Just because a company’s mission is positive or aligns with ones values does not mean the company itself is good or is actually carrying that mission out.
I am also always surprised that Mozilla receives so much praise for its technology stack, when their core source code for Firefox and Thunderbird is such a buggy pain to work with.
I understand that they inherited a legacy codebase, but I'm not sure that playing catch-up with Google on (in my opinion) useless features like WebUSB was good technical management. In fact, I would argue that letting technical debt accumulate to the point where you need to rewrite large parts in a completely different language and deprecate technologies still in use (e.g. XUL) is more like an admission of failed technical leadership.
So I am honestly surprised that Mozilla is cutting projects and firing developers, yet nobody seems to take action to reduce the overhead of their apparently incapable management.
Nobody would switch to Firefox for WebUSB, which is why I chose it as the example. There's only crickets on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/webusb
Instead, people switch to Firefox for privacy, safety and reliability. Mozilla should prioritize those areas highly. But in the past, they haven't. Instead, they burned a lot of money on acquiring 3rd party services that many Firefox users see as nothing more than unnecessary bloat. Like $30 mio for Pocket.
That's why I point the blame at their management, not their code base or developers.
And just FYI, I'm pretty sure I could hire a world-class team and build an excellent Speech-to-Text Engine just from Mozilla's management budget for a single year. Because AFAIK, their (in my opinion incapable) management pocketed $80 mio in 2018.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
"We aspire to the idea that a human being can demonstrate competence and earn respect and leadership and authority based on what you do and how you do it."
Video was posted on Nov 8 2018. I think everyone can draw their own conclusions.
Just because people call things that aren't a meritocracy a meritocracy does not mean that's what it means. It's like saying we don't want to say "democracy" anymore because China (PRC) calls itself a democracy and they actually aren't. Or if we turn the whole thing around, saying that "feminism" is offensive because TERFs use the term too.
Like, are there actually people who actually think like that? How do they communicate??
The meaning of words is constantly perverted