5 ms·

My Summer at Mozilla

152 points by ryanseys 13y ago

crispy_ 13y ago
I called your name as I reached out for you but when I opened my eyes I was alone...waiting for Raine...
austinz 13y ago
Cool blog post! From your resume it looks like you worked at Blackberry earlier this year. Do you have any thoughts about the differences (cultural, technological, etc) between working for a large company and working for a non-profit organization?
- ryanseys 13y ago
  The differences are really night and day. Blackberry is too large to really have that "home-like" feel, it really just feels like work. Mozilla has character which I definitely feed off for motivation. The attitude of the people at Mozilla is much different than those at BB, as well. Mozilla and everything in it has life, Blackberry unfortunately feels much less-lively. Motivation at Mozilla is fueled by the love of the work and at Blackberry you really can feel the money is the end goal. Both companies are just really different for different reasons, but I definitely prefer Mozilla.
- kitcar 13y ago
  Great question re: "Blackberry V.S. Mozilla work environments" - Related: one thing I've noticed some people don't place enough emphasis on when choosing initial internships/jobs out of school is the business models of companies, and the direct effect that can have on the working environment. In this case, while Mozilla is technically a non-profit, rather than being funded by donations it makes the overwhelming majority of its money by sharing in the advertising revenue generated by the search engines which come pre-installed in Firefox (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/faq/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...). Therefore, even if Mozilla does absolutely nothing in terms of improving any of their products, they will still continue to make money (in the short term, at least), which lifts quite a bit of stress off everyone who works there, and let's management take a longer view perspective in general. Professional service firms (i.e. tech. consulting and agencies) are effectively arbitrage plays - they sell the time of their employees for $X / hr, but only pay the employee $Y / hr, and then collect on the spread. If these companies ever stop selling for just a few moments, the arbitrage breaks down (as they still presumably need to pay their employees...). Therefore, there will likely to be more "stress in the air" in these types of firms, as in some cases all it takes is 1-2 contracts to be canceled for the firm to be unable to make payroll. Hit driven businesses (Which Blackberry as a whole arguably is not, due to the significant revenue driven by their enterprise server), have a different set of issues, which is that losing really sucks for morale - therefore if the company you work for is focused on building a better mousetrap, and slowly over time people internally begin to doubt the quality of the mousetrap they are working on, that can make it really frustrating to work there, regardless of the other perks the company may provide.
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Congratulations. You've officially been spoiled. :) You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome. :P The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
- ryanseys 13y ago
  I am looking forward to trying out new jobs, and love the freedom of internships for this reason alone. That being said, Mozilla will always hold a close place in my heart.
- not_rhodey 13y ago
  This, this is a really lame. You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
  - eshvk 13y ago
    I am not sure where you are going off on the parent post. Also, I don't particularly know what you mean by "exceptional job". However, let me describe a few thoughts I had whilst there (not the submitter). 1. Mozilla's mission is just as important as random company making the pipes more efficient for sending cat/twerking/whatever videos. They are a non-profit and are operated as such. 2. They have some incredibly interesting problems that they are working on. From the research team to the browser development itself. Read interesting = hard. 3. They do pay well. I know this as a former intern; also from word of mouth from people who worked there. :)
    - not_rhodey 13y ago
      I think only the highest of Mozilla and everything they stand for. "You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome." What I'm trying to convey is that I don't believe that anyone need make this compromise. Mozilla is awesome, other organizations are awesome, some freelance gigs are awesome. You can be a software developer without putting yourself through anguish, it's just a matter of priorities.
cbhl 13y ago
It's always interesting to hear what other Software Engineering students have been doing on their internships. Now, if only writing a blog post could replace your work term report. :)
- ryanseys 13y ago
  I wish we could replace that report with something a little more lively!
mrmagooey 13y ago
That sounds like so much fun, I'm very jealous.
eshvk 13y ago
I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analyze seemed frustrating then, yet, it is only after a couple of years in industry that I realize the true value of respecting those who trust their data with you and using it to do greater good.
- marcamillion 13y ago
  Do you get to keep your laptop after - or do you have to give it back at the end?
  - tekacs 13y ago
    You get to keep it. (source: comment below and friend who interned at Mozilla)
    - marcamillion 13y ago
      That's hella cool. This post makes me want to work at Mozilla!
      - infinite8s 13y ago
        That just means it becomes taxable income.
        marcamillion 13y ago
        Never thought of it like that - that's interesting.
      - tekacs 13y ago
        I did another internship for enhanced experience, but I'm going to have to consider it myself one of these years. :) (The pay is also great and the other perks and location are amazing.)
abhinavsharma 13y ago
As a former Mozilla intern, I can confirm that the company has an unusually great intern program! Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were: 1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India. 2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship. 3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk! 4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.
- acchow 13y ago
  I'm fairly certain the Google intern demo is more geographically/culturally diverse. Really glad this guy had a phenomenal time at Mozilla. All of the top internship programs in the bay area are equally good and I hope he gets a chance to try some others :)
  - abhinavsharma 13y ago
    I was thinking about that and I think you're right as far as the overall numbers go, but the intern group is really small (it was <20 when I was there), so the entropy in the distribution would be higher than Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon. And yeah I agree, as much as you like your first internship, switching it up for the second is usually a good idea because that mobility is harder when working full-time.
gluxon 13y ago
Where do I sign up? :)
- reubenmorais 13y ago
  Here! https://careers.mozilla.org/ https://careers.mozilla.org/
  - coke12 13y ago
    It looks like their 2014 internships haven't quite opened up, is that right?
    - ryanseys 13y ago
      That is correct.
iblaine 13y ago
Seems like there is a growing trend by tech companies to spoil interns with the hope of improving HR. This is great and by all means take advantage of it.
- st3fan 13y ago
  Interns are not spoiled. They are simply treated like any other regular employee. I am not sure what you mean with 'improving HR'. Did you mean 'PR' ? Because Mozilla's HR department is doing a pretty great job.
  - zobzu 13y ago
    I don't think regular employes get to keep their laptops :)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
AYBABTME 13y ago
Cool to see you had fun this summer, now you can come back and give a talk about things you worked on at our Ottawa Ruby/JS meetups!
- ryanseys 13y ago
  I'll be back in January to do just that!
  - AYBABTME 13y ago
    Ah, I'll be gone in January =S
whatts 13y ago
Cool guy, is an "open-source advocate" but removes PureCSS's copyright notice: https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md
- ryanseys 13y ago
  This would be a side-effect of using a CSS minifier, not an intentional act against Pure.
  - whatts 13y ago
    Pure's stylesheets are already minified, the only result of re-minifying them is that the copyright will be removed: http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css
    - ryanseys 13y ago
      I squash all my stylesheets into one giant .css file to serve rather than a bunch of individual stylesheets. A side-effect of squashing + minifying (which is done every time I generate my website) is that all comments are removed. You are correct, that notice is not present, but I did not remove it intentionally. To be honest, I didn't read the LICENSE.md of Pure CSS. Shame on me :) Feel free to file a bug against this at: https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - zheng 13y ago
        TBH, I don't think you're in the wrong here, but expecting someone who has already brought something to your attention to file a "bug report" against your personal website is a bit arrogant.
        13y ago
staunch 13y ago
Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks. I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative. That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck. I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.
- gkoberger 13y ago
  No comment on most of that, but to clarify: he worked for Mozilla Corporation (for-profit), not the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit).
  - staunch 13y ago
    Which is kind of a meaningless distinction since the Mozilla Foundation wholly owns the Mozilla Corporation.
- simanyay 13y ago
  Mozilla is more conservative with money than other companies. No corporate credit cards, no daily travel allowances, no daily breakfast, lunch and dinner (only lunch and only once a week, after all-hands). However, being too conservative doesn't work in Silicon Valley because you have to compete with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for talent with their perks and benefits. Whether it's good or bad in the long term I do not know but it is a fact.
  - sambeau 13y ago
    No shareholders to pay.
- sambeau 13y ago
  Surely a non-profit, who have no shareholders to pay, should be more able to behave in this way?

152 points by ryanseys 13y ago

I called your name as I reached out for you but when I opened my eyes I was alone...waiting for Raine...

Cool blog post! From your resume it looks like you worked at Blackberry earlier this year. Do you have any thoughts about the differences (cultural, technological, etc) between working for a large company and working for a non-profit organization?

ryanseys 13y ago
The differences are really night and day. Blackberry is too large to really have that "home-like" feel, it really just feels like work. Mozilla has character which I definitely feed off for motivation. The attitude of the people at Mozilla is much different than those at BB, as well. Mozilla and everything in it has life, Blackberry unfortunately feels much less-lively. Motivation at Mozilla is fueled by the love of the work and at Blackberry you really can feel the money is the end goal. Both companies are just really different for different reasons, but I definitely prefer Mozilla.
kitcar 13y ago
Great question re: "Blackberry V.S. Mozilla work environments" - Related: one thing I've noticed some people don't place enough emphasis on when choosing initial internships/jobs out of school is the business models of companies, and the direct effect that can have on the working environment. In this case, while Mozilla is technically a non-profit, rather than being funded by donations it makes the overwhelming majority of its money by sharing in the advertising revenue generated by the search engines which come pre-installed in Firefox (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/faq/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...). Therefore, even if Mozilla does absolutely nothing in terms of improving any of their products, they will still continue to make money (in the short term, at least), which lifts quite a bit of stress off everyone who works there, and let's management take a longer view perspective in general. Professional service firms (i.e. tech. consulting and agencies) are effectively arbitrage plays - they sell the time of their employees for $X / hr, but only pay the employee $Y / hr, and then collect on the spread. If these companies ever stop selling for just a few moments, the arbitrage breaks down (as they still presumably need to pay their employees...). Therefore, there will likely to be more "stress in the air" in these types of firms, as in some cases all it takes is 1-2 contracts to be canceled for the firm to be unable to make payroll. Hit driven businesses (Which Blackberry as a whole arguably is not, due to the significant revenue driven by their enterprise server), have a different set of issues, which is that losing really sucks for morale - therefore if the company you work for is focused on building a better mousetrap, and slowly over time people internally begin to doubt the quality of the mousetrap they are working on, that can make it really frustrating to work there, regardless of the other perks the company may provide.

fennecfoxen 13y ago

Congratulations. You've officially been spoiled. :) You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome. :P The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.

ryanseys 13y ago
I am looking forward to trying out new jobs, and love the freedom of internships for this reason alone. That being said, Mozilla will always hold a close place in my heart.
not_rhodey 13y ago
This, this is a really lame. You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
- eshvk 13y ago
  I am not sure where you are going off on the parent post. Also, I don't particularly know what you mean by "exceptional job". However, let me describe a few thoughts I had whilst there (not the submitter). 1. Mozilla's mission is just as important as random company making the pipes more efficient for sending cat/twerking/whatever videos. They are a non-profit and are operated as such. 2. They have some incredibly interesting problems that they are working on. From the research team to the browser development itself. Read interesting = hard. 3. They do pay well. I know this as a former intern; also from word of mouth from people who worked there. :)
  - not_rhodey 13y ago
    I think only the highest of Mozilla and everything they stand for. "You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome." What I'm trying to convey is that I don't believe that anyone need make this compromise. Mozilla is awesome, other organizations are awesome, some freelance gigs are awesome. You can be a software developer without putting yourself through anguish, it's just a matter of priorities.

cbhl 13y ago

It's always interesting to hear what other Software Engineering students have been doing on their internships. Now, if only writing a blog post could replace your work term report. :)

ryanseys 13y ago
I wish we could replace that report with something a little more lively!

mrmagooey 13y ago

That sounds like so much fun, I'm very jealous.

eshvk 13y ago

I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analyze seemed frustrating then, yet, it is only after a couple of years in industry that I realize the true value of respecting those who trust their data with you and using it to do greater good.

marcamillion 13y ago
Do you get to keep your laptop after - or do you have to give it back at the end?
- tekacs 13y ago
  You get to keep it. (source: comment below and friend who interned at Mozilla)
  - marcamillion 13y ago
    That's hella cool. This post makes me want to work at Mozilla!
    - infinite8s 13y ago
      That just means it becomes taxable income.
      - marcamillion 13y ago
        Never thought of it like that - that's interesting.
    - tekacs 13y ago
      I did another internship for enhanced experience, but I'm going to have to consider it myself one of these years. :) (The pay is also great and the other perks and location are amazing.)

abhinavsharma 13y ago

As a former Mozilla intern, I can confirm that the company has an unusually great intern program! Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were: 1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India. 2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship. 3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk! 4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.

acchow 13y ago
I'm fairly certain the Google intern demo is more geographically/culturally diverse. Really glad this guy had a phenomenal time at Mozilla. All of the top internship programs in the bay area are equally good and I hope he gets a chance to try some others :)
- abhinavsharma 13y ago
  I was thinking about that and I think you're right as far as the overall numbers go, but the intern group is really small (it was <20 when I was there), so the entropy in the distribution would be higher than Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon. And yeah I agree, as much as you like your first internship, switching it up for the second is usually a good idea because that mobility is harder when working full-time.

gluxon 13y ago

Where do I sign up? :)

reubenmorais 13y ago
Here! https://careers.mozilla.org/ https://careers.mozilla.org/
- coke12 13y ago
  It looks like their 2014 internships haven't quite opened up, is that right?
  - ryanseys 13y ago
    That is correct.

iblaine 13y ago

Seems like there is a growing trend by tech companies to spoil interns with the hope of improving HR. This is great and by all means take advantage of it.

st3fan 13y ago
Interns are not spoiled. They are simply treated like any other regular employee. I am not sure what you mean with 'improving HR'. Did you mean 'PR' ? Because Mozilla's HR department is doing a pretty great job.
- zobzu 13y ago
  I don't think regular employes get to keep their laptops :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]

AYBABTME 13y ago

Cool to see you had fun this summer, now you can come back and give a talk about things you worked on at our Ottawa Ruby/JS meetups!

ryanseys 13y ago
I'll be back in January to do just that!
- AYBABTME 13y ago
  Ah, I'll be gone in January =S

whatts 13y ago

Cool guy, is an "open-source advocate" but removes PureCSS's copyright notice: https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/yui/pure/blob/master/LICENSE.md

ryanseys 13y ago
This would be a side-effect of using a CSS minifier, not an intentional act against Pure.
- whatts 13y ago
  Pure's stylesheets are already minified, the only result of re-minifying them is that the copyright will be removed: http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css http://yui.yahooapis.com/pure/0.2.1/pure-min.css
  - ryanseys 13y ago
    I squash all my stylesheets into one giant .css file to serve rather than a bunch of individual stylesheets. A side-effect of squashing + minifying (which is done every time I generate my website) is that all comments are removed. You are correct, that notice is not present, but I did not remove it intentionally. To be honest, I didn't read the LICENSE.md of Pure CSS. Shame on me :) Feel free to file a bug against this at: https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com https://github.com/ryanseys/ryanseys.com
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - zheng 13y ago
      TBH, I don't think you're in the wrong here, but expecting someone who has already brought something to your attention to file a "bug report" against your personal website is a bit arrogant.
      - 13y ago

staunch 13y ago

Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks. I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative. That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck. I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.

gkoberger 13y ago
No comment on most of that, but to clarify: he worked for Mozilla Corporation (for-profit), not the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit).
- staunch 13y ago
  Which is kind of a meaningless distinction since the Mozilla Foundation wholly owns the Mozilla Corporation.
simanyay 13y ago
Mozilla is more conservative with money than other companies. No corporate credit cards, no daily travel allowances, no daily breakfast, lunch and dinner (only lunch and only once a week, after all-hands). However, being too conservative doesn't work in Silicon Valley because you have to compete with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for talent with their perks and benefits. Whether it's good or bad in the long term I do not know but it is a fact.
- sambeau 13y ago
  No shareholders to pay.
sambeau 13y ago
Surely a non-profit, who have no shareholders to pay, should be more able to behave in this way?