I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful.
When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.
I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance.
I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.
This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.
Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?
The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.
Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job? How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
The current CEO of Mozilla Corporation and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation (the parent organization of Mozilla Corporation) earned a total compensation of $2,458,350 [1] on a $436 million company revenue on 2018, or half a percent of the company's revenue. I can't find 2019 stats, but on a company that's not doing well, CEO's comp seems high.
I can't think of a good reason why Mitchell Baker should keep her job. I'm fine with competitive executive compensation, but what has she done other than lay off the people doing the work?
I have no idea what normal CEO salaries look like as a percentage of revenue. I'm not even sure if that's the right way to measure it. But it doesn't sound crazy high to me?
And the worse your company is doing, the more important it is to find a good CEO and the harder it will be for you to attract a good one. So you can even make an argument for why CEOs that joined companies that are doing badly might be getting paid more on average.
I wondered how much it was, and did a quick search. Apparently Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) had a total comp equivalent to ~0.13% of the revenue, and Tim Cook (Apple) was at 0.05%. So Mozilla's CEO is at 3 to 10 times more than those two examples, while arguably underperforming them.
Of course startups CEO will have different goals - company at different stages of their growth will have very different goals and tangentially they need different CEOs with different skill sets to achieve those different goals.
I never really understand why people ask for things like this. Presumably Mozilla is paying these salaries because that's what they need to pay to hire good people at that level. Why would those people stay at Mozilla if they suddenly had their salary cut? They are probably already making less than they could make in a comparable position elsewhere.
Because people feel like C-level compensation is way too high, and people feel this is disconnected from actual performance. C-level compensation has risen way, way faster in the last decades than general employee compensation [1].
It doesn't change because upper management is all in the "cult", and there's no incentive to lower salaries. If all programmers (or any other profession) were in charge of their own salaries, I'd suspect something similar happening with people rewarding each other more and more compensation while pointing at other companies to justify it.
I can see how one can argue that C-level compensation is too high (although there are also good arguments against that) but surely you can't expect Mozilla to solve this problem by themselves? If Mozilla cuts C-level salaries while the rest of the industry doesn't then why would any of them keep working for Mozilla?
This is a crap argument. Every company/NGO can use that and it doesn't solve the problem. Mozilla as a self-proclaimed altruistic ideologically-driven org should lead by example.
If the current CEO, whom from the outside is not doing a great job, is not willing to. You find a different CEO. I am not convinced that no one wants to do the job for $500k instead of $2.5m. Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation, but it's not like organizations are taking the chance.
"Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation"
they'd probably have to have at least a negative $2m impact before it mattered right?
revenue on its own may not even be the best measure, if the revenue comes via methods that conflict with the larger ideology. I don't know if Mozilla has that conflict with itself or not.
Your point is accurate though, and I've held the same views for a while now. This sort of thinking would seem to dictate that the next Mozilla CEO will need to come in at around $2.5m - that's been defined as the floor now. Regardless of how well that person executes, they've got that base. And... you can't really judge them after 3 months. You'd need to give them a year to make a 'real' assessment... and you've just spent that money on someone, regardless of outcome.
If I read the 990 right, 257500. This is 2x the lowest officer salary and 30% higher than the second-highest. By comparison Mitchell is 8x the second-highest officer and 17x the lowest. There may be more comparable salaries at MoCo, but those are not on the 990s.
NGO or non-profit doesn't mean they took a vow of poverty. It means the corporation does not distribute profits to shareholders (and may be exempt of some income taxes). It still can be loaded with money, and many NGOs are.
> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?
FirefoxOS gets a lot of hate, but I honestly thought it was a pretty good idea. The problem was that it was terribly executed.
It’s a bit unclear to me wether that was your point or not.
Obviously the idea of Firefox OS is great. It's successor KaiOS (fork of Firefox OS) is the third most popular mobile OS with hundreds of millions of users.
I think what OP was saying is that Mozilla is so poorly managed that they took a great idea and made it crash and burn.
Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile. Blackberry was swept off the stage in the blink of an eye.
Firefox OS was abandoned pretty quick as I remember, 2 years tops?
> Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile.
Microsoft made a new OS where they needed developers to target their platform. Too few did, and the platform failed.
Mozilla tried to bypass this chicken-and-the-egg problem by being able to leverage PWAs which “everyone” is making anyway these days. It wasn’t a too crazy bet that it might have worked.
In a similar vein the Pinephone is trying something similar these days: not asking developers to target it, but instead leverage existing app eco-systems (Linux and web).
I don't expect a runaway mainstream success here, but I do wish them luck.
It might have had some neat technical designs, but it is not a good idea to try and launch an OS into a maturing market, which the smartphone market clearly was by 2013.
It worked in India - it was a success. And it was a shock when Mozilla just gave it up. Giving up on an install base of hundreds of millions just when it was taking off...the US is not the only market you know ?
Sometimes you need to plough your way through the field to get the bountiful harvest - Mozilla did that and then left the harvest to burn.
Firefox made the right call, they were never going to succeed against Android. Looking at statcounter, Kai has not been able to resist it either, dropping from somewhere over 4% to under 1%, while Android sits at over 95%.
FirefoxOS was a good idea: a portable phone system that could run on cheaper hardware than Android could, built with web technologies instead of Java.
Then hardware manufacturers started producing cheap hardware that could run Android with acceptable performance, thus eliminating the price advantage for FirefoxOS, before that OS could take off in third world nations.
Well ChromeOS was successful so you could see Firefox OS as an alternative in the market. They both came out at the same time. There were of course 6 different table/mobile OSes at the time. Maybe it was a difference in execution. Or maybe resources.
So, I don't really know the context of the stuff you're writing about, if you would please indulge me...
> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion.
I honestly am not aware much of that.
> FirefoxOS anyone?
I can't tell if you're unhappy they started that project or unhappy they stopped it. I'm guessing you're unhappy, so I'm going to go along with the guys that were involved on that project for the rest of your post.
I am curious though, since you seem to know so much about Mozilla driving itself into the ground, do you know the resources that were spent on FirefoxOS?
> The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.
I know that Andreas Gal was disliked, but how was he unskilled and what did his position have to do with the nature you're speaking of?
> Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
How did you asses that Andreas Gal was under qualified and under performing?
> Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job?
Mitchell Baker is one of the oldest closely related employees to Netscape, Mozilla etc. She is very much the original culture of company. Her particular focus is the overall business aspect of operating the organisation rather than the technical. The technical work would have been people like Andreas Gal.
> How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
That's not her sallary, that comes from compensation. Compensation is based on looking at what other similarly sized companies, usually in the same sector are paying based on similarly skilled people. Companies do not want to lose their CEOs etc. What might suprise you is that she's being paid at the lower end of the scale, and this is because she's a CEO sourced internally.
If Mozilla were to replace her with an external CEO, they would likely end up needing to pay vastly more. The compenstion paid is usually pegged to performance. While the company might have not done well as a whole, there are likely things this person has navgiated the company through that you did not see? But, if you did, please share.
> Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
Mozilla is following a common technique to help bring stability to the company when one or more revenue stream starts struggling or drying up -- It is diversifying income. Mozilla appears to be a very R&D sort of company, so they seem to be doing what you see companies like Microsoft Garage or Alphabet do and try to create their own 'start ups' without the company bit to try to innovate new products. Hence where FirefoxOS came from.
Many people originally scoffed at the idea of Apple doing a phone.
Honestly, and I mean this with full sincerity, your response is exactly the point.
You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.
Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
Mozilla without Firefox is dead. Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue. Zero. It was and is a giant waste of time.
And so here we are. Years wasted on what could have been real honest and creative attempts at monetization from competent leadership. They had 10 years to figure it out. Instead they played with whatever new shiny toy fell in front of them.
> You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.
I don't know, I feel like I have more context you do right now. But maybe that is just experience from working in organisations like this.
> Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
That's not really true though, is it? FirefoxOS derivatives took off significantly and did very well, but, unfortunately, it turned out listening to the public saying to cut it was an awful idea.
> Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue.
It's not about bringing in similar revenue on a single project, it's about having many different income generators though.
> It was and is a giant waste of time
Did you actually check the development effort involved? They didn't have to spend much on resources to do so, to do these alternate revenue streams, the organisation spent relatively little rather than putting all their money behind a big project and then if it doesn't work out, collapsing -- which is likely to occur trying to pursue large projects like you're suggesting?
Not entirely certain on the reasons why the general public didn't like him, but, I suspect the real reason was because he was leading the FirefoxOS project.
I think they could have learned something from wartime speeches here in terms of reading their audience. People who care about Mozilla as an entity are sophisticated readers.
They could have said pretty much the same thing, but with a nod to the fact that it is hard to believe the corporate version. E.g. "Mozilla has laid off 250 employees today. Why? Well here are our reasons, let's start at the beginning...".
And then I'd be more interested to read.
I would love to know why - short on cash? Google's teet running dry? Or do they believe fewer people = more agility? or maybe the roles really were redundant.
The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.
I think this is a valid point. Donors don't want to give money to further enrich Mozilla's overpaid leadership, and they don't want to give money to then be split between the cause they're really donating for (generally Firefox) and various tangentially related political causes.
There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.
The more people use restricted funds designation, the less bloated non-profits with wishy-washy missions there would be and the less money there would be to pilfer by the parasite class that lives in the executive roles of the non-profits.
Write "Restricted funds - see attachment" on a check. On the attachment list check details and a restriction such as "Direct expenses for <blahblahblah> only." If you just do not want it to go to G&A fluff fund the execs use to live a large life, just exclude G&A: "<blah blah blah> purposes only. No G&A"
Regulations for non-profits aren't a joke. If they took your restricted funds, you bet they are going to follow the restrictions.
Non-profits may hate it but at the end it is money. So they take it. If they decline to cash the check, no skin off your back.
Source: lived in a non-profit land as a tech consultant. Heard constant bitching about big donors being smart and always restricting funds above a few hundred dollars. Execs of every non-profit that pretends it cannot deal with restrictions are taking the donor for suckers and are fleecing them.
> Okay, but how does that money get from MoFo to MoCo?
It is their problem, not my. They want money. It is restricted. Money is fungible. If they figure out how to use the money that is restricted then they need to spend less unrestricted money.
General and Administrative. For example, a catered lunch from a fancy restaurant that will have friends of the execs attend as a part of some presentation would be charged into G&A line.
Interesting, thanks. Do Mozilla really accept restricted funds donations toward Firefox development? What are the steps to make such a donation?
Here's a related discussion on exactly this topic, from 11 months ago. I see that it was you who mentioned restricted funds in that thread, too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874641
Donors don't fund Firefox. Search engine revenue does. Every scrap of evidence suggests that donations will absolutely not fund work at the scale of Firefox. If they did our overall open source infrastructure would be in much better shape.
Exactly. I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not about Mozilla. If another company forks the projects and delivers a better program I'll be as happy as if Mozilla keeps doing it.
Supporting and directing Internet standards, resisting Google, etc, are a byproduct of developing an independent browser.
Did you police yourself? It seems you replaced a word you intended with the word “politics” to be PC.
Mozilla has always been political. It was born so. Why do you think Jamie Zawinski got Shepard Fairey to design its logo?
The Mozilla manifesto is full of political statements.
Do you remember the fight against DRM? Net neutrality? SOPA?
Often, people that speak like you mean “speech favoring equal treatment” instead of “politics”.
They used to care about freedom, now they care about a bunch of vaguely defined stuff aligned with (some of) US left. Being from outside the US, to me this change and the speed of it seems extremely jarring. I mean just look at their messaging in new tabs -- do I really need my browser telling me that "It's okay to like Facebook" or that "Tech (people? companies? projects?) has a responsibity to [...]" ? Thanks, Mozilla, I guess I wouldn't have used it if not for your permission (/s). Does anyone even read these fucking things before they push them out?
There's a difference between politics to improve Internet-related things (like fighting DRM, SOPA, or promoting net neutrality) and other political issues that while important are completely irrelevant to a browser development company.
I'd like to add that Mozilla has relatively limited resources and it's more worthwhile for them to focus on issues that are directly related to what they do (the web) instead of unrelated social issues.
Furthermore Mozilla has the expertise, connections and brand when it comes to the web they can use as leverage to solve web-related social/political issues, but might not have much leverage for unrelated issues so the risk/reward ratio will not be in their favor.
Exactly. Everything in the world is political: Firefox was a political statement from its outset, Mozilla is a political entity, and also - and I've yet to see an argument from anyone against this notion - Mozilla is overwhelmingly a force for good in the world. Lots of people on HN really struggle to accept this, because it goes against their own (libertarian right or anarcho-capitalist) political perspective.
People complaining about "politics" are often complaining about political scope creep.
If I keep that in mind while listening/reading people complaining about "politics" it is often the smallest change to their stated message that would make it clear and internally consistent. So I ask clarifying questions to see if their complaint is poorly articulated rather than picking at their words to defend the thing they're criticizing.
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose.
I didn’t think it was well written at all. The sheer number of words is a red flag. There are five focus areas that are all extremely vague. Good writing is clear and concise.
Open Source is not influenced by political factors. Influencing factors are almost entirely economical, with the exception being decisions by lawmakers.
I'd rather they kept politics and so-called fights against racism out of Software, because they were never problematic there to begin with.
The terms master and slave for example are only in bad taste because people make them to be.
To channel RMS: The political concern there is Free Software. Open Source isn't a political movement, it's an approach to software development that has similar ideas on software licensing.
Consider that it might have always been politized, but the previous status quo might have been more convenient/pleasant to you (i.e. made it easier for you to ignore problems which affect others).
I agree that the criticism is disproportionate, especially after all Mozilla has done for the net. I am disappointed what issues take up a priority today. I primarily think of focusing on community as policing speech in repositories and terminology, brave new world style. I don't think the old leadership failed, I think the new one is just very quick with results. Mozilla was beloved because they had a different image. I am in a position where I dislike their advocacy, because it just doesn't resonate with me for improving anything, on the contrary. I don't judge them for trying to monetize some of their services, but I also see it as a result of expanding aimlessly.
And they want to offer me leadership? For what? Seriously considering if Mozilla still has a place on the donation list.
This blog post is pretty bad. Doesn't mean I just drop my support, but I don't see how you cannot be disappointed here or who feels like this is a road to improvement.
"But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests"
I was a loyal Firefox user and can't even remember why I switched to Chrome. Sometimes shit happens. Kohler can be all ecited about making the next great toilet bowl. Just don't expect me to get excited every morning to go take a poop on that bowl. It's an impossibly high standard!
> I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose
If the purpose of Mozilla is to fight systematic racism, then I'm sorry building a web browser and running a VPN is a terrible way to go about it and the leadership team should be removed.
Bit of hyperbole there. This is a press release that their PR head pumped out in 5 minutes, using whatever techniques they teach PR heads at communications schools. Insert any company that can lay off 250 employees and keep ticking, and you will probably get about the same exact document from a similarly schooled PR head.
I wouldn't expect there to be a corporate template for a mass layoff press release. Having such a thing would be a warning sign for the future of the company to me.
Also, people who don't know anything about a task tend to underestimate its complexity. I can't remeber the name of the effect but it's a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Mass layoffs are and have been standard procedures in any company, regardless of size. Writing such templates in good times instead of wasting resources elsewhere is just good risk management.
Whether you have a template or not, each mass layoff is going to be under specific circumstances, and is going to carry significant PR and HR consequences. It would be wise to take considerably longer than 5 minutes to consider and craft that message. I would agree that they could hammer out an initial draft for discussion with management in 5 minutes though.
Agreed on hyperbole and I could have used a more realistic example. My point was to bring up faulty logic, which is still equally valid.
As others have mentioned, layoffs should not be templatized, it is an indication that the company doesn't care much about the employees, the heart and soul of the company. I hope to God it was more than 5 minutes to draft a message to put 250 people out of a job in the middle of a Pandemic.
Putting it up to "well this is the standard of the industry" is bullshit, if you want more realistic examples, sexism in the work place is _not_ a hyperbole and is still very normal and very wrong.
It depends on whether the reader feels diversity should be reduced to a PR tool and a mechanism of distraction, which seems disconnected from whether you’re for or against diversity as a goal for the organization. In fact, I’d think both folks for and against it would find this reductive usage onerous at best.
I don't agree. I think the whole press release comes off quite dishonest and manipulative.
I'm not quite sure who the intended audience of the release is. Releasing a statement announcing the layoff of many employees while trying to position the company as "a technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement" just screams insincerity.
Honestly, I think the exact opposite of what you're implying. If you truly value diversity, you don't use it as some sort of cover in the first paragraph of your layoff announcement.
Any corporate entity making claims of supporting diversity without creating efforts to improve actual diversity which requires much earlier interaction long before hiring, is likely not really concerned about diversity but virtue signaling.
This is just my own opinion. There's also the consideration that merit and talent should exceed diversity as a goal. For developers, I find that those that I would hire are roughly 10-15% of those I've interviewed. I've always paid more attention to content and character, and that has shaken itself out to include quite a bit of diversity in the end without being a goal.
Maybe it's a side effect of coming from a generation online before cameras and even gui interfaces were really much of a thing. I never really cared much about someone's sexual or racial identities, only what their ideas and statements were. I almost wish we could return to those things. When I see a pull request on github, I don't go looking into the person, only the code.
> That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity.
Or that depends entirely on how the reader is used to seeing buzz words the whole time used in unrelated contexts. You know, not every mundane thing is life bears relation to high ideals.
You're getting downvoted and all the replies are disagreeing with you. Is it because everyone else is misunderstanding your clear, reasonable argument, or is it more likely something to do with the way you're communicating it?
It appears to be the former because no one addressed my point that people have different viewpoints.
In my original post I stated that people would only eyeroll a reference to diversity based on how they view diversity. That's it.
I thought that was harmless and succinct. People have different points of view, and no person can anticipate how another person will react. Then people tried to explain to me that I was wrong, which means: people's views DON'T actually play into how they react, which is demonstrably false. See that? In order to argue me, you have to take the position that you know exactly how everyone will already react.
OK, so what's the point you were trying to make with your initial statement? If you were just making the tautological statement that people act based on their points of view, a fact which if meant literally is both obvious and irrelevant, then what was the point of making that comment?
Rather, your comment strongly appeared to suggest that you were implying one would support Mozilla's statement if they supported diversity, and vice-versa. But if you were trying to imply that, it appears you missed the point of the parent's comment. And if you weren't trying to imply that, and weren't just stating a tautology, then it still isn't clear what point you are trying to make.
>Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.
it also means not immediately dismissing different perspectives.
It is self defeating to remove emotional bias when the statement in question is an emotional plea. That's likely the root of all the reservations you're getting in replies.
> Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people. These are individuals of exceptional professional and personal caliber who have made outstanding contributions to who we are today. To each of them, I extend my heartfelt thanks and deepest regrets that we have come to this point.
it is still a weird suggestion. given two truths "we are currently failing" and "we decided to change course" it makes sense to bundle them into "we tried something, we must face it didn't work, there are negative consequences now, we are hopeful a new direction will save us".
sometime corporate doublespeak is just trying to communicate a narrative or a vision for the future, which in terms of long term survival are often more important than clearly stated facts.
Yes, but that's largely because they serve different purposes.
Mozilla's announcement is a press release for external consumption. Carta's post is internal and for employees, and I'm sure there was one of these for Mozilla as well, but we're not privy to it.
When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.