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>"Crucially, the organization vowed to double down and "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams" – products like its bookmarking app Pocket, it

>"Crucially, the organization vowed to double down and "ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams" – products like its bookmarking app Pocket, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its $4.99-a-month VPN subscription service. >“The people who are included in the reduction are both true Mozillians, and professionals with high degrees of skill and expertise and commitment," CEO Mitchell Baker said in a memo. "This action is not in any way – not, not, not – a reflection on personal or professional qualities.” >Mozilla's Servo team, which was working away on a new browser engine for Firefox in Rust, was closed down by the cuts. The group working on the Mozilla Developer Network – the essential bible for web devs and programmers – was hit hard, too, as were some of its security, policy, and tooling staffers. How exactly would folks working on things like browsers engines, Security, policy and tooling not be extremely valuable for working on "products like its bookmarking app Pocket, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its $4.99-a-month VPN subscription service."? Further the fact that $400-450 million dollars in new funding is announced days after large layoffs is says a lot about CEO Mitchell Baker's management and values. This CEO is the one who should be looking for a new job right now.

StillBored 6y ago
Teams that instead of fixing their main product, go off and create even larger products that don't have immediate revenue streams do little to "ship new products faster" or help the bottom line. This is going to be down voted, but if I were running a software dev team charged with producing X and they spent all their time doing Y because they "need" a new tool I would question their value. Particularly if all the competitors are kicking our butts, and don't seem to need said tool. So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground up create a new langage/ecosystem? Outside of the tiny developer community using rust, what does it bring to the end users of firefox (you know the other few billion people on the planet who aren't developers) that couldn't have been done with just spending the time to fix compiler warnings/errors and enable some basic code analysis/linter functionality on the existing code base? (which yes, I've fixed some bugs in firefox, its a giant mess, every time a new GCC comes out, firefox needs to have bugs patched just to run).
- bogomipz 6y ago
  My larger point was why If you have talented developers and hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding can't you simply give those developers the option to stay with the company and refocus their efforts on the new areas in which you seek to grow the business? It doesn't seem like that was even a consideration. Also there were also far more than just Rust folks affected by this layoff.
- the_other 6y ago
  > So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground up create a new langage/ecosystem? I would yes “yes”. The other browser-makers all steer an ecosystem.

StillBored 6y ago

Teams that instead of fixing their main product, go off and create even larger products that don't have immediate revenue streams do little to "ship new products faster" or help the bottom line. This is going to be down voted, but if I were running a software dev team charged with producing X and they spent all their time doing Y because they "need" a new tool I would question their value. Particularly if all the competitors are kicking our butts, and don't seem to need said tool. So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground up create a new langage/ecosystem? Outside of the tiny developer community using rust, what does it bring to the end users of firefox (you know the other few billion people on the planet who aren't developers) that couldn't have been done with just spending the time to fix compiler warnings/errors and enable some basic code analysis/linter functionality on the existing code base? (which yes, I've fixed some bugs in firefox, its a giant mess, every time a new GCC comes out, firefox needs to have bugs patched just to run).

bogomipz 6y ago
My larger point was why If you have talented developers and hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding can't you simply give those developers the option to stay with the company and refocus their efforts on the new areas in which you seek to grow the business? It doesn't seem like that was even a consideration. Also there were also far more than just Rust folks affected by this layoff.
the_other 6y ago
> So, rust is great and all, but is mozilla really the org that needs to ground up create a new langage/ecosystem? I would yes “yes”. The other browser-makers all steer an ecosystem.