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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

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.

apaprocki 7y ago
We... like SpiderMonkey very much. Contact in profile ;)
- Redoubts 7y ago
  Oh lol, almost forgot about your terminal stack.
gregschlom 7y ago
Friendly tip: maybe put your contact info in your HN profile?
- sstangl 7y ago
  Oh, thank you! I added it.
_kp6z 7y ago
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.
- scarface74 7y ago
  How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?
  - mcny 7y ago
    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...
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
    - jimmydorry 7y ago
      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.).
    - whatthefoxer 7y ago
      Mozilla has no equity so they make up for it in cash.. well for executives mainly. This makes for lofty salaries
    - 7y ago
waste_monk 7y ago
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.
zozbot234 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Sorry for question, but will you continue work on adopt it to Rust?
- roca 7y ago
  There's also https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe
wslh 7y ago
Could you be a match for https://eos.io/news/eos-virtual-machine-a-high-performance-blockchain-webassembly-interpreter/ https://eos.io/news/eos-virtual-machine-a-high-performance-b... ?
lachlan-sneff 7y ago
Is Dan still there?
- sstangl 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mylons 7y ago
sorry this happened to you.
andreasgal 7y ago
Shoot me an email agal at apple. Also feel free to give my email to anyone else affected.
- krambs 7y ago
  That's cool.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- samat 7y ago
  For others who are interested in who's the parent is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal
pabs3 7y ago
Igalia are hiring for WebKit and related work: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/ https://www.igalia.com/jobs/
hartator 7y ago
Shot me an email at julien at serpapi.com.
Avi-D-coder 7y ago
How many people are left working on Cranelift?
tzjmetron 7y ago
That sucks, man! Hope you find a better place soon.
RavenessaX 7y ago
We have many job openings at SpaceX for senior software engineers, please do apply! https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5B%5D=761&type%5B%5D=20 https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5...
bemeurer 7y ago
If you’re interested in non-compiler, HPC Rust work reach out at bernardo at standard dot ai
awill 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Your number is high, estimating from user population and search revenue share market rates.
modarts 7y ago
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
pascalpaillier 7y ago
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 pascal.paillier@zama.ai.
kraken-eng 7y ago
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-dd90df0e9105 https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...
wdanilo 7y ago
LUNA (http://luna-lang.org 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 7y ago
  In case anyone is interested, here is a more formal description of positions we are looking for: https://github.com/luna/hiring https://github.com/luna/hiring
- joshsyn 7y ago
  Are you guys moving away from haskell?
  - rurban 7y ago
    Scala apparently
zeuxcg 7y ago
If you're interested in language runtime work (in C++) e-mail arseny at roblox.com
shanbar 7y ago
GitHub is hiring, we have quite a few roles posted, and many more opening... https://github.com/about/careers https://github.com/about/careers
artemis1666 7y ago
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.
dzlobin 7y ago
Facebook is definitely looking for folks with compiler experience. Feel free to reach out at dannyz [at] fb

apaprocki 7y ago

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

Redoubts 7y ago
Oh lol, almost forgot about your terminal stack.

gregschlom 7y ago

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

sstangl 7y ago
Oh, thank you! I added it.

_kp6z 7y ago

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.

scarface74 7y ago
How much could they have scaled backed their comp to save 70 jobs?
- mcny 7y ago
  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...
- Aeolun 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
  - jimmydorry 7y ago
    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.).
  - whatthefoxer 7y ago
    Mozilla has no equity so they make up for it in cash.. well for executives mainly. This makes for lofty salaries
  - 7y ago

waste_monk 7y ago

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.

zozbot234 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Sorry for question, but will you continue work on adopt it to Rust?
roca 7y ago
There's also https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe

wslh 7y ago

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

lachlan-sneff 7y ago

Is Dan still there?

sstangl 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mylons 7y ago

sorry this happened to you.

andreasgal 7y ago

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

krambs 7y ago
That's cool.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
samat 7y ago
For others who are interested in who's the parent is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gal

pabs3 7y ago

Igalia are hiring for WebKit and related work: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/ https://www.igalia.com/jobs/

hartator 7y ago

Shot me an email at julien at serpapi.com.

Avi-D-coder 7y ago

How many people are left working on Cranelift?

tzjmetron 7y ago

That sucks, man! Hope you find a better place soon.

RavenessaX 7y ago

We have many job openings at SpaceX for senior software engineers, please do apply! https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5B%5D=761&type%5B%5D=20 https://www.spacex.com/careers/list?field_job_category_tid%5...

bemeurer 7y ago

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

awill 7y ago

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 7y ago
Your number is high, estimating from user population and search revenue share market rates.

modarts 7y ago

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

pascalpaillier 7y ago

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 pascal.paillier@zama.ai.

kraken-eng 7y ago

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-dd90df0e9105 https://jobs.lever.co/kraken/4c864c8f-bde6-443d-b521-dd90df0...

wdanilo 7y ago

LUNA (http://luna-lang.org 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 7y ago
In case anyone is interested, here is a more formal description of positions we are looking for: https://github.com/luna/hiring https://github.com/luna/hiring
joshsyn 7y ago
Are you guys moving away from haskell?
- rurban 7y ago
  Scala apparently

zeuxcg 7y ago

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

shanbar 7y ago

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

artemis1666 7y ago

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.

dzlobin 7y ago

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