My Summer at Mozilla
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Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were:
1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India.
2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship.
3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk!
4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.
Really glad this guy had a phenomenal time at Mozilla. All of the top internship programs in the bay area are equally good and I hope he gets a chance to try some others :)
And yeah I agree, as much as you like your first internship, switching it up for the second is usually a good idea because that mobility is harder when working full-time.
Certainly, the amount of resources people put behind stuff varies (Mozilla obviously cares deeply, to the extent of it being their foremost mission; Opera has historically cared about it deeply — it used to be a point that a disproportionate amount of specs were edited by Opera employee — and it is part of their "vision"), but at the end of the day, as an intern you're likely to be working with those directly alongside you almost exclusively.
If you care about working somewhere where people are truly passionate about what they're doing — go for any browser vendor working on an engine (I say this as to exclude Opera — while there are some contributions flowing from there, they are relatively sparse in number — though I wouldn't be surprised for this to change back to them investing heavily in their browser engine as their Blink-based products enter the market). Yes, in many ways Mozilla are probably the best (as there's no question that this view goes all the way to the top), but don't rule out the others.
(source: comment below and friend who interned at Mozilla)
This post makes me want to work at Mozilla!
(The pay is also great and the other perks and location are amazing.)
The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.
A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
However, let me describe a few thoughts I had whilst there (not the submitter).
1. Mozilla's mission is just as important as random company making the pipes more efficient for sending cat/twerking/whatever videos. They are a non-profit and are operated as such.
2. They have some incredibly interesting problems that they are working on. From the research team to the browser development itself. Read interesting = hard.
3. They do pay well. I know this as a former intern; also from word of mouth from people who worked there. :)
"You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome."
What I'm trying to convey is that I don't believe that anyone need make this compromise. Mozilla is awesome, other organizations are awesome, some freelance gigs are awesome. You can be a software developer without putting yourself through anguish, it's just a matter of priorities.
We work for a company because we think the company can compensate us fairly and those at Mozilla are usually very happy with what they can do (open source projects most of the time). That's interesting. You like your freenlancer, go-everywhere-style, good, but not me.
Idealized city apartment? Half of the people working for Mozilla are remote and the other half spend half of their week at home as well. That's how we work and we make good product.
I like getting a comfortable chair, some snacks and food on a daily and weekly basis. It's like telling people they should all become a freelancer or become their own boss - why work for anybody?
I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative.
That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck.
I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.
People talk about nonprofits being "irresponsible" when they behave like for-profit corporations: advertising, perks for engineers, whatever. And yet the for-profits do these things because they work; advertising gets sales, perks get you better engineers (and it's usually cheaper than just bumping up salaries, because macbooks are shiny). If these things don't work successful corporations will stop doing them, and if they DO work we should stop giving nonprofits shit for doing them too.
That said, your point about Mozilla in particular coming crumbling down is interesting--I'm not sure I disagree. However, if they need smart people to pull them out of the hole, offering free macbooks isn't a bad way to do it.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...
However, being too conservative doesn't work in Silicon Valley because you have to compete with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for talent with their perks and benefits. Whether it's good or bad in the long term I do not know but it is a fact.
If Google thinks they have 95% they probably can give up on us, but I don't think that day will ever come in the next 10 years. Also, while MOCO is a corporation, its mission is not to make money. MoFo came up with MOCO because MoFo members wanted to be good citizens. They wanted to pay taxes to avoid stupid tax allegation. Read Mozilla history and you will have a good laugh.
If we fail, we will restructure ourselves. You can't guarantee Google will be around forever. We just have to do what we have to do today. If we are always worrying about money, we would not be building anything. There wouldn't be any startup because half of their customers will either move on or use another service.
Related: one thing I've noticed some people don't place enough emphasis on when choosing initial internships/jobs out of school is the business models of companies, and the direct effect that can have on the working environment.
In this case, while Mozilla is technically a non-profit, rather than being funded by donations it makes the overwhelming majority of its money by sharing in the advertising revenue generated by the search engines which come pre-installed in Firefox (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...). Therefore, even if Mozilla does absolutely nothing in terms of improving any of their products, they will still continue to make money (in the short term, at least), which lifts quite a bit of stress off everyone who works there, and let's management take a longer view perspective in general.
Professional service firms (i.e. tech. consulting and agencies) are effectively arbitrage plays - they sell the time of their employees for $X / hr, but only pay the employee $Y / hr, and then collect on the spread. If these companies ever stop selling for just a few moments, the arbitrage breaks down (as they still presumably need to pay their employees...). Therefore, there will likely to be more "stress in the air" in these types of firms, as in some cases all it takes is 1-2 contracts to be canceled for the firm to be unable to make payroll.
Hit driven businesses (Which Blackberry as a whole arguably is not, due to the significant revenue driven by their enterprise server), have a different set of issues, which is that losing really sucks for morale - therefore if the company you work for is focused on building a better mousetrap, and slowly over time people internally begin to doubt the quality of the mousetrap they are working on, that can make it really frustrating to work there, regardless of the other perks the company may provide.
Now, if only writing a blog post could replace your work term report. :)
I am not sure what you mean with 'improving HR'. Did you mean 'PR' ? Because Mozilla's HR department is doing a pretty great job.
You are correct, that notice is not present, but I did not remove it intentionally. To be honest, I didn't read the LICENSE.md of Pure CSS. Shame on me :)
Feel free to file a bug against this at: https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com