm not paying to keep them away)

Engines do not by themselves raid user privacy, and we strip out front end and middleware tracking from chromium/Blink. See https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-....

You have “who pays” exactly backwards about optional Brave Rewards in your closing parenthetical. We pay you, we do not make you pay.

There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.

Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.

Both run the Chrome engine! That's not an alternative. You really want all available browsers run the same engine, and one that is developed by Google?? You realize they are at step two of "embrace extend extinguish", right? And you realize that by showing their cards with AMP, they totally aren't above actually doing it too?

What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.

>I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla.

Even if it did, what can we do?

Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.

Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.

Completely agree, but do we have to root for Mozilla if we want to root for Firefox?

I'm not sure what your question is, there's all sorts of uninteresting complications to the trademarks on the name "Firefox" and how Mozilla deals with it.

i don't know what they do for money, but i suppose it's not giving away free internet browsers. so it might have something to do with that.

Search revenue share deals, mainly with Google.

Thanks. Although it doesn't really clear up the mystery of what that workforce of theirs is doing.

Look at the majority of the titles under https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/.

Interestingly this appears like the same misconception and misdirection that lets people be deluded by their idea of "science".

A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.

Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to you.

A fairly large number of managers have been laid off too.

And also a VP

We have many job openings at SpaceX for senior software engineers, please do apply! https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5...

Just curious, what is the breakdown of "classes" of people layed off.

By which I mean developers vs managers vs other assorted e.g. "tech evangelists" or whatever it's called.

Friendly tip: maybe put your contact info in your HN profile?

Oh, thank you! I added it.

We... like SpiderMonkey very much. Contact in profile ;)

Oh lol, almost forgot about your terminal stack.

> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.

Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.

Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult.

The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.

Sorry for question, but will you continue work on adopt it to Rust?

There's also https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe

Could you be a match for https://eos.io/news/eos-virtual-machine-a-high-performance-b... ?

LUNA (http://luna-lang.org) - write to us! :)

I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)

In case anyone is interested, here is a more formal description of positions we are looking for: https://github.com/luna/hiring

Are you guys moving away from haskell?

Scala apparently

Kraken is hiring Senior SW Engineers with extensive Rust experience for our backend services team. The team is remote. Check out the link below to apply or get in touch at leon at kraken dot com

https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...

If you’re interested in non-compiler, HPC Rust work reach out at bernardo at standard dot ai

How many people are left working on Cranelift?

Igalia are hiring for WebKit and related work:

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

Your experience seems like it would be great for embedded flight software development. Please email tyler.butler at lmco.com if you or others in your situation would be interested in working on NASA's Orion program.

GitHub is hiring, we have quite a few roles posted, and many more opening... https://github.com/about/careers

Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to pascal.paillier@zama.ai.

That’s terrible, really sorry that happened to you. The good news is that you have an extraordinarily rare and valuable skill set as a compiler eng

sorry this happened to you.

Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees. That seems like it should be profitable.

Your number is high, estimating from user population and search revenue share market rates.

Facebook is definitely looking for folks with compiler experience. Feel free to reach out at dannyz [at] fb

If you're interested in language runtime work (in C++) e-mail arseny at roblox.com

Shot me an email at julien at serpapi.com.

Is Dan still there?

I spoke to Dan to let him know that I'll need to hand off my work, and he didn't mention anything. So I assume he is.

At this point I don't know who was affected.

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