14 ms·

Leaving Mozilla

174 points by dmm 6y ago

johncessna 6y ago
>For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered. I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months. I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.
- oAlbe 6y ago
  What was your reaction to that? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never been in the situation and wouldn't know what to do.
  - johncessna 6y ago
    Confusion, mainly. Part of me didn't understand why everyone else didn't commit to the team effort. Ah, to be young and have no responsibilities. Another part of me was genuinely confused how an immovable date got moved. It wasn't until later that I understood that there's no such thing as an immovable date. What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target. I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.
omosubi 6y ago
Emily seems to have the gift of being able to be noticed wherever she goes - I almost never go on software development twitter (or any other area of twitter for that matter) but whenever I do she seems to have some recommended tweet listed alongside whatever I'm looking at - and now a top post on HN about leaving because she wants something different - impressive
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> The cherry on top was being specifically targeted for harassment that same week after the release by unhappy users of Firefox looking for someone to direct their frustrations at. Thats lovely.
- coldpie 6y ago
  I work on an open source project which is popular, but definitely a lot less used than Firefox. I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one. While I don't do that anymore, it does still give me with a strong sense of maintaining a "firewall" with the public. I don't put myself out there as a public face more than necessary. I don't have work email or any of that on my phone. If it's not work hours, I'm not dealing with it. The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been, and these days I find the less time I spend around technology, the happier I am.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    "The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been" Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"
    - loopz 6y ago
      Flaming was invented when the internet was born. Netiquette came later but didn't really catch on as well..
    - gggtt 6y ago
      But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away. Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it. Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
throwaway123x2 6y ago
FireFox is my main driver and I still use it on Android... but I have to say the android refresh wasn't great. It's full on random usability errors, it crashes, and they started curating extensions for mobile. That said, I do appreciate all the work FireFox devs put in to give us a Chrome alternative. Misfires happen. I hope FF for Android keeps getting better with time.
- dralley 6y ago
  I've never seen a crash, and personally I can attest that the new version is much snappier and more responsive. I don't like every aspect of the UI but it was a worthwhile upgrade IMO. re: addons, a lot of people were understandably upset about this, myself included for a while. With that said, in the months after release every extension which had been disabled by the upgrade started coming back online as the extension API was slowly added back after the rewrite. I can certainly sympathize with the maintenaince headache of trying to maintain one old decrepit piece of software while simultaneously trying to get the one one out the door, since that's exactly what I've spent the last 4 years of my life doing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    There's a story here: Many extensions, including some major ones are still broken on Firefox desktop and I think people are afraid this will happen on mobile as well :-/
adamcstephens 6y ago
I hope Emily can learn to separate work from not-work, and set those boundaries early in any new role. It's not healthy to work all the time, and we all need our own time.
- mjip 6y ago
  I'm sure you didn't intend it but your comment comes off as a bit condescending (a good litmus test for that is checking how a comment like this would read if the author was an older, more experienced man). Setting appropriate work-life boundaries is a common issue now in the covid WFH era and something people at all levels are struggling with. I've found uninstalling Slack on my phone to be helpful in enforcing this.
thgaway17 6y ago
Looking at the picture makes me wonder why tech doesn’t get more constant criticism for being almost completely devoid of black faces?
- mdoms 6y ago
  Tech gets unending criticism for lack of diversity including the lack of black employees.
  - thgaway17 6y ago
    There’s all sorts of age, gender, and racial diversity in that photo. Just no black faces.
    - rvz 6y ago
      So what and who cares? Just because you see one team that doesn't have a 'black face' in a photo means they should be criticised for not having such a person in the team? Are you going to look for every black face in Mozilla's all hands meeting? I just want Firefox for Android to work better and whoever is qualified to make this happen regardless of the colour of their face, I don't care; neither do the users care either. Maybe it's only the racists that care so much about the colour of someone's face is on the team.
      - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
        That's the usual defensive line. Its not about color as long as the work gets done. Never mind imbalance or systematic exclusion, that can't be real. Its ever so easy to dismiss bias when we have an emotional connection. It's worth being careful about, noticing and even sometimes bringing up. And not helpful to get trolled and mocked for bringing it up. Is this picture really disproportion in makeup? Lets see, 40 people, black faces make up 14% of America. What's the probability that's by chance? Its about 1 in 1000. But lets be real. Black engineers are rare, much less than 14%. From ^this site its about 6%. That comes out to maybe a 1 in 12 chance of happening by accident. So who knows. Maybe Mozilla is that 1 in 12. ^ https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
systemvoltage 6y ago
I still use Firefox. I’m sticking around. It’s becoming more annoying to use, but I’d rather support Mozilla than anyone else. The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me. To the author, thanks for your efforts.
- ppf 6y ago
  I'm becoming more and more of the opinion that the web is dead and Google has won.
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    Same. But I’ll continue to use Firefox until someone turns out the lights...
    - EvilEy3 6y ago
      Same. Firefox + Lockwise is a great combination, will also use Mozilla VPN when that comes out.
      - tehbeard 6y ago
        Wasn't Mozilla VPN just a white label of a shady VPN company? Or did they switch partners? Vaguely recall some unsettledness when it was first announced.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        cbsks 6y ago
        They use Mullvad, which is a reputable VPN provider.
  - jakub_g 6y ago
    It's not true, at least until the only allowed engine on iOS is Safari. And it's the Safari, not Firefox, who sets the lowest bar feature-wise and in dev experience for several years already.
renewiltord 6y ago
There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same. Cater to them at your own risk.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  You don't think that "not wanting the GAFAMs to own the Internet" might also be a reason?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    I'm sure they say that but they attack the people advocating their cause so often that I doubt it. You see, there's no range on their responses. DuckDuckGo using a favicon service without thinking about it would be as evil as Google intentionally using HTML5 Local Storage to bypass cookies.
walrus01 6y ago
> That and.. I am also extremely burnt out. > Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.
- u678u 6y ago
  Its not just that, the one week of PTO she talks about as if its really unusual.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    That as well, and the part immediately next to it quoted: > but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration. and this > On the negative side, it has become increasingly hard for me to separate work from not work. I found myself “contributing” (read - working) at all hours of the day. Replying to issues, emails, and public chats when I was in bed at midnight, when I just woke up at 7am, in the car on the way to go hiking on the weekend, and then while ON the hike.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Yes, Please! Burnout culture is horrible and we need to respect our work/life balance. If you work for a company where you can't say "I'll get to that first thing tomorrow" then you should be working somewhere else. Unreasonable expectations usually starts with management though. I had a "boss" who was very much my senior as far as age but had zero management experience and his benchmark for value was Lines of Code and Cards Completed instead of better value metrics like features delivered, velocity, bugs reported, etc. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.
- aloisdg 6y ago
  In France we work 35h and I thin we should move to 28h. More and more company do the move. https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-jours-par-semaine https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-...
gabereiser 6y ago
> ...but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration. Welcome to agile? I know the feeling, honestly, but in software engineering there's always more bugs to fix, more features to develop, more needs of the users that require your attention. Cutting a release should feel like letting go, and indeed at places it does, but ultimately once the release is out in the wild it's done. The only thing to do then is to move forward with the next iteration, the next sprint, the next release. Sorry, but are there examples or cites for this harassment from the users? Was it fallout from the layoffs? I feel like I need a bit more context.
- jvzr 6y ago
  I have no particular data for her harassment, but I've read here and on other media outlets some pretty angry comments about that Android rewrite. I can totally imagine some people venting on Twitter, and even targeting parts of the team. Though I can't say I've seen that myself... just hypothesizing.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    That's what I wanted to know. Was there targeted harassment like this from users? Was it just twitter flame? Did she get angry emails? I understand it has no bearing on the OP but I feel like it would add gravity to her experience if we had some context to empathize with.
    - ekager 6y ago
      Hi! Emily here. Added some more context in a footnote to the original blog post about the worst types of harassment I experienced.
      - gabereiser 6y ago
        Thank you. I’m not doubting it happened. I thank you for updating the post with the extent of the harassment. It’s something I think people don’t realize how bad it is. Or has become. I’m sorry you experienced that.
staticelf 6y ago
Kind of uninteresting post tbh, I would love the authors take about how it is like working at Mozilla now when they are going hard with the identity politics. I can't imagine everyone at Mozilla are sharing that specific political agenda, or are they? Maybe everyone that didn't agree with the stuff they're pushing now got fired? I don't know, but that is what I want to know. All I am saying is that I expected it to be some juicy information about how it is like working at mozilla but I got disappointed (please don't downvote me for asking questions and sharing my humble opinions).
tppiotrowski 6y ago
If you really love your work or want to make an impact it’s possible to work “all the time”. This can be so rewarding but since most startups fail and the next big feature can flop it can take a huge toll on your life. My dad always said it’s good to have at least 3 or 4 legs on your stool instead of 1. Family, friends, health, hobbies, faith, etc. That way if one of the legs fails the others can still support it. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket...
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Sometimes you have to go all in, though. At least if you want to make a big jump.
muglug 6y ago
Speaking just from my own experience, maintaining open-source software can be unhealthily engrossing. The combination of wanting to please random internet strangers and everyone being in different time zones has, at times, overcome the flimsy work-life barriers I’ve tried to erect.
mauricioc 6y ago
The Firefox mobile rewrite (Fenix) is just fantastic, and for me it is a huge improvement over the previous version. Many thanks to Emily and the whole team that shipped it, it's much appreciated :)
pictur 6y ago
This woman seems not sincere at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- mrkwse 6y ago
  Emily has a name, and I don't see how you've come to that conclusion. Her account of living resonates with a lot of my reflections when I left my previous job. Perhaps you haven't yet been lucky enough to have a job that has been similarly fulfilling.
  - pictur 6y ago
    People like this insincere behavior and I respect it. I just don't like it.
gradeAgrifting 6y ago
Gotta say that Emily comes across as a HUGE grifter and part of the reason identity politics have swiftly crept up into tech. It's obvious (and apparent from her past tweets) that she joined tech because she'd have an advantage as a female (can play the diversity card), and the $$$. I mean look @ the suggested article after this post: "Going Viral as a Woman in Tech". That was her edge, she made her money, and now will potentially move back to the east coast and be with her rich family. If any of you actually feel bad for her you're getting played. Now I'm sure her next move is to be a consultant to other women or move out of engineering entirely. This will probably get killed, but someone needs to expose these charlatans for who they really are. Good riddance.
ascorbic 6y ago
The amount of abuse she got on Twitter after the FF Android launch was hard to believe. I don't understand how somebody thinks that disliking an update to a piece of free software justifies shouting abuse at an engineer who worked on it.
leereeves 6y ago
> I first joined Mozilla as an intern during my change-career journey mainly because I had taken one Android class, knew some Java, and applied on a whim at the right time to hit the recruiter’s inbox. Is it that easy to become an intern at Mozilla?
- ekager 6y ago
  Sorry, how many years of experience with professional software development do you expect your interns to have?
  - leereeves 6y ago
    If I offered internships I think I'd be lucky to get a few applicants, but I thought internships at top tech companies like Mozilla were very competitive.
    - ekager 6y ago
      And why are you assuming that I wasn't qualified or a competitive candidate? I said I applied on a whim and wasn't drawn to Mozilla for any particular reason, not that I didn't deserve the job?
      - leereeves 6y ago
        I'm only reading what you wrote: "I had taken one Android class, knew some Java". I guess I would have expected them to want some related open source work, or a lot of related coursework, things like that.
  - sundarurfriend 6y ago
    It's clear from the other person's responses that they don't mean it as a jab (which you seem to have taken it to be). Many people have a mythical idea of needing to be a superhuman developer to get any position at a big name tech company. Reading this seems to have made this person realize that such positions might be not as out of reach as they assumed, and they were expressing surprise about that.
patrickscoleman 6y ago
If you read these comments, Emily, just want to say thank you for having the courage to share this in public. Burnout is tough but it gets better. Helpful for others to know they're not alone. And thank you for Firefox on Android!
- ekager 6y ago
  I read them <3 Thank you!
  - gwenzek 6y ago
    Just wanted to see I love Firefox Android, I have been on nightly release for at least a year now, and it's great !
  - FloatArtifact 6y ago
    Keep going strong! Thank you for making open source software a great place to be.
CivBase 6y ago
I'm actually very happy with the Firefox Android rewrite and I strongly prefer it over Chrome. It sounds like some people had problems, but I'd expect teething issues with any significant software changes. With such a big undertaking and how many people responded to the rollout (not to mention everything else that has happened in the last year), I'd be surprised if most devs on the project didn't find themselves burnt out at this point.
ausbah 6y ago
if anyone else here uses tiktok, highly recommend checking out her page. lots of pretty funny content about the tech industry
vlunkr 6y ago
She says in here that she "cared deeply about the product." Honest question, it is better to not care about the product? As I've grown as a developer, I've become less personally attached to the products I work on. I still care that it's a quality product, and that it's stable, tested, etc. But I don't attach it to my personality or my self-worth. Ultimately what happens to it is out of your control, (assuming it's not a 100% solo project) so it's dangerous to have that attachment. I'm not sure that caring deeply about a project actually improves it in a meaningful way. Also, this is a nice post. Sharing real stories about burnout and helping others understand it is great.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  It's been one of the most important lessons I've had to learn in my career and am still learning: not to care so much about everything. That said, working on something that I care about is also one of the aspects of my job I love the most. I think the trick is to carefully pick a few things that you care about and focus on that, but then also to have a far more hands-off approach for pretty much everything else, and let others shape those things to their visions.
jakub_g 6y ago
For some context: Firefox for Android, which shipped a few months back, was a rewrite from scratch, with new browsing engine (development of "old Firefox" was halted and there were no releases for >1 year). Due to this, it initially shipped with no support for extensions except uBlock Origin, (which was a deal breaker for many long-time users; it now supports a handful of manually vetted extensions, but still not all AFAICT), plus of course when you rewrite from scratch, there will be some rough edges. Shipping without extensions was a sure way to enrage users, but having an app in development for 2+ years to ship "perfect v1" had its drawbacks too, so it was a tough call for Mozilla. Despite that, and some edge-case UX polish need, I find new Firefox Android pretty ok and as a 2021 "degooglify myself" resolution, I've been using it for a few weeks now. So far so good, even if some aspects of it work differently that Chrome (for example, it's more aggressive in garbage collecting inactive tabs). When the small issues are resolved, it will be a very good browser.
glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
> the constant stream of negative comments from unhappy and rude users during the work week and outside of it was extremely draining This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports from contributors. Open source organizations should focus on fostering the community and educating users. Not trying to champion new versions and rewrites themselves. Mozilla at first focused on selling the default search spot (and spent that money on exec salary and moonshot projects not related to the browser at all). Now they are focusing on getting mobile users in order to sell their attached products. When you pay for developers, and make your projects even more closed, you call that on yourself. You are now a company competing on the freemium market. Case in point, i was an early contributor to Gaia (the mozilla phone OS). I could build and change the browser with ease. I would send in detailed bug reports. Now on android, I can barely get a decent build with the google libraries baked in, let alone make meaningful changes. I just hold off updates and hope somebody else do the work for me (for a while f-droid folks did :) And I will not even get into my worse petty peeve which is the recent android addons non-techcnical-totally-political-whitelist. sigh. or the changes on every revision to the bookmarks. keywords, folders, etc. can't keep my data consistent for a while now :( But to close in a good note: mozilla is not representative of opensource! it is much better elsewhere. thank you!
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  No. Abusers are responsible for their abuse. This is non-negotiable. The people on the Internet chose to be abusive. That's their fault. That is never anyone else's fault, period. > the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once others had already made that choice. How dare you say that we can blame the recipient of abuse for the choices of others to be abusive. You have no right. If you choose to be rude to someone else on the Internet, you alone are fully responsible, without regard for any extenuating circumstances whatsoever. If you are having a medical event, seek in-reality medical attention and prepare an apology when your medical treatment has progressed far enough. If you didn't mean to be abusive, apologize, and then demonstrate over time that you're becoming less accidentally abusive. If you thought that the shield of anonymity on Twitter would protect you from being caught, you're no different than someone who throws bricks into people's windshields on the highway. No circumstance whatsoever sets aside your personal responsibility for the words you produced on the Internet. It doesn't matter what they did, what their employer did, what their software did. It doesn't matter if they could be perceived as being abusive to you. None of that matters at all. There is absolutely no room for blame-sharing or blame-transfer here. There are no excuses for choosing to be abusive in this way. You simply cannot transfer one iota of responsibility here. That decision terminates at you, and you alone. ps. I don't know if you're abusive or not, and I honestly don't care. This isn't about you, whoever you are. This is about your attempt to transfer the responsibility for abuse in part or in full from the abusers to the recipient of their abuse. That attempt, and my detailed refutal, is the sole focus of my comment. The English word "generic individual target within a plural set" is, unhappily, "you". Some confusion may occur, and I don't have the English skills to mitigate that at this time. No doubt someone will chime in with a better way to phrase this. I endorse whatever corrections are necessary to resolve the tense difficulty here.
musicale 6y ago
> I did take one week of PTO right after our release! ;-( It's disappointing but unsurprising that Mozilla apparently seems to facilitate a burnout work culture like every other tech company: New/college hire -> work like mad with no life -> burn out -> quit -> repeat process for the next sucker in line.
charliebrownau 6y ago
Firefox is now run by { THEM } They now operate as Global Left Authorian poltical activism They no longer operate on Merit Qualifcations Reward Hard Work Goals Pride They are Anti White Anti Freedom Anti Consumer Anti White straight male ================================= Replacements / Solutions * PC Firefox >>> LibreWolf - https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ * PC Chrome >> Iridium or Ungoogled Chromium - https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/ * PC Tor >> TOR + LibreFox - https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox * Android Browser >> Bromite - https://github.com/bromite/bromite https://github.com/bromite/bromite
eidelweissgirl 6y ago
I just quit my job of 10 years too. One of the big reasons it burning out. Working myself to death by doing 8 hours at work and also doing leetcoding, interview prep to get into FAANG.
pjkundert 6y ago
We’re all leaving Mozilla... Give Brave a try; awesome experience, so far.
theknocker 6y ago
In fairness, anyone who actually tried to use firefox for android at the time could readily observe how that release was a total mess. edit: Also, I'm sure that this penchant for hiding behind "muh lived experience" when someone wants to address a technical failure is in no way related to her (and her cheerleaders) rubbing people the wrong way.
jlelse 6y ago
Thank you! I really like the new Firefox for Android, it made me switch back and I'm using it since the early beta versions. I really can't understand the hate against people putting so much effort in creating nice user experiences. If you're not happy with Firefox, just use something else, but don't threaten the developers!

174 points by dmm 6y ago

>For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered. I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months. I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.

oAlbe 6y ago
What was your reaction to that? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never been in the situation and wouldn't know what to do.
- johncessna 6y ago
  Confusion, mainly. Part of me didn't understand why everyone else didn't commit to the team effort. Ah, to be young and have no responsibilities. Another part of me was genuinely confused how an immovable date got moved. It wasn't until later that I understood that there's no such thing as an immovable date. What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target. I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.

omosubi 6y ago

Emily seems to have the gift of being able to be noticed wherever she goes - I almost never go on software development twitter (or any other area of twitter for that matter) but whenever I do she seems to have some recommended tweet listed alongside whatever I'm looking at - and now a top post on HN about leaving because she wants something different - impressive

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> The cherry on top was being specifically targeted for harassment that same week after the release by unhappy users of Firefox looking for someone to direct their frustrations at. Thats lovely.

coldpie 6y ago
I work on an open source project which is popular, but definitely a lot less used than Firefox. I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one. While I don't do that anymore, it does still give me with a strong sense of maintaining a "firewall" with the public. I don't put myself out there as a public face more than necessary. I don't have work email or any of that on my phone. If it's not work hours, I'm not dealing with it. The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been, and these days I find the less time I spend around technology, the happier I am.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  "The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been" Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"
  - loopz 6y ago
    Flaming was invented when the internet was born. Netiquette came later but didn't really catch on as well..
  - gggtt 6y ago
    But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away. Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it. Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.

throwaway123x2 6y ago

FireFox is my main driver and I still use it on Android... but I have to say the android refresh wasn't great. It's full on random usability errors, it crashes, and they started curating extensions for mobile. That said, I do appreciate all the work FireFox devs put in to give us a Chrome alternative. Misfires happen. I hope FF for Android keeps getting better with time.

dralley 6y ago
I've never seen a crash, and personally I can attest that the new version is much snappier and more responsive. I don't like every aspect of the UI but it was a worthwhile upgrade IMO. re: addons, a lot of people were understandably upset about this, myself included for a while. With that said, in the months after release every extension which had been disabled by the upgrade started coming back online as the extension API was slowly added back after the rewrite. I can certainly sympathize with the maintenaince headache of trying to maintain one old decrepit piece of software while simultaneously trying to get the one one out the door, since that's exactly what I've spent the last 4 years of my life doing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- skinkestek 6y ago
  There's a story here: Many extensions, including some major ones are still broken on Firefox desktop and I think people are afraid this will happen on mobile as well :-/

adamcstephens 6y ago

I hope Emily can learn to separate work from not-work, and set those boundaries early in any new role. It's not healthy to work all the time, and we all need our own time.

mjip 6y ago
I'm sure you didn't intend it but your comment comes off as a bit condescending (a good litmus test for that is checking how a comment like this would read if the author was an older, more experienced man). Setting appropriate work-life boundaries is a common issue now in the covid WFH era and something people at all levels are struggling with. I've found uninstalling Slack on my phone to be helpful in enforcing this.

thgaway17 6y ago

Looking at the picture makes me wonder why tech doesn’t get more constant criticism for being almost completely devoid of black faces?

mdoms 6y ago
Tech gets unending criticism for lack of diversity including the lack of black employees.
- thgaway17 6y ago
  There’s all sorts of age, gender, and racial diversity in that photo. Just no black faces.
  - rvz 6y ago
    So what and who cares? Just because you see one team that doesn't have a 'black face' in a photo means they should be criticised for not having such a person in the team? Are you going to look for every black face in Mozilla's all hands meeting? I just want Firefox for Android to work better and whoever is qualified to make this happen regardless of the colour of their face, I don't care; neither do the users care either. Maybe it's only the racists that care so much about the colour of someone's face is on the team.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      That's the usual defensive line. Its not about color as long as the work gets done. Never mind imbalance or systematic exclusion, that can't be real. Its ever so easy to dismiss bias when we have an emotional connection. It's worth being careful about, noticing and even sometimes bringing up. And not helpful to get trolled and mocked for bringing it up. Is this picture really disproportion in makeup? Lets see, 40 people, black faces make up 14% of America. What's the probability that's by chance? Its about 1 in 1000. But lets be real. Black engineers are rare, much less than 14%. From ^this site its about 6%. That comes out to maybe a 1 in 12 chance of happening by accident. So who knows. Maybe Mozilla is that 1 in 12. ^ https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

systemvoltage 6y ago

I still use Firefox. I’m sticking around. It’s becoming more annoying to use, but I’d rather support Mozilla than anyone else. The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me. To the author, thanks for your efforts.

ppf 6y ago
I'm becoming more and more of the opinion that the web is dead and Google has won.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  Same. But I’ll continue to use Firefox until someone turns out the lights...
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Same. Firefox + Lockwise is a great combination, will also use Mozilla VPN when that comes out.
    - tehbeard 6y ago
      Wasn't Mozilla VPN just a white label of a shady VPN company? Or did they switch partners? Vaguely recall some unsettledness when it was first announced.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - cbsks 6y ago
        They use Mullvad, which is a reputable VPN provider.
- jakub_g 6y ago
  It's not true, at least until the only allowed engine on iOS is Safari. And it's the Safari, not Firefox, who sets the lowest bar feature-wise and in dev experience for several years already.

renewiltord 6y ago

There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same. Cater to them at your own risk.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
You don't think that "not wanting the GAFAMs to own the Internet" might also be a reason?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I'm sure they say that but they attack the people advocating their cause so often that I doubt it. You see, there's no range on their responses. DuckDuckGo using a favicon service without thinking about it would be as evil as Google intentionally using HTML5 Local Storage to bypass cookies.

walrus01 6y ago

> That and.. I am also extremely burnt out. > Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.

u678u 6y ago
Its not just that, the one week of PTO she talks about as if its really unusual.
- walrus01 6y ago
  That as well, and the part immediately next to it quoted: > but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration. and this > On the negative side, it has become increasingly hard for me to separate work from not work. I found myself “contributing” (read - working) at all hours of the day. Replying to issues, emails, and public chats when I was in bed at midnight, when I just woke up at 7am, in the car on the way to go hiking on the weekend, and then while ON the hike.
gabereiser 6y ago
Yes, Please! Burnout culture is horrible and we need to respect our work/life balance. If you work for a company where you can't say "I'll get to that first thing tomorrow" then you should be working somewhere else. Unreasonable expectations usually starts with management though. I had a "boss" who was very much my senior as far as age but had zero management experience and his benchmark for value was Lines of Code and Cards Completed instead of better value metrics like features delivered, velocity, bugs reported, etc. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.
aloisdg 6y ago
In France we work 35h and I thin we should move to 28h. More and more company do the move. https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-jours-par-semaine https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-...

gabereiser 6y ago

> ...but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration. Welcome to agile? I know the feeling, honestly, but in software engineering there's always more bugs to fix, more features to develop, more needs of the users that require your attention. Cutting a release should feel like letting go, and indeed at places it does, but ultimately once the release is out in the wild it's done. The only thing to do then is to move forward with the next iteration, the next sprint, the next release. Sorry, but are there examples or cites for this harassment from the users? Was it fallout from the layoffs? I feel like I need a bit more context.

jvzr 6y ago
I have no particular data for her harassment, but I've read here and on other media outlets some pretty angry comments about that Android rewrite. I can totally imagine some people venting on Twitter, and even targeting parts of the team. Though I can't say I've seen that myself... just hypothesizing.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  That's what I wanted to know. Was there targeted harassment like this from users? Was it just twitter flame? Did she get angry emails? I understand it has no bearing on the OP but I feel like it would add gravity to her experience if we had some context to empathize with.
  - ekager 6y ago
    Hi! Emily here. Added some more context in a footnote to the original blog post about the worst types of harassment I experienced.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      Thank you. I’m not doubting it happened. I thank you for updating the post with the extent of the harassment. It’s something I think people don’t realize how bad it is. Or has become. I’m sorry you experienced that.

staticelf 6y ago

Kind of uninteresting post tbh, I would love the authors take about how it is like working at Mozilla now when they are going hard with the identity politics. I can't imagine everyone at Mozilla are sharing that specific political agenda, or are they? Maybe everyone that didn't agree with the stuff they're pushing now got fired? I don't know, but that is what I want to know. All I am saying is that I expected it to be some juicy information about how it is like working at mozilla but I got disappointed (please don't downvote me for asking questions and sharing my humble opinions).

tppiotrowski 6y ago

If you really love your work or want to make an impact it’s possible to work “all the time”. This can be so rewarding but since most startups fail and the next big feature can flop it can take a huge toll on your life. My dad always said it’s good to have at least 3 or 4 legs on your stool instead of 1. Family, friends, health, hobbies, faith, etc. That way if one of the legs fails the others can still support it. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket...

hutzlibu 6y ago
Sometimes you have to go all in, though. At least if you want to make a big jump.

muglug 6y ago

Speaking just from my own experience, maintaining open-source software can be unhealthily engrossing. The combination of wanting to please random internet strangers and everyone being in different time zones has, at times, overcome the flimsy work-life barriers I’ve tried to erect.

mauricioc 6y ago

The Firefox mobile rewrite (Fenix) is just fantastic, and for me it is a huge improvement over the previous version. Many thanks to Emily and the whole team that shipped it, it's much appreciated :)

pictur 6y ago

This woman seems not sincere at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mrkwse 6y ago
Emily has a name, and I don't see how you've come to that conclusion. Her account of living resonates with a lot of my reflections when I left my previous job. Perhaps you haven't yet been lucky enough to have a job that has been similarly fulfilling.
- pictur 6y ago
  People like this insincere behavior and I respect it. I just don't like it.

gradeAgrifting 6y ago

Gotta say that Emily comes across as a HUGE grifter and part of the reason identity politics have swiftly crept up into tech. It's obvious (and apparent from her past tweets) that she joined tech because she'd have an advantage as a female (can play the diversity card), and the $$$. I mean look @ the suggested article after this post: "Going Viral as a Woman in Tech". That was her edge, she made her money, and now will potentially move back to the east coast and be with her rich family. If any of you actually feel bad for her you're getting played. Now I'm sure her next move is to be a consultant to other women or move out of engineering entirely. This will probably get killed, but someone needs to expose these charlatans for who they really are. Good riddance.

ascorbic 6y ago

The amount of abuse she got on Twitter after the FF Android launch was hard to believe. I don't understand how somebody thinks that disliking an update to a piece of free software justifies shouting abuse at an engineer who worked on it.

leereeves 6y ago

> I first joined Mozilla as an intern during my change-career journey mainly because I had taken one Android class, knew some Java, and applied on a whim at the right time to hit the recruiter’s inbox. Is it that easy to become an intern at Mozilla?

ekager 6y ago
Sorry, how many years of experience with professional software development do you expect your interns to have?
- leereeves 6y ago
  If I offered internships I think I'd be lucky to get a few applicants, but I thought internships at top tech companies like Mozilla were very competitive.
  - ekager 6y ago
    And why are you assuming that I wasn't qualified or a competitive candidate? I said I applied on a whim and wasn't drawn to Mozilla for any particular reason, not that I didn't deserve the job?
    - leereeves 6y ago
      I'm only reading what you wrote: "I had taken one Android class, knew some Java". I guess I would have expected them to want some related open source work, or a lot of related coursework, things like that.
- sundarurfriend 6y ago
  It's clear from the other person's responses that they don't mean it as a jab (which you seem to have taken it to be). Many people have a mythical idea of needing to be a superhuman developer to get any position at a big name tech company. Reading this seems to have made this person realize that such positions might be not as out of reach as they assumed, and they were expressing surprise about that.

patrickscoleman 6y ago

If you read these comments, Emily, just want to say thank you for having the courage to share this in public. Burnout is tough but it gets better. Helpful for others to know they're not alone. And thank you for Firefox on Android!

ekager 6y ago
I read them <3 Thank you!
- gwenzek 6y ago
  Just wanted to see I love Firefox Android, I have been on nightly release for at least a year now, and it's great !
- FloatArtifact 6y ago
  Keep going strong! Thank you for making open source software a great place to be.

CivBase 6y ago

I'm actually very happy with the Firefox Android rewrite and I strongly prefer it over Chrome. It sounds like some people had problems, but I'd expect teething issues with any significant software changes. With such a big undertaking and how many people responded to the rollout (not to mention everything else that has happened in the last year), I'd be surprised if most devs on the project didn't find themselves burnt out at this point.

ausbah 6y ago

if anyone else here uses tiktok, highly recommend checking out her page. lots of pretty funny content about the tech industry

vlunkr 6y ago

She says in here that she "cared deeply about the product." Honest question, it is better to not care about the product? As I've grown as a developer, I've become less personally attached to the products I work on. I still care that it's a quality product, and that it's stable, tested, etc. But I don't attach it to my personality or my self-worth. Ultimately what happens to it is out of your control, (assuming it's not a 100% solo project) so it's dangerous to have that attachment. I'm not sure that caring deeply about a project actually improves it in a meaningful way. Also, this is a nice post. Sharing real stories about burnout and helping others understand it is great.

Vinnl 6y ago
It's been one of the most important lessons I've had to learn in my career and am still learning: not to care so much about everything. That said, working on something that I care about is also one of the aspects of my job I love the most. I think the trick is to carefully pick a few things that you care about and focus on that, but then also to have a far more hands-off approach for pretty much everything else, and let others shape those things to their visions.

jakub_g 6y ago

For some context: Firefox for Android, which shipped a few months back, was a rewrite from scratch, with new browsing engine (development of "old Firefox" was halted and there were no releases for >1 year). Due to this, it initially shipped with no support for extensions except uBlock Origin, (which was a deal breaker for many long-time users; it now supports a handful of manually vetted extensions, but still not all AFAICT), plus of course when you rewrite from scratch, there will be some rough edges. Shipping without extensions was a sure way to enrage users, but having an app in development for 2+ years to ship "perfect v1" had its drawbacks too, so it was a tough call for Mozilla. Despite that, and some edge-case UX polish need, I find new Firefox Android pretty ok and as a 2021 "degooglify myself" resolution, I've been using it for a few weeks now. So far so good, even if some aspects of it work differently that Chrome (for example, it's more aggressive in garbage collecting inactive tabs). When the small issues are resolved, it will be a very good browser.

glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago

> the constant stream of negative comments from unhappy and rude users during the work week and outside of it was extremely draining This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports from contributors. Open source organizations should focus on fostering the community and educating users. Not trying to champion new versions and rewrites themselves. Mozilla at first focused on selling the default search spot (and spent that money on exec salary and moonshot projects not related to the browser at all). Now they are focusing on getting mobile users in order to sell their attached products. When you pay for developers, and make your projects even more closed, you call that on yourself. You are now a company competing on the freemium market. Case in point, i was an early contributor to Gaia (the mozilla phone OS). I could build and change the browser with ease. I would send in detailed bug reports. Now on android, I can barely get a decent build with the google libraries baked in, let alone make meaningful changes. I just hold off updates and hope somebody else do the work for me (for a while f-droid folks did :) And I will not even get into my worse petty peeve which is the recent android addons non-techcnical-totally-political-whitelist. sigh. or the changes on every revision to the bookmarks. keywords, folders, etc. can't keep my data consistent for a while now :( But to close in a good note: mozilla is not representative of opensource! it is much better elsewhere. thank you!

floatingatoll 6y ago
No. Abusers are responsible for their abuse. This is non-negotiable. The people on the Internet chose to be abusive. That's their fault. That is never anyone else's fault, period. > the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once others had already made that choice. How dare you say that we can blame the recipient of abuse for the choices of others to be abusive. You have no right. If you choose to be rude to someone else on the Internet, you alone are fully responsible, without regard for any extenuating circumstances whatsoever. If you are having a medical event, seek in-reality medical attention and prepare an apology when your medical treatment has progressed far enough. If you didn't mean to be abusive, apologize, and then demonstrate over time that you're becoming less accidentally abusive. If you thought that the shield of anonymity on Twitter would protect you from being caught, you're no different than someone who throws bricks into people's windshields on the highway. No circumstance whatsoever sets aside your personal responsibility for the words you produced on the Internet. It doesn't matter what they did, what their employer did, what their software did. It doesn't matter if they could be perceived as being abusive to you. None of that matters at all. There is absolutely no room for blame-sharing or blame-transfer here. There are no excuses for choosing to be abusive in this way. You simply cannot transfer one iota of responsibility here. That decision terminates at you, and you alone. ps. I don't know if you're abusive or not, and I honestly don't care. This isn't about you, whoever you are. This is about your attempt to transfer the responsibility for abuse in part or in full from the abusers to the recipient of their abuse. That attempt, and my detailed refutal, is the sole focus of my comment. The English word "generic individual target within a plural set" is, unhappily, "you". Some confusion may occur, and I don't have the English skills to mitigate that at this time. No doubt someone will chime in with a better way to phrase this. I endorse whatever corrections are necessary to resolve the tense difficulty here.

musicale 6y ago

> I did take one week of PTO right after our release! ;-( It's disappointing but unsurprising that Mozilla apparently seems to facilitate a burnout work culture like every other tech company: New/college hire -> work like mad with no life -> burn out -> quit -> repeat process for the next sucker in line.

charliebrownau 6y ago

Firefox is now run by { THEM } They now operate as Global Left Authorian poltical activism They no longer operate on Merit Qualifcations Reward Hard Work Goals Pride They are Anti White Anti Freedom Anti Consumer Anti White straight male ================================= Replacements / Solutions * PC Firefox >>> LibreWolf - https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ * PC Chrome >> Iridium or Ungoogled Chromium - https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/ * PC Tor >> TOR + LibreFox - https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox * Android Browser >> Bromite - https://github.com/bromite/bromite https://github.com/bromite/bromite

eidelweissgirl 6y ago

I just quit my job of 10 years too. One of the big reasons it burning out. Working myself to death by doing 8 hours at work and also doing leetcoding, interview prep to get into FAANG.

pjkundert 6y ago

We’re all leaving Mozilla... Give Brave a try; awesome experience, so far.

theknocker 6y ago

In fairness, anyone who actually tried to use firefox for android at the time could readily observe how that release was a total mess. edit: Also, I'm sure that this penchant for hiding behind "muh lived experience" when someone wants to address a technical failure is in no way related to her (and her cheerleaders) rubbing people the wrong way.

jlelse 6y ago

Thank you! I really like the new Firefox for Android, it made me switch back and I'm using it since the early beta versions. I really can't understand the hate against people putting so much effort in creating nice user experiences. If you're not happy with Firefox, just use something else, but don't threaten the developers!