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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool?

I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy).

Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going public". No fancy offices or amenities. Just a reasonable pay, a mission for the public good, and sincere dedicated people.

I've looked hard and searched for jobs like that. Maybe wikimedia and internet archive. But yeah, can't get my emails returned so maybe that's not who they are.

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I suspect the few companies like what you describe have a list of applicants longer than the golden gate bridge. So unless you're well known or well connected enough to get their attention they're not interested. Why settle for a random engineer when they can get a world renowned expert with two PhDs and four 5000+ star git repos?

For $160k?

More for the helping the world part of things. Many people will give their all to causes they consider worthy for minimal personal gain. Not like they can't move to a regular corporate job after 10 years when they need to support a family.

such companies with salaries under average market level wont work well due to 1. corporate bureacracy - managers usually are undercompetent and tend to ignore personal matters so team members might bully eachother 2. idealistic people usually have a couple of nuts loose in their heads, combine two or more such persons and you get problem for entire team - linux's coc is one example. so nearly every org without really focused goal and means of it's following will go the mozilla way, the marissa meyer and such... it will happen every time if managerial part ignore specifics of programmer work.

Sounds like government work

I have friends at JPL and NASA. You're not that far off.

I want a more general version

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

The browser is absolutely their focus which is why they laid off the Servo team. Servo is a research project, Gecko/Firefox is their browser. It's also a massive money sink. Firefox itself has zero income and yet keeping up with Google is fantastically expensive (even Microsoft decided to throw in the towel).

So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spending on their browser.

Contradicts their announcement on new product focus https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

And here is a 2013 post about the "next generation" engine (Servo) https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

> So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spending on their browser.

Exactly, that means they do not see any value in closing the gap with Chrome. Servo was this plan that launched years ago. See this paragraph from the above post from 2013

> Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web.

Not to mention their threat response team got laid off

https://www.securityweek.com/mozilla-cybersecurity-staff-hit...

Several parts of Servo have been incorporated into Firefox (Stylo, Webrender, Pathfinder and more).

I think Servo was branded as a research project pretty early on. That it would replace Firefox wasn't very realistic.

Yes, however if Servo was stopped early on due to no "ROI" (like it is the case today). Then those very good improvements would have not been made.

As a Mozilla employee, I can say that this is a fairly accurate assessment.

Except for the part about Firefox not making any money. Firefox is making most of the money.

It gets a fixed amount of money from Google for using them as the default search engine. But what I meant was Firefox has no means to actual generate an income in its own right. Mozilla have tried. The reactions have not been good.

The money from Google is practically a donation at this point. It's not exactly an altruistic one but it's not exactly a pure business transaction either given Firefox's current market share.

Is it even possible to donate money to Firefox development and not to greedy CEOs?

You can't donate to Mozilla Corp full stop. Besides which Firefox users are strongly opposed to "nags" in the browser as Mozilla have found. Even wikipedia, with it's massive reach and yearly nags, "only" makes ~$120 million. Firefox could never hope to reach anything like that from donations alone and it needs many times that number to keep pace with Google Chrome's practically unlimited funds.

Send money to employees

> It gets a fixed amount of money from Google for using them as the default search engine

Your first bad assumption is that the amount of money is fixed.

What will happen to this donation if the outcome of the anti-trust is against Google ?

Firefox is the reason why Google pours so many millions in Mozilla. Hardly a money sink.

and the Product is whatever they sell Google every couple of years.

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