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Comment by 72deluxe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it is not so much "the cult of the free" as "the art of directionless misspending". Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.

Also, from the list of jobs laid off there are some jobs that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development:

Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager, Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality, Global Event Maker, Senior University Recruiter, Senior Product Designer + Growth, Staff Business Strategist, Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Senior Executive Assistant, Brand Designer.

I am not even sure what some of those jobs involve! Some even sound like invented jobs to me.

I mean, is a "brand designer" someone who actually draws graphics or is it just someone who thinks what the "brand" should involve? ie. The Web, a browser.

Education welcomed.

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> Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager

Staff recruitment and retention roles.

> Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality

Easily mockable since it has "strategic" in it twice, but ultimately this role should either get money into FF or get FF into more platforms. Focus on mixed reality / AR seems questionable in retrospect.

> Global Event Maker

Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.

> Senior University Recruiter

Fairly obvious: recruit graduates from universities.

> Senior Product Designer + Growth

This actually sounds pretty core; someone has to define the product, and I don't think you really want that left to the forums.

> Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Brand Designer

That may be one or two many designers, resulting in unnecessary UI churn.

> Senior Executive Assistant

Everywhere has one of these. PA to the boss. They tend to be surprisingly critical since they know what's going on even if they don't have formal responsibility.

> > Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager

> Staff recruitment and retention roles.

More like the exact opposite: annoy your staff with superficial stuff.

If you look at the Mozilla events page, in the past few years they've held a huge amount of dev events/user groups/outreach outside of Europe and North America. I would expect that someone there was working to make sure they were connecting and recruiting devs globally.

And I can see why, when you had Facebook pushing their walled garden with WhatsApp and Internet.org in various spots in Africa and India. Mozilla was all about an open global internet.

You don’t think those are important?

Needing D&I simply means the company and its employees did not self-regulate. And not needing one doesn't mean you don't care or it's not important, just that you don't need one. You're probably not brushing your teeth right now and it's not because you don't think oral hygiene is important.

If you're one of the people who don't need to be educated then D&I is an annoyance. If you're one of the ones who do then D&I is an annoyance. And unfortunately many times it's more than just an annoyance, it makes matters worse by polarizing or radicalizing people further.

You don't necessarily need a function like this to fix a behavior. You don't need a Basic Human Decency Lead to achieve this in your company. You instill it with education starting at a young age, and then you filter for this at every step of the way, including via interviews, promotions, etc.

But if it's one of those companies they probably couldn't care less about D&I, whatever they have works just fine for them. They want to look like they care so they proudly announce such functions and measures. All the while the people responsible for being in that situation in the first place still hang around, working just a bit harder to do the same things they always did and make it look legit this time. That's usually the role of D&I, shielding the company from responsibility while not actually changing much, if anything.

Important as topics some people need to keep in the back of their minds while doing their jobs? Important as full time roles that are inherently out-of-hierarchy so that they conveniently need paycheck-induced status or else nobody will listen to them? Those are very different kinds of "important".

Most people don't care about D&I. Neither for or against, just an annoyance.

Can you give more of a reason why "most" people don't care about it? Why would inclusion be an annoyance?

Because "diversity offenses" typically happens against minorities, which definitionally aren't most people. It's also a questionable use of funds in that the places that would hire one are probably less likely to need it. But treating everyone well and handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient; a diversity and inclusion staff has become the requisite "Workers of the world, unite!" sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

Add to this that most people don't like being preached at not to be racist etc. when most already aren't.

Okay so I am a bit more confused now. You are comparing being told about diversity and inclusion in the workplace to communism?

> handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient

I am almost certain most of these "diversity and inclusion staff" you speak of are part of HR, so yes, it is still normal.

I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?

> I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?

To me, that's not life, that's being micro-managed or treated like a child. I'd never want to work somewhere that treats employees like that.

Do you throw your hands in the air every time your lead reminds you of a due date you already knew? Do you skip "meetings that could have been emails"? I have yet to find a place that doesn't tell me something I already know or hold on my hand on some minor things. I just go about it, being upset over it isn't worth my time.

No, but were it a regular problem, I'd absolutely bring up that it's likely an annoyance and a productivity hit for most people and a good manager would try to help fix the issue.

No, I'm trying to draw an analogy. Companies over the past few years have been expected to vocally articulate a commitment to a certain set of social values. This typically involves hiring diversity staff, mandatory training, letters of solidarity, etc. The mission of the corporation is still to make money, just as is the mission of a greengrocer.

> isn't that life in general

Sure, it still happens, but if it happens repeatedly in the workplace, I might try to reduce it. I also sincerely doubt that a terrible racist person will stop being one because his company implements mandatory diversity training.

This sorts of stuff is very often experienced by staff as lame box-ticking exercises they have to suffer through annually or quarterly, put together by people who spend most of the time keeping their chair from floating to the ceiling, and were only hired to make things look better if anything bad happens ("well look, we did something, look at all these records of training videos and ridiculous quizzes we made everyone take!")

That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.

How are you so sure this version of it so rampant everywhere? I am genuinely curious why so many people state this is such a common occurrence yet I have yet to see it myself personally.

You may not have worked at or know many people who work at sufficiently boring workplaces. It's the default at those, and that's... most workplaces, among the ones big enough to have this kind of thing.

"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.

I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.

> Most people don't care about D&I.

Maybe, but:

> Neither for or against, just an annoyance.

Viewing it as an annoyance is both “against” and very much not an example of not caring.

I'm not saying this is your actual motivation, but it kind of comes across as a clumsy attempt of someone hostile to the idea to try to get people in favor to back off by conjuring an image of the maligned neutral that they think those in favor will be more sympathetic to than actual opponents, but failing to be able to even imagine what neutrality would look like when presenting the argument.

When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.

If you think diversity and inclusion is "an annoyance", then you clearly aren't "neither for or against"

Sibling comment:

> When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.

Or in many cases, it's annoying your staff with anti-white racism under the guise of being pro-diversity.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am confused, how is pro-diversity immediately categorized as anti-white? Are you just assuming every pro-diversity initiative is anti-white?

I don’t want to jump into this particular garbage fire, but the answer to your second question (and implicitly your first) is in the post you’re responding to.

> Staff recruitment and retention roles.

The irony being that they themselves were made redundant.

How will they possibly keep all the other staff now??

It’s pretty weird how the browser took off (and IMO was at its best) before most (all?) of these roles were involved, isn’t it?

> Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.

The main one was the Mozilla Festival, but I believe it also organized various smaller sibling events, hackathons, etc.

I find it somewhat off-putting that you would declare a bunch of standard tech industry jobs to be "superfluous", while at the same time admitting that you have no concept of what these roles even entail.

>you would declare a bunch of standard tech industry jobs to be "superfluous",

It looks like you're misquoting GP. Unless they edited it later and I didn't notice... the commenter said, "_seems_ superflous" not "_are_ superfluous". They said they were willing to be educated on what those roles did.

It feels awkward having to spell this out: Throwing a "seems" into a sentence, and ending with "but I am willing to be educated" doesn't make whatever precedes it innocuous.

Don't share if you know (and admit) that you have no idea what you are talking about. If all you want to do is learn, ask. Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.

Also you might take offense in my interpretation of what has been written but I did not misquote anything.

>It feels awkward having to spell this out: Throwing a "seems" into a sentence, and ending with "but I am willing to be educated" doesn't make whatever precedes it innocuous.

Yes, I'm aware of the rhetorical technique of the "question that's actually a veiled insult". E.g. "Why does Facebook/Airbnb/Dropbox have all those thousands of programmers?!? What do they all do?!?" ... are often not really sincere questions but really a humblebrag of commenter saying, "I can code a Facebook clone over the weekend with one hand tied behind my back...yada yada yada"

I hope my example above shows the we both have a shared understanding of unstated but implied messages in what people write. That said, I still think it's a more productive discussion to try to answer the question the way pjc50 did[1] rather than the retaliatory criticism of your reply.

>Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.

Well, those "ignorant assumptions" was (for several hours) the top-voted comment in this thread so it seems that many are interested in it. (I'm using "seems" in a sincere way.)

If you think it's unproductive to try to answer the commenter's question because you believe they were only trolling Mozilla, consider reframing it as "educating all the lurkers who upvoted that comment". The silent lurkers may have sincere curiosity about what all those roles actually do even if the commenter you responded to does not.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142700

How do you think this makes it at all better? This "I only said you 'seem' like an <expletive>. That wasn't an insult." is something not even preschool children would be fooled by.

I think we should assume the most charitable interpretation, unless we all want to sound like angry old men. Keeps interaction pleasant in spite of anonymity.

eh? the interaction itself was pleasant. the bikeshedding OTOH ...

Read the next words as well. that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development. It wasn't claimed that "no company should ever have those jobs", just that they don't really seem central to browser development.

Thanks. I did not edit it. I did indeed state that they "seemed superfluous" and that I am willing to be educated.

>Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.

Mozilla isn't just about the browser. It's about free and open internet. So of course they should be involved in authentication, search, messaging (mail, chat, and video), and secure dns. But they don't do any of those projects any more so whatever.

> Mozilla isn't just about the browser. It's about free and open internet.

Which is contradictory with what they have actually been doing for a decade, which is pushing, pushing and pushing again for Web-everything and everything-Web everywhere.

Even the items you list after, in Mozilla strategy, were meant be implemented inside and around a single piece of tech: a Web browser, over a single protocol (HTTP(S)); also replacing classical libraries with Web-tech (that's now new since the interface of their products has always been based on some form of it, but they kept on pushing the pedal of webisation).

Man... Mozilla could've been it's own Google if they wanted to be. Maybe they even would've had the clout to produce a privacy friendly ad network. What a wasted opportunity.

> privacy friendly ad network

Given that the ad industry is filled by the kind of people who are vocally hostile to privacy (especially when it comes to "targeting ads"), this is a product without a market.

Not really. Mozilla desperately needs a market to make money, and consumers desperately need privacy preserving ad technology so creators don't sink under a lack of funding. The advertisers won't really care since fraud/bad clicks/bad data will just get priced into the bid anyway. Ad fraud is only bad for ad dashboards.

I'm not sure what you're saying. I've (sadly) worked with and met many adtech professionals over the years and they are just not the kind of people who would go in for more privacy.

adtech is a big area. It's not clear who you're talking about. People who sell ads? People who buy ads? People who make the networks?

AIUI, web sites that host ads probably want the ads to be shown so they can get their money. And people who buy ad space probably want the ads to be shown so they can market their product or service. And maybe the ads will be shown if users white list ad networks that respect privacy.

> Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser.

Do you have some examples of this? Also, their mission is beyond the browser:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." [0]

I've said it before but I'll say it again since it's relevant:

The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its monthly active users go down by ~6% in the last 12 months [1]. I think Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all". The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

[1] 222M MAU in Aug. 2019 and 209M MAU as of Aug. 2, 2020 https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people." https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

How am I "empowered" on the Internet? If I do not use Mozilla products, am I powerless when I use the Internet? Are all Apple iPhone users powerless?

Can I no longer "shape my own experience" if I use an iPhone with Safari?

If I use Mozilla products, do I get given richer webpages where my experience is modifiable by me? If not, how do I "shape" my experience??

The mission statement is vague, which seems to have translated into liberal spending.

> Are all Apple iPhone users powerless?

Can they run a browser which does not work by embedding safari? Can they run another browser which runs JS in JIT mode?

> Can I no longer "shape my own experience" if I use an iPhone with Safari?

Until relatively recently, the answer was "no". And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed and people kept raising this as an issue with both default iPhone and Android browsers. Neither Safari nor Chrome allowed custom ad and trackers blocking.

Right because little companies like Google have a hard time breaking through the noise since no one goes to their web page....

Safari on iOS does in fact allow ad blockers and has for five years.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make regarding Google. Sarcasm doesn't help with readability here.

I explicitly mentioned custom ad/tracker blocking because the ad blocking provided by iOS Safari was pretty simplistic. You couldn't block specific cookies, div on a page, or other behaviours as far as I understand.

Yes you can block a div.

If I care about my privacy, why would I want a third party app to have complete access to my browsing history? That’s the problem solved by iOS’s framework. The third party ad blocker has no visibility into your browsing history.

Safari is increasingly making it difficult for third party tracking cookies.

And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed

So it look like you thought that Mozilla who no one outside of geek circles no exist, had more to do with people wanting third party browsers as the default than Google.

> Mozilla who no one outside of geek circles no exist

Let me remind you that 5 years ago FF had ~20% usage on the desktop. It was a commonly known name and even more popular at homes if you remove the enterprise usage.

So if we go back 5 years and exclude the enterprise and exclude mobile devices where the majority of web traffic comes from - Mozilla is relevant?

5 years is ago is when the mentioned adblocking was added. Enterprise use is different because people normally don't have influence over that, but home use is actually their real choice.

Desktop, because ff mobile didn't really exist yet, so mobile segment is not really relevant for comparison.

You really think Apple added ad blocking to mobile because of Firefox?

Depends on what you mean by "because of". Adblocking became really popular with the adblock extension. When it was released it was a FF extension, because other browsers didn't really have the same functionality / ecosystem available. So in a sense Mozilla enabled adblock to become popular and something that people know about/want. I'm sure Apple didn't say "FF had it so we have to". Instead, Mozilla/FF enabled the ecosystem years ago, where adblocking became both possible and popular, leading to inclusion in iOS.

Actually, no.

Apple’s method of ad blocking - having a JSON file that gives the browser engine rules is relatively browser intensive - at least in regards to what mobile processors could do during the iOS 8 era. Apple didn’t even support it on 32 bit phones that did run iOS 8.

Apple could have only shipped it two years sooner for iOS. iOS 8 was the second version of iOS that supported 64 bit processor.

> Actually, no.

No... what? Not sure what you're disagreeing with.

Apple didn’t just come up with the idea of ad blocking because of Firefox. Apple couldn’t implement the form of ad blocking that Safari uses on its mobile processors and still keep Safari performant before the iOS 8/iPhone 6 era. You could tell the performance difference on the iPhone 5s (the first 64 bit iPhone). They didn’t even support it on 32 bit phones.

While I agree with your last sentence to some extent, I do believe that having a vibrant, viable Mozilla does serve to empower Internet users in a somewhat similar way as the GPL does.

Linux and other GPL software I believe has served as a viable alternative to closed/walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem (and I say that from my Macbook with my iPhone and iPad close at hand). Every time we lament the issues of loss of user power in walled gardens, I think it's substantially true that "it could be even worse" if there were no countervailing forces, like Mozilla.

This is a good point. I am just not a huge fan of the vague mission statement.

If your mission statement is too concrete, it can actively prevent you from looking at opportunities.

Mission statements are like a wind in the sails of the corporation. It doesn't replace the role of the rudder (that's the job of the C level leaders), but it does lead you in a particular direction.

Making Firefox more like Chrome is one reason their user share has fallen off a cliff.

> Also, their mission is beyond the browser:

Yes, that's the problem. Mozilla was Netscape++ and was pretty darn good at it until their ‘leadership’ lost interest.

I mean, someone has to come up with "moz://a".

It's cute, to be sure, but it felt like kind of a slap in the face when I saw that rebrand logo front and center on the blog post about Mozilla laying off 250 staff.

That logo was launched 3 years ago

Never let reality spoil a good selective-memory-based rant.

Yes, and it is an icon of the priorities that got them in this mess.

I lean more to setup nonprofits like Mozilla as Cooperatives, that way it will attract less the wrong kind of people (execs aiming to get millions of dollars in comps) and the money can be shared among the people doing the grinding.

I don't get the heartbreak over Mozilla, the only people I know who use Mozilla products are tech enthusiasts and people who would fall into the political spectrum of "cyber activist". It's not sad when an org that ignored the bulk of users to chase idealism finds itself beaten out by corps that decided to focus on giving users what they want.

> the list of jobs laid off

Where is it? I've seen in other posts that real developers (even "almost all Servo team") were laid off?

Overwhelming sentiment seems to be the opinion that Mozilla should be focusing on Firefox but at the same time raising vague concerns about Servo being cut. Servo was an R&D project that fulfilled its purpose with respect to Firefox.

I browsed the list on mozillalifeboat.com; there's a discussion on here about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032

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