[sstangl]

I'm one of the 70. There were no signs that this was imminent, although Mozilla has been struggling financially for many years. I expected that it would happen eventually; I'm relatively well-prepared for it; and it's not too shocking. I did however expect that there would be some warning signs in the lead-up, but that was not the case.

I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode. Before that, I worked on the SpiderMonkey JITs for 9 years. If anyone has need for a senior compiler engineer with 10 years of experience writing fast, parallel code, please do let me know.

[andreasgal]

Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.

[samat]

For others who are interested in who's the parent is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal

[krambs]

That's cool.

[_kp6z]

Sounds like a pretty clueless layoff, I guess I expected better from Mozilla than usual corporate derp. If there was truly no dead weight, surely the management could have scaled back their own comp for misdirecting the company? Very few people understand what it means to be a leader in corporate world.

[ksec]

> for misdirecting the company?

As someone who has been using Netscape before even Internet Explorer exists, and followed all of its development through to Firefox till recent few years. I am not surprised.

At first you give them benefits of doubt, because their ideal were good. Then it happened again, again, and again.

>Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Yes, you do need lots of people for making something as complex as browser, But 1000? Out of the 70 employees, they decided to lay off more than a few senior engineers with a decade of experience.

I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla. Every time I pointed something negative on Mozilla there are someone quick to defend it. As someone who used to religiously defend Netscape and Mozilla when I was much younger. I get it. I could understand the appeal, the ideal. Until you grow older and realise, You didn't have that ideal, the ideal had you.

[MzHN]

>I dont know if this will change HN's perspective on Firefox and Mozilla.

Even if it did, what can we do?

Giving Chrome more market share gives Google more power to shape the future of web technologies, controversial stuff like Manifest v3 and AMP that HN loves to hate.

Personally I'm rooting for Firefox and Mozilla, not out of being a fan of them, but because I'm afraid of the alternative.

[feminintendo]

Completely agree, but do we have to root for Mozilla if we want to root for Firefox?

[tripzilch]

I'm not sure what your question is, there's all sorts of uninteresting complications to the trademarks on the name "Firefox" and how Mozilla deals with it.

[neuronic]

Interestingly this appears like the same misconception and misdirection that lets people be deluded by their idea of "science".

A field that should be an ideal, inherently good space for knowledge and humanity to expand is in fact a cesspool of greedy assholes chasing grants and prestige, reflected in the circumstances around journal publishing.

Egos first, then comes science. If your priorities are the other way around, then sincerely good luck to you.

[pergadad]

What's the alternative? Google? Not really better even if this disappoints about Mozilla.

[qbaqbaqba]

Edge or Brave. Different business models than Google's and to some extent Mozilla's.

[eslaught]

But still beholden to the same rendering engine, and therefore Google's technical decisions about the future of the web. Which is exactly why I would strongly prefer for Mozilla to stay strong, even aside from the non-profit aspect of it.

[m3adow]

Still 100% depending on Google, still supporting a near monopolistic position for the browser. Every Chromium fork is part of the problem, not the solution.

[BrendanEich]

Engine consolidation happened, the fight now is over privacy. When and if Brave is big enough we will chart our own engine course.

[tripzilch]

Both run the Chrome engine! That's not an alternative. You really want all available browsers run the same engine, and one that is developed by Google?? You realize they are at step two of "embrace extend extinguish", right? And you realize that by showing their cards with AMP, they totally aren't above actually doing it too?

What do you suppose will happen when the entire web runs on the Chrome engine? No good things.

[anon463637]

There are no good alternatives. The corporations have hijacked the design-by-committee "open standards" by requiring DRM. Hobbyists are shut-out.

Mozilla's FF was once a viable alternative to FAANG privacy monetization, but they're flailing around like their leadership doesn't know what to do but fire engineers and re-organize the deck chairs (org chart) on the Titanic.

[timwaagh]

i don't know what they do for money, but i suppose it's not giving away free internet browsers. so it might have something to do with that.

[BrendanEich]

Search revenue share deals, mainly with Google.

[timwaagh]

Thanks. Although it doesn't really clear up the mystery of what that workforce of theirs is doing.

[BrendanEich]

Look at the majority of the titles under https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/.

[deepaksurti]

Many corporate leaders are Peters at work [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

[klagermkii]

I would think the Peter Principle would be better represented if there was someone who was a star on the technical side, but messed up as the CEO in a role they couldn't handle. i.e. if Brendan Eich was CEO and this happened it would be a Peter Principle moment.

All these senior leadership people seem to be straight from the management track. Doesn't seem like they showed their excellence in another discipline and were then misplaced as CEO.

[raxxorrax]

Through the bank my experience is that a technical background with someone growing into a leadership role ultimately creates better results. People whose only skill is "leadership" tend to perform pretty badly.

But the Peter principle, doubtful if it even can be taken seriously, doesn't say anything about this specifically.

I don't know anything about Eich, but I don't really see how he would have been bad for Mozilla as a CEO. He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.

All that aside, that the execs at Mozilla get millions and they still lay off 70 people is bad leadership. Really, really bad leadership. And the recent focus seem to underline that failure in my opinion.

Mozilla has done incredible things for the net and technology. Sadly, I think this is subject to change.

[spease]

> He had some controversial views as some have reported, but I don't really think that would have been very relevant, especially if so many people disagree.

As far as I know, he never expressed what his “views” were. People just found he donated $1000 (which was .002% of the total funds raised) towards a proposition opposing same-sex marriage. There didn’t seem to be anyone who had worked with him, regardless of orientation, who felt uncomfortable with him, or were even aware of it. His contributions having an effect were gated by a democratic vote, and his financial contribution was so small that I can’t imagine it having a substantial effect on the outcome.

To me the fact that he had the maturity to restrict his political discourse to the same means available to any other voter, to his private life, and was discreet enough that nobody knew about it for years, made him look better. Mozilla is supposed to be making the internet accessible to everybody, even people who hold conflicting views.

The quote comes to mind:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

[pbhjpbhj]

Surely the Mozilla execs don't take millions? And beg for charity??

I know Mozilla Corp/Org are technically split, but if one head of Cerberus ate all the food surely it doesn't still need feeding.

[zobzu]

they do take millions. the money they take is basically from Google's search deal (thought technically a few other sources too).

The money you donate only goes to the foundation, which does not pay the exec, so any donation does not actually go to exec. The donations are required for the foundation to function at all, regardless of how well the corporation does.

to be honest, the whole thing is a bit of a hack though, because really mozilla functions 100% like a corporation even if they had a real foundation inside. its just a way to ensure that the board is Mitchell Baker - not a bunch of people who want the company to profit. this has good and bad sides, and right now we're definitely seeing the bad sides: exec get paid 800k to 2500k (Mitchell), senior devs get fired for making - i bet, 100k to 300k.

foundations are made to be places where you make the world a better place without having the "i want to make money" motto and that's not what Mozilla does. Mozilla wants money to pay execs and keep on surviving. Many other foundations have similar hacks (or arguably, scams!). The other advantage is that the foundation side does not pay tax of course.

[BrendanEich]

Read the link above. The Peter Principle does not require change from tech to mgmt — it simply describes promotion above one’s level of competence.

[klagermkii]

Yes, I'm just using tech as an example. It still requires them to be excellent in any one field and then move into another field on the basis of that excellence, but then fail to have the excellence carry over to the new and different discipline.

None of these people show some kind of original standout excellence in a different field that was lost in their transition to Mozilla leadership roles.

[BrendanEich]

You are introducing a change of “field” where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle talks only of skills from lower level position being insufficient for competency at higher level. No change of field in the standard definition. I’ve read about, heard, and used the PP for decades without any change of field or tech vs mgmt being required to use the phrase correctly. It may be that higher level management requires training in a different field from lower, but in many firms it does not exclude promotion from below. Some of the best CEOs confound the PP to rise from the ranks.

[sgift]

I think your comment falls into the same trap that Mozillas leadership probably fell into: Middle manager and top management are different, even if they look superficially the same. Not every good team lead or even department lead is a good fit for being part of a companies leadership.

[chillfox]

Just because they might have made excellent middle managers at some point in time does not mean that they would be any good at being executives.

[tuananh]

Thanks. Today i learn something new

[scarface74]

How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?

[9152ba83773b]

Mozilla has way too many VP and above employees that are useless (check what the once VP engineering, then interim CTO, then fellow is actually doing for instance). They should let go a few, but as far as I know, none has been fired. Gotta keep getting twice the bonus percentage as regular ICs...

[whatthefoxer]

You mean ekr yea? I don't know what he's doing either or why he's been promoted along the way. Nobody really knows.

[9152ba83773b]

No, not ekr. There's much worse.

[Aeolun]

Is 70x a strange multiple for an executive to make? I’m sure I’ve heard stories of more.

That said, I doubt the executives at Mozilla make north of 7M

[inferiorhuman]

Well a bit further down Mitchell Baker is being skewered for making $2,500,000 annually. I'd assume that the multiplier at Mozilla is much, much lower than 70x.

[whatthefoxer]

Mozilla has no equity so they make up for it in cash.. well for executives mainly. This makes for lofty salaries

[kabes]

For a single executive yes. But all of them combined could add up to 70x

[jimmydorry]

Hardly any executive is just getting paid 7m in cash. They are typically paid in financial instruments that are time locked for several years. The media however, will go bananas on reporting about how they are paid crazy amounts when these instruments are finally unlocked, ignoring the tax implications, the lack liquidity and massive risk involved, and also just how much the rest of the market has increased during the time period of those instruments being locked.

When you pay yours executives a modest amount using such a method, it's often very feasible for this to be a massive windfall at the time of maturity (e.g. $1 options becoming $6, etc.).

[mcny]

If they scaled back their own compensation maybe it would be half of seventy? Better than inadvertently laying off someone you need I would imagine...

[gsvelto]

A fairly large number of managers have been laid off too.

[gsvelto]

And also a VP

[RavenessaX]

We have many job openings at SpaceX for senior software engineers, please do apply! https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5...

[waste_monk]

Just curious, what is the breakdown of "classes" of people layed off.

By which I mean developers vs managers vs other assorted e.g. "tech evangelists" or whatever it's called.

[gregschlom]

Friendly tip: maybe put your contact info in your HN profile?

[sstangl]

Oh, thank you! I added it.

[apaprocki]

We... like SpiderMonkey very much. Contact in profile ;)

[Redoubts]

Oh lol, almost forgot about your terminal stack.

[zozbot234]

> I was working on Cranelift, the WebAssembly compiler that is also a plausible future backend for Rust debug mode.

Just curious, but could Cranelift (or rustc_codegen_cranelift, I'm not sure which would be the closest) also acquire a C-transpiling backend, making it a viable replacement for mrustc? There might be quite a few people willing to fund that sort of work, since it could suffice to bring Rust to a whole lot of platforms that people care about.

[sstangl]

Yes, it's plausible that were Rust to adopt Cranelift as a supported backend, you could use Cranelift as an intermediary to translate Rust MIR (via Cranelift CLIF) into C. Outputting functional-but-horrifying C would not be terribly difficult.

The CLIF format is low level but relatively architecture-independent.

[Agrailag]

Sorry for question, but will you continue work on adopt it to Rust?

[roca]

There's also https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe

[wslh]

Could you be a match for https://eos.io/news/eos-virtual-machine-a-high-performance-b... ?

[wdanilo]

LUNA (http://luna-lang.org) - write to us! :)

I'm one of the founders. We are looking for senior compiler engineers (GraalVM) and senior WebGL developers (Rust ) in our team. We are doing a visual programming language for data science and we just got funding of $2.5M. We'd love to chat :)

[wdanilo]

In case anyone is interested, here is a more formal description of positions we are looking for: https://github.com/luna/hiring

[joshsyn]

Are you guys moving away from haskell?

[rurban]

Scala apparently

[kraken-eng]

Kraken is hiring Senior SW Engineers with extensive Rust experience for our backend services team. The team is remote. Check out the link below to apply or get in touch at leon at kraken dot com

https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...

[bemeurer]

If you’re interested in non-compiler, HPC Rust work reach out at bernardo at standard dot ai

[Avi-D-coder]

How many people are left working on Cranelift?

[pabs3]

Igalia are hiring for WebKit and related work:

https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

[artemis1666]

Your experience seems like it would be great for embedded flight software development. Please email tyler.butler at lmco.com if you or others in your situation would be interested in working on NASA's Orion program.

[shanbar]

GitHub is hiring, we have quite a few roles posted, and many more opening... https://github.com/about/careers

[pascalpaillier]

Your experience may be invaluable to us -- we're building a homomorphic virtual machine for machine learning, all open source and in Rust. Send me an email to [e-mail].

[modarts]

That’s terrible, really sorry that happened to you. The good news is that you have an extraordinarily rare and valuable skill set as a compiler eng

[mylons]

sorry this happened to you.

[awill]

Stupid question, but doesn't Mozilla make around $500MM revenue a year, and have a little over 1000 employees. That seems like it should be profitable.

[BrendanEich]

Your number is high, estimating from user population and search revenue share market rates.

[dzlobin]

Facebook is definitely looking for folks with compiler experience. Feel free to reach out at dannyz [at] fb

[zeuxcg]

If you're interested in language runtime work (in C++) e-mail arseny at roblox.com

[hartator]

Shot me an email at julien at serpapi.com.

[lachlan-sneff]

Is Dan still there?

[sstangl]

I spoke to Dan to let him know that I'll need to hand off my work, and he didn't mention anything. So I assume he is.

At this point I don't know who was affected.