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Leaving Mozilla

davidwalsh.name

558 pointslebaux161 comments

> To the 18 year old David who sat in that lonely computer lab: you fucking did it, dude. You lived that dream. To 37 year old David: Go do it again.

I really enjoyed that part. I forget sometimes that my career - what I woke up to do this morning, the reason I'm in this office right now - this was my dream.

I should remember that more often. This dream started almost 20 years ago (I'm about the same age as David) and it's easy to forget... I thought this would be impossible once. Well, the odds looked pretty bad at first. I barely scraped by in school, would never enter post secondary school, and at the time was terrible with math and logic. I didn't care about programming specifically though, I cared about what I could create with it. In retrospect, I'm glad I had the attitude and optimism that I did.

More on topic, I know of David through his website which, early on on my front end days, was an incredibly helpful resource. I vividly remember figuring out Mootools problems with the help of his articles. Ha, like this: https://davidwalsh.name/namespace-mootools

So out of date now, but man, some of his stuff saved my ass when I was thrown into a Mootools-heavy project in 2011-2012 with very little experience with JS. Great memories.

This really hits close to. home as well. 15 year old me learning programming dreamed of where I am now.

15-year-old me wanted to control an army of robot minions from a moon base.

I mean, I'm not sad with how my life turned out, it's pretty great, but I don't even have one robot minion since the Roomba died.

It's not too late.

Checkout https://screeps.com/. You could control your very own army of minions.

As we age, we find bigger and better dreams to pursue.

What is it so special about the minions? Do they have to be robots? What is it with the Moon? Answer those questions and you will figure out what is your new dream... or reframe the older one

I want minions in the old fashioned slave does my bidding context - cook meals, clean the house, work the fields, and whatever else I happen to dream up. All of that taking whatever abuse I happen to dish out in my frustration about whatever.

I share the modern ethical concerns about owning other humans, so that leaves robots.

In addition to the juvenile power fantasies of being in control and having lots of power, I also wanted to create the crazy things seen in science fiction, for a mix of the purer "I want this thing to exist in the world" and the baser "I'd be so famous if I created this".

Of course, it's a lot easier and cheaper to learn pure programming than to learn programming and how to build robots, which is how I got where I am today.

Granted, it's also gotten a lot easier (now that things like Pi's and Arduino and the associated off-the-shelf robotics sensors, etc exist) and more affordable (as I am a paid programmer and not a penniless yute) to build robots, but doing the really cool stuff is still in the realm of "dozens to thousands of people working collaboratively for years" rather than "one person staying up late and coding while listening to music".

To answer bluGill and saalweachter both.

If you have power fantasies, may I interest you in the practice of martial arts instead? I know I am biased in favor of that, but I will try anyways.

If you want to learn and make others do your bidding, the first step is to learn how to do your own bidding: "cannot command until can do" and all that. It is very satisfying to be able to decide to do something and then just do it. Most people cannot do that. Most people do not realize they devote precious little of their time to do what they want to do, because they keep just running in the hamster wheel until they grow old and die.

I had all sorts of fantastic dreams ... when I was 15.

At this point in my life, I emphatically do not want to be in charge of other people. There's still a little part of me that desires fame and accolades, but it's heartily offset by the part of me that now understands how much I loathe actually being the center of attention.

My dreams as an adult are much more modest and achievable than those of that youthful fantabulist.

Well, mostly. I would still like to build a robot army. But the moon base is probably a bit much.

I don't have a power fantasy, I have a leisure fantasy. I want a nice garden without having to seed it. I was clean dishes and laundry without having to wash and put them away. I want good food on the table even when I don't feel like cooking. I spend a couple hours a week cleaning my house (putting away toys, sweeping...) that I want to spend doing something else. I don't care how it gets done, just that it is done.

My 'minion' dream is to get one of those 32 core Threadrippers and actually be able to wrangle all those cores to do my bidding. (my Rust education is moving at glacial speed...)

I for one dreamed of becoming an astronaut and spending some time on the Moon. I still do.

Valid. I dreamed of where I am today. Living it doesn't feel like it was your dream, but remember how bad you wanted it when you were a teanager and appreciate where you are now and how far you have come. Great to reflect.

Gratitude, baby. Our society seems very focused on "more", but it is very good for one's mental health to remember how great what we have now is.

There are studies that show daily practices of gratitude change the brain. If you can, write down three things you are grateful for every night before bed. No matter how bad your day was, it will put you in a better head space.

Now, of course, I don't routinely follow my own advice. But when I did, it had noticeable benefits that have persisted to this day.

You know, I actually started this practice recently (more or less - trying to keep track of what has made me happy and what I'm grateful for at night. I miss nights, but I keep at it), and as I wrote that comment I had a thought. I'm not sure I would have reflected so positively or even realized that I'd accomplished a dream of mine if I hadn't been 'practising gratitude' so to speak. It seems to me like it's an important thing to do and believe in. There's so much to be glad about that I've often missed.

Granted there's plenty to be unhappy about, but that's too easy and not rewarding at all. Anyone can plainly see what's bad. But to find the good, it's sort of a treasure hunt before bed. What was awesome today? As it turns out, plenty. Maybe even more was bad, but the good parts were still good, and that's enough most days.

I've sort of been doing something similar for a few years now where, each day I will document the highlight of my days.

It's been a really interesting experience and it's useful from not just a gratitude/appreciation perspective but also it's turned into an invaluable tool for keeping track of how time passes.

You know, when you can look back over the days and see even just one thing that you did each day, they each become a little more memorable.

It can also be handy sometimes when you have a mystery receipt, and you're trying to work out what you spent $12 on 3 weeks ago, on a random weeknight. "Oh yeah, that's the day I went out for ice-cream after work because I'd had a bad day", or whatever.

I wrote a post about it a while back, if you're interested in hearing more: https://nitemice.com/2018/05/12/daily-highlights/

To your point, this interesting podcast discusses the psychology of how we perceive our success/position/wealth - esp. in relation to others.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/14/912749547/why-nobody-feels-ri...

Just started listening. Thank you for the recommendation.

No joke. As a teenager I thought of this path as a leap of ill-construed faith (I didn't share the idea with anyone), but didn't really care. I couldn't envision my life even a week in the future, let alone 10 or 15 years. It didn't seem possible that I'd even be alive still. But what the hell, it worked!

I'm currently 27. When I was in second grade, I told my parents I wanted to do the exact job I'm doing right now when I grew up. I still have that realization every once and a while.

Same! When I saw the really fat UNIX janitor in Jurassic Park, I knew that was my life's calling.

I worked 5 years at a company I dreamed about. Then 2 at another one. It was an amazing experience, I learned a lot in the process and met many great people. Problem is, there are no companies or projects left for me to dream about any more. :'(

I know the feeling. I've come to believe that it's a terrible thing to actually meet your goals. Kinda like heroes, I guess.

I've heard people say that rather than focus on goals, focus on systems. Like, one time I set a goal to dead lift 400lbs. I actually did it a couple years later. The stupid thing is I stopped lifting maybe 3 months after that. Lifting 400lbs really meant nothing. Focusing on that goal was pointless. Focusing on the system of getting stronger and healthier would have been far more sensible, because there is no end to it, and there's endless progress to be made. Well, within one's own means - you could lift, swim, climb, whatever. Just enjoy it and push yourself, and you'll probably find more ways to get better at it than you could manage in your lifetime.

I've been realizing recently, maybe late in life - I don't know if this is obvious to other people much earlier - that discreet goals don't make much sense in such changeable, open-ended lives. Why aim to save $10,000 when you could aim to maintain the practice of saving 10% of your income - forever? Every month or quarter or year you can look and say hell yes, I hit that goal! Maybe you want to increase it one year. $10k will run out in no time, but a good habit doesn't. Also, maybe saving sums of money isn't really what we need to focus on... Kind of like lifting some arbitrary weight. Maybe what we really want is health and strength, or financial security and independence to allow us to buy the things we want or need. Maybe rather than travelling to a specific location, we want to live in such a way that we can have the opportunity and means to explore and see interesting places. The discreet goals could be a sub-goal of the system perhaps, but probably shouldn't be the focus.

I've always had these silly discreet goals and terrible habits to support them. I think, moving forward into my later 30s and beyond, I'll try more to focus on systems over discreet, limited results.

> rather than focus on goals, focus on systems

Maybe it's from James Clear?

> You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

> This is a quote from my new book Atomic Habits and was adapted from one of my favorite sayings by the Greek poet Archilochus: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009

"You fall to the level of your systems"

I really like that! Thanks, I'm going to check this out.

I hear you, I've felt like that at times. Lately I've been thinking I need to make my own dream, so to speak. I want to build something for myself maybe - just enjoy the product of what I've learned and the skills I've developed. I enjoy working with my team and having a job, but I think my next step might be taking a break to just enjoy creating something. I definitely feel that "what's next" question creeping up more often these days.

I think that was the original dream in a way too - to learn enough to be able to create the things I imagined. Maybe I'll work part time at regular work and part time on the 'dream', who knows. Like others have mentioned though, there's often a lot to be grateful for in the moment, dreams aside.

The thing with building something for myself is that it's hard. Sure, I do have a hobby project that will, hopefully, make the world better at some point. But that's a hobby project. It doesn't help with this crippling loneliness the slightest. And then starting your own company is a lot of responsibility. Much more than I'm willing to ever take. Not only do you have to have an idea good enough and that there's market for, you also have to devise a way to make money, preferably without ruining your product both in the long and short term. And delegation. I don't like delegation, but running your own startup demands a lot of it. I'm such a kind of person that it's almost always easier for me to do something myself when I know exactly how it's done rather than to explain someone else what I want.

The software industry is trending towards dumbing everything down and making increasingly user-hostile design decisions. This is the exact opposite of my values. Then there's the purely technical side of things. It's becoming scarily common for software developers to not understand the abstractions they're using and the compromises they're making while choosing those abstractions. This leads to poor-quality, underperforming products. It's become so ingrained into the culture that people legit look at you weird when you tell them that they don't need react and 50 JS libraries to build a website and that using the Android APIs in an app directly is a perfectly okay thing to do.

So, there are diminishing opportunities for creating a startup, and most existing companies' values go against mine. I feel lost at this point. I truly have no clue where to go next and what to look for. Nonprofits maybe?

I stand at the same point, and like others of my generation I'm considering switching job and moving to something completely different.

But if I'm being honest, I have to remind myself that the industry was not any better when I joined. Actually, I initially refused to work in that field for the same reasons that you list, except the epitome of dumb and user hostility at the time was Microsoft and Oracle. What made it possible for me to work in the industry was the raising tide of free software. Contributing to the success of it was interesting and fun and meaningful.

Now this tide have receded. Open source has merged with the industry, it incorporated its culture and helps greatly with the dumbing down and the over production of junk software.

I'm waiting for the next wave to come. I'm not sure where it will come from. My best guess at the moment as the most important, potentially disruptive technology, is functional OS distributions pioneered by NixOS and perfected by GuixSD, that has the potential of becoming the Debian of the future and revolution the way we assemble and distribute software and put an end to that unprincipled era of containers.

Rust is also an interesting piece of tech that has the potential to promote correctness and optimization in a field obsessed with simplicity.

So if one had to look for a job right now I would encourage either evangelization in one of those technologies maybe. That, or to work in a farm and enjoy computers on the side.

"You haven't exhausted all ideas, all ideas have exhausted you."

The latter sounds worse. :o

I identify so much with this comment.

I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life.

Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn.

Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.

This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs.

Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet.

Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do.

I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.

Go build something to dream about!

My job is part of my dream, but not all of it. I am currently building the other part, where I have equity in something that is growing everyday.

I hear people talk about how great high school was, or how much they loved college or their 20's. For me, each decade is better than the last as long as I'm still learning, growing, and building.

Lots of great sentiments in that article.

You don't have to love every day of a job to love the job. You can love the organization even as you need to let it go (or it needs to let you go).

He's proud of the arc of his career and understands that sometimes a good thing needs to come to an end for a new good thing to begin.

Endings are bittersweet. You can focus on the bitter, or you can focus on the sweet. He seems to be doing the latter.

What a great summary to an even greater blog post

> You don't have to love every day of a job to love the job.

You shouldn't love your job. A job isn't a person. You should love your friends and family. A job is what you do for money. Like a trick, michael.

I would love to know when the idea of "loving your job" came into the culture. It feels so manufactured like "I (heart)/love NY". Similar to "productivity" today. "Have you been productive today"? When did "productivity" sneak into the culture.

Edit: The replies indicate what I am talking about. People are so conditioned into thinking that you should "love" your job that they get defensive when you point out that a job isn't something that you should "love". You can enjoy your job, you can get fulfillment from your job, but a job isn't a person. It isn't something that you should "love". Words matter. I don't like how love has been hijacked into a meaningless term now. I love my job, my hobby, my football team, etc. Someone wrote they spent decades with a job they loved. If you did, then you wasted your life. Do other countries/languages also "love their job" or is this an american thing? It's such a strange thing to "love". Strangely enough, only on hacker news would you people so religious defend their love of their job.

You can love your job in the same way that you can love a hobby that you're passionate about, where you look forward to Mondays, and get genuine excitement and pleasure from the work.

I think that's what people mean when they say they love their job.

I have loved most of my jobs over my 27 year professional career.

I love my family even more...by a large margin.

Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"

> You shouldn't love your job.

Why not? I consider myself exceedingly fortunate and lucky to be in the tiny minority of people who has had the high privilege of really enjoying/loving the work I get to do.

> A job is what you do for money.

Yup! It can be more than that, but that's the baseline. What's wrong with really enjoying/loving that which you do to make money?

> Team members at every organization I've worked with have heard me say, when asked to join them for drinks after work, "Hey, I like you guys and that sounds fun, but I like my family even more. Have a great time!"

How are drinks with friends / corworkers related with loving your family?

I do socialize with my co-workers, but only secondarily. Time with them is time away from my family, and I greatly prefer the latter.

Slightly off topic, but all this talk assumes the person has good relationship with their immediate family, and/or is having a successful romantic relationship. Something that I, as a fresh graduate single dude who's not on great terms with family, would argue is also a privileged position. You really shouldn't judge what people choose to enjoy in their lives without knowing their circumstances.

Yes, this is all true and good to keep in mind. Thank you for raising that point.

Frankly it baffles me how people can go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love.

Maybe I'm privileged to have had this option, but I've always avoided better paying jobs that didn't feel good to go for the ones that I enjoy every single day.

Meanwhile I see mates slog through their weeks, burning themselves out on neverending meaningless work, which pays well but basically means they are living mostly for the weekend. How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?

>Maybe I'm privileged to have had this option

You are privileged, and I definitely am too. But a simple, extreme, counterfactual works to demonstrate that many do not get this option: Picture a working mother with three children to feed and lives week-to-week with no opportunity to gain new skills. Her only option is going to be to work literally whatever appears. I suspect similar applies to most people who appear to be middle class as well.

Also, consider all those jobs you choose not to do. _Somebody_ does them, and rarely because they have differently wired brains and they actively enjoy the work you've rejected. People who clean toilets, or collect trash, or any of those other unskilled menial jobs that absolutely need doing in society aren't "enjoying this jobs every single day".

>> How did accepting that as the norm sneak into our culture?

I think you've got that totally back to front. The typical HN reader is _super privileged_ to even be able to think about choosing "a job that I love" over a less fulfilling job. 99% of the humans on the planet are doing whatever job they can just to survive. "A job that you love" has never been "the norm in our culture". Pretending most people don't just "go through life wasting away most of their prime waking hours on a job they don't love" is ignoring the lived existence of practically everybody you see each day that's not in a FAANG Michelin-starred cafeteria or double-digit equity incentivised at a swing-for-the-fences startup.

Apologies for not being more clear about this in my original comment, but I was not talking about the unfortunate people who don't have a choice. I had the HN crowd in mind when I mentioned my mates, who definitely DO have other options that would drastically improve their quality of life, but STILL choose to stick with the job that makes them miserable.

The jobs I passed on were not bad in any way, but would often require me to sell my soul in one way or another.

Besides that, if for some reason all I could do was an "unskilled menial job", I would still find the one that had at least some element which I could enjoy. I would grow into it and eventually learn to love my job or find another one.

This was all in response to the person who made the claim that "you should not love your job", which I simply don't agree with. But in his edit it appears that it's mostly an issue of semantics. "Love" has a lot of ambiguous meanings in the English language.

A lot of people don't have much opportunity to land a job that they love. If I could find a job I love I would hop right on that, instead I work in a warehouse for $15 an hour. I think "the norm" is closer to this than the high paying soul-sucking jobs (see: 2019 US median personal income of $36K).

Though I too am baffled by the people in highly skilled professions who willingly take jobs they hate to make more money when they could probably easily find a somewhat lower paying (but still quite decent) job that they enjoy a lot more.

TL;DR: I have decided that a word with multiple definitions[1] has only one that I accept. Anyone who does not accept my definition is wrong, and I will double down on pushing my singular definition of a word, because someone is wrong on the internet![2]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/love, which includes:

2: warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion love of the sea

and

3: to like or desire actively : take pleasure in loved to play the violin 4: to thrive in the rose loves sunlight

[2] https://xkcd.com/386/

(Replying after your clarifying edit.)

You seem to have a very narrow definition of what "love" is and want to deny people the ability to love in whatever way makes them happy, which is a bit uncharitable of you.

I think maybe I get the root of your complaint; there are some people who drink the kool aid and get stuck in what amounts to an abusive relationship with their job, and stay there out of some sort of warped "love". That is genuinely bad. That is also not what anyone in this thread is talking about when they say they love their job.

I have at times loved my job. I have at times only liked it. And sometimes actively disliked or hated it. I've also loved romantic partners, family, and friends. My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends. That doesn't cheapen the value of any of these kinds of love, and neither does broadening your horizons to accept other kinds of love that you perhaps don't feel yourself.

There are many different kinds of love, and no person has any business telling others how to love or how not to love. This has nothing to do with "conditioning" or "defensiveness". You just don't get to decide this for anyone but yourself, and complaining about how other people love is as meaningless as complaining that the sky is blue.

> My love for a job is different than my love for a romantic partner, which is a different love than the love I have for family, which is also a different love than the love I have for friends.

Interestingly, languages other than english have different words for those different forms of what English all lumps in as "love".

In Greek (at least ancient Greek, anyway), "romantic love" is eros, "family love" is philia or storge, and "friend love" is xenia or philia. (I don't understand the subtleties of those last two where they cross over...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love

It seems the ancient Greeks did not have a work for "job love", which is interesting to me in terms of the upthread discussion.

I wonder if the paucity of English language around different types of "love" is a cause of the kind of misuse of the concept to apply to things like "I love my job", or if it's a symptom of it - with language shaping and forcing our understanding and deep deep thought structures?

Are there any Greek speakers reading here who could tell me if those multiple differing words for love still exists in modern Greek, and if so how the concept of "I love my job" would be expressed in Greek, and what the word and definition/connotations of the version of "love" that'd be used in that context are?

Why the heck shouldn't you love your job if you want to? Love isn't something you have a finite supply of that you have to dole out sparingly. Loving your job or your city or your dog or whatever else doesn't "use up" love that you then no longer have available to give to your friends or family or devalue it or whatever. Love is something that you generate more of as you give it away.

My wife is a musician, I used to be a musician, I have a lot of friends in the arts of one kind or another. You can be damn sure they love their jobs (because basically noone goes into most kinds of artistic careers thinking they will make any sort of living over and above the barest kind of subsistance).

This posts makes Mozilla problems better understood. One thing are slightly overpaid bosses, but there is more...

"After leaving MDN, I took on a dual role: WADI (Web Advocacy & Developer Initiative) and Firefox OS for TV Partner Engineering. With WADI I had the pleasure of contributing to the Service Worker Cookbook. With the TV role I got a beautiful 60" ultra HD TV where I helped partners bring their video sites and games to life."

it seems there are some jobs at Mozilla that might not necessarily contribute significantly to its success.

And it looks like overall management in Mozilla is not in the greatest shape:

"When things got a bit tough at Mozilla, I shifted to Mozilla's "Productivity Tools" team. My first two weeks were nothing short of hilarious; my new manager didn't know I was a front-end engineer, so I stumbled through completing a big python migration."

> it seems there are some jobs at Mozilla that might not necessarily contribute significantly to its success.

Important observation, and it demonstrates where room for improvement is needed and actionable. One of the failings of Mozilla was not recognizing this and making active efforts to spin out useful (but not useful to Mozilla's core efforts) projects (for example, MDN should've been spun out long ago, similar to Thunderbird).

Best wishes David on your journey.

MDN is extremely useful for Firefox as it documents Firefox capabilities so web designers can use them. Without it people would think webkit=the internet.

Yeah places like caniuse are biased towards Chrome. They rarely add a feature that's only present in Firefox, but often add features only present in Chrome. Also caniuse is no full MDN replacement.

Caniuse is open source, anyone can PR in new functionality that’s only in Firefox (and I have).

What I saw is that the open source data is only partial and that PRs are often kept open until Chrome adds the functionality as well.

Let's face it, the answer to "caniuse" a feature that isn't in Chrome yet is "no".

It's a common pattern: The main revenue source (in this case licensing money from Google) isn't cutting it/drying up, so the company tries all sorts of things to try to come up with another success. In reality they're just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, which is usually not a recipe for success, but you also can't really fault them for trying - when no really good plan B ever materializes so you can just go all in on that, you're left with the scattershot approach, or just lying down and dying.

Or C, shrink down to the size you should have been all along.

This is unlikely to occur due to management incentives (grow clout, influence, status, etc).

What's a way to find/hire people who are immune to such things

I would think you'd have to hire someone who doesn't want the job to begin with

Hmm, My thoughts are more like hiring someone who cares a lot about the company's higher goals and vision, more than about his/her own career.

Maybe that's not possible to find in traditional profit maximizing companies, because who cares about maximizing the shareholders' profits

I was thinking more along the lines of old political leaders who willingly gave up power, like george Washington or Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, I agree. Maybe you could find someone who cared about some companies, but most companies don't have a vision at all. Is there anyone who actually deeply cares about nestles higher vision? I think if you could find someone both willing and able to do will as ceo while being completely uninterested in being a ceo it would go well, but there can't be many of those people.

George Washington seems like a good example to me -- then I understand what you mean. (I read on Wikipedia about Marcus Aurelius but didn't find anything except for that he was a stoic thinker? What that now means)

And maybe it's possible to find such people, like GW, for non executive roles, too.

What if maybe Nestle doesn't actually have a vision?

If they just picked words that sound good, as a PR thing, to sell more?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus probably because I was thinking of this guy, Marcus Aurelius just said he didn't want to be emporer but did it as a duty to the state, got them mixed up. I think nestle not having a vision is the reason it won't ever have a moral ceo, though, there's no reason for anyone to push a moral person to the top when morality will probably produce less results. Even if you find such people it's hard to promote them without a sense of ethics at the top I think.

Thanks for the link, interesting to read :-)

Hmm yes maybe in a way, some organizations can be "immune" to becoming more ethical / less depraved

Maybe the way to handle that, is to start another organization and try to out complete the wicked one

The biggest problem is that they're still doing B but they threw C under the bus (without a security team i don't see a bright future once the exploits come rolling in and when they finally realize C was the option all trust will be gone)

Contrary to Twitter speculation, we never had just one single security team, nor did we eliminate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24659174

Or D, go back to what built the organization in the first place instead of trying to be a non-evil version of Google.

> The main revenue source (in this case licensing money from Google) isn't cutting it/drying up

If Firefox weren't bleeding market share this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

The market-share bleed is ... amplified or mitigated, depending on your viewpoint ... by the absolute dominance of handheld Android devices (defaulting and manditory intalls of Google Chrome).

Firefox has slid some on desktop, but not nearly as much as broad numbers suggest.

Put differently: desktop is increasingly irrelevant to the modern Web. Which itself is likely not a good thing.

_______________________________

Late edit: Safari's marketshare, overall and by desktop/mobile segment, is virtually identical with its device share. Party like it's 1998.

Which suggests Mozilla's attempt at a mobile OS was not entirely misguided. It's preloads, bundling, and tying all over again.

People don't leave jobs because things are going too well...

Mozilla is a mess, and they need to can anyone who can't contribute code

That would result in feature bloat and products, if they ever make it to market, that don't address consumer needs. Competent management is just as needed as technical contributions.

Mozilla already has a ton of useless products and features without a market fit due to incompetent management...

One of management's biggest jobs at a company like Mozilla is aiming developer resources at the problems that do address consumer needs. In the last few years, Mozilla hasn't really been doing that, so it sounds like they need new management because the current management isn't competent.

That's indeed exactly what happened. Lots of moonshot products that were dead on arrival such as FirefoxOS (and TV/IoT) or BrowserID, features nobody really wanted, while taking away features that people did want. Even right now, with their "refocusing" they killed or stymied features/products that people do want or at least gave them some rep with the power users and tech people (aka the people who will later recommend/install the browser to/for friends and family), e.g. devtools and MDN.

I can't stress enough how important and amazing MDN is.

It's probably (one of) the main things I think of for what keeps developing for the web a somewhat sane and cohesive experience.

MDM is great! And its filled with sample code! Almost like it was written by someone who can code...

That is just absolute unmitigated nonsense. Teams require more than just "people who code" and what you describe is a highway direct to disaster.

I recommend this read:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the company's overall health.

Firefox OS was launched at a yoga retreat near Lake Tahoe because the head of marketing wanted to attend.

> Would I have passed an interview for that job? Hell no. Did I succeed in the end? Hell yes.

Not the point of the article, but it pretty much sums up big part of job interviews in tech.

Also, the article feels very bittersweet - it seems like Mozilla is full of enthusiasts caring about its mission, it's sad to see it going through these rough times.

I think the author is actually saying they weren't productive at the start.

I agree. His background was not a fit, but his drive and willingness to learn got him through.

BTW that also seems to be the problem with tech interviewing we keep hearing about. He probably would have passed an interview with me even for the Python work. I have 3 things I look for in tech interviews and he's clearly got 2 of them. The 3rd requires his feedback on a particular role.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201007125029/https://davidwals...

> but COVID and other business factors contributed to 25% of the organization being made redundant.

Well... Maybe the leadership is just plain incompetent and 25% of the organization would still be there if the C-level people would have been kicked...

I fail to understand how COVID could have made 25% of the people redundant at Mozilla. Where those all facility managers or working in the cafeteria(s)?

It may take a bit more speculation. If it is like almost every large organization in 2020 they are under going a consolidation effort to mitigate the economic fall out of covid. You often don’t throw away talent due to a consolidation until after you determine the redundant roles. The roles did not begin as redundant. They became redundant after smooshing teams together.

What I don't understand is how covid affects Mozilla's revenue. I mean nobody stops browsing the web because they have to work from home, or can no longer eat out, or whatever other measures where taken.

The economy gets worse. Ad spending goes down. Google's search revenue decreases. Mozilla's search deal with Google is less profitable.

Do you a source that google ad revenue is down? YouTube Ad Inventory, seems to be WAY UP, as many of the youtubers that were not getting ads before are saturated with ads today.

Further I do not believe their Search deal is dependent on Advertising at all, it is about number of searchs, and being the default not a % of ad spend

There might be more ads, but that doesn't mean that they're converting into sales.

Iain and I are both Mozilla employees, and terms of search deals are very much NDA-covered things -- we can say very little about our limited knowledge.

All I will say is that the revenue from Google is not fixed, and what the press release said was in fact true: revenue was substantially affected by COVID.

Let me Google that for you: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...

Revenue is down two consecutive quarters. It is well-known that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads (see eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/12/24/is... or https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18024654/alphabet-google...)

During the pandemic, fewer people have been searching for (and more importantly, purchasing) niceties. They're buying things like toilet paper. That's going to directly affect ad revenue.

At the same time, online-shopping is through the roof because of lockdowns. People still want to buy things, especially when they're scared or bored.

This helped the Kleenex brands of online retail. It doesn't help drive Mozilla's search deal when you go to Amazon and impulse shop.

I'm working for large affiliate sites and they have seen unprecedented traffic across all categories since March. Most people aren't going directly to Amazon, people are still using Google, where they see ads that they click on and then buy stuff.

Okay, but how much of that translates into partnership revenue? Again, we're all just making a bunch of assumptions in an effort to cast Mozilla's press release as false.

I have no idea, but if Mozilla's partnership revenue is sinking despite record online shopping, then it's not "because of the pandemic", I think. The pandemic is a godsend for anyone that serves consumers online.

I wouldn't understand it either if I wasn't exposed to it. It's not something I can disclose but the general concepts at play are human reactions to risk. There's a short term boost in impressions across the internet as individuals are locked down. They order more delivery, they order more from the brands they trust, but they don't spend more during an economic downturn. We're for the most part less inclined towards risk during uncertainty. The forecasts for fully recovering to mid 2019 vary by industry but some of the largest ad buyers were the most affected. They don't care about a short term increase in ad views when no one is gonna buy their service. The largest retailers also run their own ad services so the amount of pie left after everyone has their cut isn't something that keeps many employed.

It's just a lame excuse, nothing more, as you've already said.

It did not, I dont see how COVID has any bearing on Mozilla Revenue or business...

It is just a convenient (and likely good legally) way to cover for bad management.

More than a few companies with poor management are using COVID to cover for their poor choices

I wrote a longer comment on my somewhat insider take on the management stuff a while ago.

tl;dr I agree with your hypothesis that the top level management should leave

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238633

Thank you very much for the helpful insight. From "the outside" Mozilla lacks kind of a vision, you'd probably call it "marketing bs" ;-) but I'd love to see a vision like "build the best browser of the world".

Focussing resources on this and maybe one or two other big projects (Thunderbird, anybody?), which could really make an impact in the modern day and age of the internet, would be great. That would be a clear way to go, I could become a "follower" or "supporter" with no fear in my heart and let it run.

Right now Mozilla looks pretty clueless to me. Losing market share, all the gossip, massive layoffs, starting and ending side projects like Firefox Send (which I'd really would have loved to see take off, competition for WeTransfer and alike would be good)... There's just a big bunch of "hmpf, don't know".

No "let's build the best browser" is a vague goal but still a goal. When I say marketing bullshit I mean stuff that is even more vague or even completely without any discernable meaning. E.g. "synergies" is such a bs term to me that springs to mind (tho, I don't think the mozilla leadership used it)

I think the C-level largely has. Compare

Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil...

Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil...

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

How do you mean that? (Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker, don't understand the sentence.)

He means: I think the C-level largely has been kicked.

For those unwilling to count; most categories are the same or differ by 1 person (today vs 1 year ago) except for management which is half the size it was 1 year ago. I am not a software dev or manager so I am unsure if this is just because those are the teams that got cut or if these were senior over-paid managers.

If companies start to fail, the good people tend to leave first. Maybe that's what happened here.

I was part of the August layoffs as well and this rings very true to my experience. Getting laid off was bittersweet - Mozilla has played a huge role in my life for the past 5 years and I care deeply about the people and the mission, but I felt the same relief when I saw the email and my calendar invite.

> I felt the same relief when I saw the email and my calendar invite

Were you not panicked at all about losing your job and income in the middle of a recession?

I'm about a month into my next (interim) role at this point. Mozilla gave people who were laid off a generous severance and recruiters were messaging everyone with a job at Mozilla on LinkedIn from the moment the news broke.

So they laid off a guy who worked there for 20years, and is crazy passionate about the company? Good job, mozilla.

8.5 years, whose interest was waning and he kind of wanted to be laid off. So I agree - good job. I've always wished companies would successfully identify those who no longer are thrilled with being there. I've seen too many layoffs where they let people go who wanted to stay, and keep people who wanted to leave.

I only partly agree. You can have people who are considering or happy enough to move on but are still doing a great job and you can have people going through the motions who would rather continue to collect a paycheck than go through a job hunt.

I didn't know "loving the job" was part of the job. I think I see what you're saying if I stretch a bit, but "effectiveness in role" and "communicates respectfully and accurately" should be the main drivers, not "Does she still dream about her merge requests?"

That is exactly my point - effectiveness in role and communications should not be the main drivers. Desire to be at the job should be the main driver. If you don't want to be there, you effectiveness will suffer. But if you have a team who does want to be there, you can coach them to improve effectiveness and communications.

You rock dude, mozilla was lucky to have you. Will be eager to see what you do next, your an inspiration for an entire generation of javascript ninjas.

Title is actually "39 Shirts - Leaving Mozilla".

Has something to do with HN title debaiting or something IIRC.

What does "39 shirts" mean? Doesn't mean anything more to me than "shirts", heh.

What's in the photo at the top of the post?

To be fair, the server was suffering, it's possible the images or the post did not load for the poster.

A bunch of Mozilla merch, 39(?) t-shirts and a Firefox stuffed animal.

At large company gatherings for big tech companies some people get given shirts/hoodies/bottles/etc.

What do you think about "37 Signals" ?

He has 39 pieces of Mozilla swag (from Mozilla internal events presumably). Basically an unusual way of saying he's been there a long time.

Man when I was at IBM I had to buy a Watson shirt.

Jimmy Carter t-shirts, of course!

"Jimmy 39"

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/jimmy-carter-by-redboy/2...

"Carter 39"

https://www.amazon.com/Jimmy-Carter-39-President-America/dp/...

"I'm Nuts About Jimmy. Vote Carter in the '76"

https://www.wish.com/product/5a784d351a8c211973880ae4?hide_l...

Hi, I posted this with the title "39 Shirts - Leaving Mozilla", but it got truncated to "Shirts - Leaving Mozilla" for whatever reason. I could not exactly go back and edit it.

It seems a hn mod edited the title. Thank for that!

That is what I said : Number prefixes in titles are automagically removed. Indeed it seems a mod removed the 'Shirts' later.

XXXIX Shirts - Leaving Mozilla

Thirtynine Shirts - Leaving Mozilla is too uhhh plain?

Congrats David, excited to see where you take the web next.

Personal anecdote, I've been following David since I began my professional web career back in '07. I was always impressed by each redesign of his site and all the tips, tricks, and advice he had to offer. Just a wonderful person to follow.

Congratulations to David for living his dream. He certainly is more optimistic than I would be. To live and breathe the mission for so long, constantly move around and help where needed, stepping outside his comfort zone and it sounds like working more than 40 hours a week, he still gets the axe because of incompetent management.

I wish him the best going forward, it sounds like he is an awesome developer and teammate and whatever company he goes to next will be lucky to have him.

Sounds like it did land a job: https://twitter.com/davidwalshblog/status/131168544997550899...

This is a terrific perspective to have on a job. All jobs end in one way or another. Being able to look back on it as a meaningful and successful chapter of your life is the most healthy way to then move on to the next chapter.

Mozilla as an organization has lost its principles.

Just one example is the fact that it is not possible to run a fully self-hosted sync service. You must use Firefox accounts or something like that.

Sure, you can run your own actual data hosting, but it still forces you to use some authorization service. Sure, you can try to also run your own version of that, but now you have to setup two distinct services for one sync function.

It's a gigantic enormous hassle to do it, you must also override several Firefox settings to make it use your "3rd" party auth service. Oh and the documentation is not existent because their official stance is "don't do this, don't run your own Firefox Accounts service"

Once upon a time this wasn't the case, but at some point it was decided to 'upgrade' the sync stack. which resulted in a centralized auth function. Gotta keep up with google chrome I suppose.

At the risk of sounding all like "you should take what you're given and like it", which is not what I intend... the fact that it's even possible to swap out a cloud service provider without hacking through the code is pretty unusual for a mainstream piece of desktop software.

Yes, Mozilla should document it better and make it easier for people to do it, and avoid making big unannounced changes to it, but they deserve some recognition for making it possible in the first place.

Might be a great time to reflect on browser development. Maybe approach gov or heritage conservatories for funding a new browser? Btw I used FF mobile for as long as I've used Android, and think it deserves better promotion; just ad blocking alone saves bucks/mobile data and PII leaks big time.

I love the idea of a browser being developed as a public service, but I wouldn't trust the American government to run code on my machine.

Well, that leaves Europe.

Didn't block the ads at the bottom of the post though. Self-hosted image and a plain anchor tag. Advertising done right.

This resonated greatly with me because I wanted to follow a similar path to end up doing developer stuff at Mozilla (granted I'm only early 20s now with a couple yoe so I hadn't tried applying yet, but I do have a good number of contributions to their projects)

But with the current sentiment around them/shift in focus, I'm not sure if this will still be the case for me in a couple of years.

Either way congrats to David for achieving his dream.

Hi!

It's not all that black/white. I'm also on a similar journey to David (volunteer for Mozilla since I was 16, I'm 37 now), with a lot of passion for the project and invested in some large projects there.

AMA, and don't let other people's journeys decide on yours.

Thanks for the response!

I understand it's not black/white and the current restructuring to focus on increasing revenue in the near future could be temporary and they could eventually refocus on improving the internet for people.

I'll still keep an eye out for that and if this is the case in the future, then I will definitely try my luck at applying then.

Congrats, David, I remember we started on the same day! Well, me as an intern. It's fun seeing that picture again!

Why would a web company let a notable developer (who has contributed so much to the grow of the web itself) walk away is beyond me.

When companies reach a certain age and renown, they lose all sight of what brought them to that point.

> I didn't grow up in a tech-centric place -- Wisconsin is full of farms, cows, and people dreaming outside of the cornfields

Not to be snarky, but the currently 13th ranked UW-Madison CS department would beg to differ.

Thanks for sharing your journey and feelings. Whats next? Would love to know. Please do write again.

Nice article David. I wish i was this exited about my job.

getting a 500x, did hacker news broke your site?

Internet Archive has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20201007112514/https://davidwals...

  500 Internal Server Error

The server is also leaving David Walsh :(

Awesome story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com