Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.

View on HN

classic story of envy driving you to be worse than that what you envy - was shocked to get to know some Mozilla folks and find out that they _fly everyone to week-long "offsites" at resorts_. Because something something gotta be competitive...

>but it should still be enough to develop a browser

Yes, but not enough to pay the management staff (whatever they do)

the American system of employment is demonstrably broken; Mozilla in SF is bound by hundreds of contradictory and expensive rules for employment, originally designed to make safety and stability for workers, that are now spaghetti-code and are routinely worked around using international channels

Is there any evidence anywhere that Mozilla's decline is caused by labor regulation?

probably not directly, no.. but the expense of employees and the pressures within management, I would expect, are a factor on why 250 responsible adults had jobs last week, but next week, they will not, in High-cost of Living SFBay Area

But they haven't said where the jobs are being eliminated and not all are coming out of the Bay ARea. The article mentions they are closing a center in Taipei. They also have a pretty distributed workforce with only part of it being in the Bay Area.

The US has a generally simple set of employment rules compared to the rest of the world. Most of which you outsource to some third party company and pay them a fixed fee per employee. The cost of employment comes from capitalistic competition for talent. Also, the fact that so many minimum wage workers exist in the US (at a minimum wage below most developed nations) is direct contradiction to your point. Employees are cheap in the US, engineers are expensive everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com