4 ms·

Mozilla isn't a monolith. Like most medium and large organizations, your experience can vary greatly between teams and management chains. If Mozilla's mission

Mozilla isn't a monolith. Like most medium and large organizations, your experience can vary greatly between teams and management chains. If Mozilla's mission and manifesto resonate with you, give it a shot. With Microsoft throwing their weight behind Chromium, we're the last bastion standing against a WebKit-derived monoculture. It's an impossible challenge, but it matters, and we've beaten the odds before. Current openings are at https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/ https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/, and I'd encourage you to apply.

codezero 8y ago
That's the problem though. From the outside, there's no way to know if you're going to end up in the "good" part of the company or not. Sure, you can do your best to screen the company, but it's not too hard in the short interview process to mask a lot of the warts. You could say this is true at any company, but it feels like more of a problem when comparing a company with lots of really good reviews/testimonials to one with very few good ones. I think I'd have to have a close friend, or someone who I trust internally, to convince me of the quality of a particular team at this point, and I haven't got that. Also, I've moved off the career path, I think, that would be of value at Mozilla.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  > From the outside, there's no way to know if you're going to end up in the "good" part of the company or not. I think this is a serious problem in all sorts of fields, and I've never heard of a good answer. Sometimes Glassdoor is enough to get impressions like "healthy devops team, unhealthy frontend and sales teams", but with companies where the same job title appears on many teams it's even harder to sort out. I suspect you're right that it's a significant reason for word-of-mouth job searches; they're a candidate's best form of diligence. It definitely cuts both ways, too - no matter what the prevailing culture a large company is likely to have teams out of sync with it. Places like Uber and Riot Games that make the news for bad culture have teams who aren't exposed to that stuff, and on the other side we've all heard stories of localized tyranny and incompetence within otherwise-great companies.
  - codezero 8y ago
    Yeah, personally, when I am trying to find this out if I'm speaking with a current employee who is on the team I would be working for, I try to drill down to see if problems are related to poor middle management (a single bad manager can destroy an entire team and any team that is connected to it), or whether it's endemic in the culture, which is harder to suss out, but is usually something you can infer when asking about over-arching company strategy and how plans get executed from the top down.
- techslave 8y ago
  But why is this a problem? You don't go to work there and then you are stuck for 20 years. You can learn in 3 months if it is viable and if not, assuming you are well credentialed and easily employable, move on. It's worth the chance if you've drunk the kool-aid otherwise. You're just giving yourself reasons to fail. Give yourself a reason to succeed.
  - codezero 8y ago
    The time and emotional effort of changing companies is a huge fixed cost, and I personally don't want to do it twice in three months ever, but you are right, it's always an option.
fabrice_d 8y ago
Mozilla Corp keep painting themselves as the only bearers of the Mozilla Manifesto values. But the reality is that MoCo has done so many missteps that they have lost all credibility there. You are still relying on the same and only end user product as in 2004 and drink the coolaid of Mitchell's talks twice a year at the all hands. You are losing against chromium because gecko was never made a platform for others to use. There is not even a platform engineering group with its own VP since it got folded into Firefox when the engineering VP decided to cut the support for the only other gecko product, FirefoxOS. But hey, he's still on the payroll with an executive assistant making his haircut appointments, so all is fine! The management is so risk adverse it's ridiculous given how much they have in the bank. The good news is that innovation on the web happens in other places now - just look at all dweb projects, another area that MoCo refused to staff at a decent level.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  > the only other gecko product, FirefoxOS. Thunderbird still has more users than FirefoxOS ever did. At a technological failure, the more-or-less passive decision to abandon any embedding story for Gecko is probably Mozilla's single biggest fault. (I say more-or-less passive because the transition to Gecko 2.0 necessitated adjusting embedding hooks, and the original intent was that it would be temporary until a new embedding story could be worked out. The direct embedding was then abandoned in favor XULRunner, itself abandoned in favor of webapprt, itself abandoned in favor of... nothing, so far as I know).
  - BrendanEich 8y ago
    KaiOS has 50M users heading toward 100M. This is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS and shows that the latter failed only due to Mozilla leadership failures. Blaming it for weakness within Firefox or non-OS platform teams is self-refuting.
coldtea 8y ago
>Mozilla isn't a monolith. Like most medium and large organizations, your experience can vary greatly between teams and management chains. That sounds like part of the problem. Mozilla shouldn't "vary greatly between teams and management chains" like it's some fossilized megacorp -- that's for the Oracle's of this world. It should be a nimble and efficient non-profit style organization.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yeah, that's what bothers me. They get hundreds of millions of dollars a year and they still manage to act like a cash-starved corporation. 1) "Can't afford" the development time to allow me to customize keyboard shortcuts. They deprecated the old functionality and replaced with a limited "oh, extensions can do that, but they only take effect after the page has loaded." Super Metroid had that in 1992 for the SNES. 2) No unsigned extensions because of a phantom "security risk". Not even if you enable it in an obscure part of the config. Geez, if I can't modify my own open-source software, what's the point? You might as well shrink-wrap Firefox and make me get it from Microsoft at Best Buy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8 3) Mr. Robot marketing integration, where the marketing was so important that they got to override reasonable concerns about "gee, do you really think we should force an add-on for a security update that has a cryptic message in its description?"
leoc 8y ago
When is Atom/RSS support getting reintegrated into core Firefox, then?

codezero 8y ago

That's the problem though. From the outside, there's no way to know if you're going to end up in the "good" part of the company or not. Sure, you can do your best to screen the company, but it's not too hard in the short interview process to mask a lot of the warts. You could say this is true at any company, but it feels like more of a problem when comparing a company with lots of really good reviews/testimonials to one with very few good ones. I think I'd have to have a close friend, or someone who I trust internally, to convince me of the quality of a particular team at this point, and I haven't got that. Also, I've moved off the career path, I think, that would be of value at Mozilla.

Bartweiss 8y ago
> From the outside, there's no way to know if you're going to end up in the "good" part of the company or not. I think this is a serious problem in all sorts of fields, and I've never heard of a good answer. Sometimes Glassdoor is enough to get impressions like "healthy devops team, unhealthy frontend and sales teams", but with companies where the same job title appears on many teams it's even harder to sort out. I suspect you're right that it's a significant reason for word-of-mouth job searches; they're a candidate's best form of diligence. It definitely cuts both ways, too - no matter what the prevailing culture a large company is likely to have teams out of sync with it. Places like Uber and Riot Games that make the news for bad culture have teams who aren't exposed to that stuff, and on the other side we've all heard stories of localized tyranny and incompetence within otherwise-great companies.
- codezero 8y ago
  Yeah, personally, when I am trying to find this out if I'm speaking with a current employee who is on the team I would be working for, I try to drill down to see if problems are related to poor middle management (a single bad manager can destroy an entire team and any team that is connected to it), or whether it's endemic in the culture, which is harder to suss out, but is usually something you can infer when asking about over-arching company strategy and how plans get executed from the top down.
techslave 8y ago
But why is this a problem? You don't go to work there and then you are stuck for 20 years. You can learn in 3 months if it is viable and if not, assuming you are well credentialed and easily employable, move on. It's worth the chance if you've drunk the kool-aid otherwise. You're just giving yourself reasons to fail. Give yourself a reason to succeed.
- codezero 8y ago
  The time and emotional effort of changing companies is a huge fixed cost, and I personally don't want to do it twice in three months ever, but you are right, it's always an option.

fabrice_d 8y ago

Mozilla Corp keep painting themselves as the only bearers of the Mozilla Manifesto values. But the reality is that MoCo has done so many missteps that they have lost all credibility there. You are still relying on the same and only end user product as in 2004 and drink the coolaid of Mitchell's talks twice a year at the all hands. You are losing against chromium because gecko was never made a platform for others to use. There is not even a platform engineering group with its own VP since it got folded into Firefox when the engineering VP decided to cut the support for the only other gecko product, FirefoxOS. But hey, he's still on the payroll with an executive assistant making his haircut appointments, so all is fine! The management is so risk adverse it's ridiculous given how much they have in the bank. The good news is that innovation on the web happens in other places now - just look at all dweb projects, another area that MoCo refused to staff at a decent level.

jcranmer 8y ago
> the only other gecko product, FirefoxOS. Thunderbird still has more users than FirefoxOS ever did. At a technological failure, the more-or-less passive decision to abandon any embedding story for Gecko is probably Mozilla's single biggest fault. (I say more-or-less passive because the transition to Gecko 2.0 necessitated adjusting embedding hooks, and the original intent was that it would be temporary until a new embedding story could be worked out. The direct embedding was then abandoned in favor XULRunner, itself abandoned in favor of webapprt, itself abandoned in favor of... nothing, so far as I know).
- BrendanEich 8y ago
  KaiOS has 50M users heading toward 100M. This is the lineal descendant of FirefoxOS and shows that the latter failed only due to Mozilla leadership failures. Blaming it for weakness within Firefox or non-OS platform teams is self-refuting.

coldtea 8y ago

>Mozilla isn't a monolith. Like most medium and large organizations, your experience can vary greatly between teams and management chains. That sounds like part of the problem. Mozilla shouldn't "vary greatly between teams and management chains" like it's some fossilized megacorp -- that's for the Oracle's of this world. It should be a nimble and efficient non-profit style organization.

SilasX 8y ago
Yeah, that's what bothers me. They get hundreds of millions of dollars a year and they still manage to act like a cash-starved corporation. 1) "Can't afford" the development time to allow me to customize keyboard shortcuts. They deprecated the old functionality and replaced with a limited "oh, extensions can do that, but they only take effect after the page has loaded." Super Metroid had that in 1992 for the SNES. 2) No unsigned extensions because of a phantom "security risk". Not even if you enable it in an obscure part of the config. Geez, if I can't modify my own open-source software, what's the point? You might as well shrink-wrap Firefox and make me get it from Microsoft at Best Buy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8 3) Mr. Robot marketing integration, where the marketing was so important that they got to override reasonable concerns about "gee, do you really think we should force an add-on for a security update that has a cryptic message in its description?"

leoc 8y ago

When is Atom/RSS support getting reintegrated into core Firefox, then?