What?! Servo and the tech coming out of it is the only reason I’ve begun using Firefox as my daily driver again. The Quantum stuff has made Firefox usable again. How are these CEO’s chosen? Really seems like Mozilla should be turned into a CO-OP or something.
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
> I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market.
Considering the companies performance, she should have been put on a PIP a long time ago, even considering the so called 80% discount. Never seems to happen to CEOs though.
Management is out of touch with reality if they think they deliver any value here.
I'm actually very saddened by this. What are the alternatives? Use chrome/chromium or other blink powered browsers and let google have it's way with the web?
I wish some organizations like Tor will fork firefox and absorb these talent, then I can contribute whatever I can afford monthly to it, knowing that anything I contribute will be going to the betterment of the web than into incompetent management. Maybe they can start a kickstarter campaign or something, I will definitely contribute.
> "Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
Why should a nonprofit's CEO be paid that much? Why the hell? I can't grasp this. I don't even understand why they'd make more than a few times what the typical programmer in the organization makes.
I can't help but think we're experiencing the slow demise of Mozilla and have been for a while now. What kind of family needs 2.5M a year?
NGO CEO just sounds like an oxymoron to me too. CEOs make me think of revenue increase, while I assume NGOs have very different goals - or at least they should have. It just seems like a fundamental misalignment.
ere is a (selective) look at the management of Mozilla in the recent past.
From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
“Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.”
“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”
Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes Mitchell Bakers account https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ . Worth a read.
Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500 Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion):
“I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.”
Shown here is the trustworthiness of the current CEO, having a go at someone because their opinions disagreed with theirs, this is straight after his death when he couldn't defend himself. The people who knew him have a very different opinion on what he was like compared to her, and it can be seen what changed with how executives were treated compared to the rest of the employees.
Most of "Quantum" has been just solid engineering work on Gecko. Servo tech, in the form of Stylo, helped a bit, WebRender will help a bit more but has been mostly developed in the context of Gecko for years. "Servo is the only reason I've been using Firefox again" is not accurate at all.
Is the Servo originated engine ( WebRender) doing that well in Firefox? Feels like it's very slow work to make it enabled by default in stable and the speedups haven't been yhat great, meanwhile there are basically 2 very different modes that they have to support and maintain.
(this is just because GPU drivers are so flaky afaict)
replying to myself, apparently there's a software based webrender code path in developent too, maybe the long term plan is to drop the non-webrender code paths and just fall back to sw-webrender on setups where there are GPU driver problems?
Confirmation from a person on the Mozilla's (former) threat management team:
>They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection and incident response.
>Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director are gone
This is a weird phenomenon I've been seeing in some tech companies - getting rid of security ops people because technically you can link security to other BU's, like dev or even IT.
Just looking at Mozilla, there seems to be a lot of security engineers, who are probably going to have to swallow this area of responsbility.
Thing is that even in very mature organizations, preventive actions are not and are unlikely to ever be good enough to not have any need for detection / IR specialists.
Is Mozilla trying to kill Firefox? Without an active threat management team, it would be irresponsible to recommend Firefox to any of my less technical friends.
Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web browser engine.
No comment on the firing of the security response teams, but isn't Servo pretty much a "finished proof of concept" since quite some time? Hasn't the techniques it pioneered been integrated, as far as possible, into Firefox?
When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine. Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla have cut an R&D project. Whether that is still as useful to Firefox as it was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or marketing take the hit.
A tragic example of the principal-agent problem in action. These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions, and have just killed the team that was doing the best job furthering the organization’s mission (preventing a browser monoculture). Just brutal.
It’s an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don’t know how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the blood out of our institutions like this.
>These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions
It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved at a high level from the start:
>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.
It's very common when a company or organization loses its original founders. The admins and middle managers just don't have the same driving forces or motivations.
"the team that was doing the best job furthering the organization’s mission" is the Gecko team. That team is still largely there.
Servo is/was cool, and some cool stuff that originated in Servo made it into Gecko, but make no mistake that Gecko and Gecko developers contribute far more to the open Web than Servo ever did.
Mozilla also fired #1 contributor to Wasmtime, while saying there are "vast new areas" (their words, not mine) beyond the web and giving Wasmtime as an example(!!!). This is a tragic comedy.
Readit News
The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors.
1. https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-cor...
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
Considering the companies performance, she should have been put on a PIP a long time ago, even considering the so called 80% discount. Never seems to happen to CEOs though.
Management is out of touch with reality if they think they deliver any value here.
edit: he to she, thanks!
Why should a nonprofit's CEO be paid that much? Why the hell? I can't grasp this. I don't even understand why they'd make more than a few times what the typical programmer in the organization makes.
Marissa Mayer
Susan Wojcicki
Elisabeth Holmes
Edit: in case you missed my username I'm a female myself.
NGO CEO just sounds like an oxymoron to me too. CEOs make me think of revenue increase, while I assume NGOs have very different goals - or at least they should have. It just seems like a fundamental misalignment.
From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... “Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.”
From http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html
“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily and collaboratively find another subject for us to discuss. Gerv was a reasonable man. He could set aside fundamental disagreements and find common ground to talk with, collaborate with, and befriend those who disagreed with him. That level of kindness and openness is rarely seen in our current times.”
Here is an article another person who knew Gervase Markham who refutes Mitchell Bakers account https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ . Worth a read.
Brendan Eich on the jump in executive share since he was let go: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629
Here is Brokedamouth on the two class system now at Mozilla https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061500 Comment replicated here (it is worth looking at the whole discussion): “I was at Mozilla for a while and it was a two-class system. The execs flew first class, stayed in fancy hotels, and had very expensive dinners and retreats - sometimes in the high five-figures. This is not even included in comp. One time, the CFO sent out a missive urging everyone to stay in AirBnB to save money and the execs (literally the following week) booked $500/night rooms at a hotel in NYC. I think the moment that made it clear as day was during a trip to Hawaii for the company all hands. The plane was a 737 so you had to walk past first class. These all hands are a huge deal for families - many were struggling down the aisle, carrying booster seats, etc. And they were passing two of the C-levels sitting in giant first-class seats sipping tropical cocktails. The rule in the military is that men eat first, officers last. Mozilla has always reversed that rule and the result was a pretty toxic culture, all around.”
Shown here is the trustworthiness of the current CEO, having a go at someone because their opinions disagreed with theirs, this is straight after his death when he couldn't defend himself. The people who knew him have a very different opinion on what he was like compared to her, and it can be seen what changed with how executives were treated compared to the rest of the employees.
I wonder if the people being fired would be sufficiently equipped to do that themselves. Though losing access to the branding may not be workable.
A co-op would make for an interesting business model for a FOSS company. Has this been tried before? Are there any well known cases out there?
(this is just because GPU drivers are so flaky afaict)
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
Well obviously the most important factor is making sure they haven’t donated money to any of the wrong political causes.
>They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection and incident response. >Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director are gone
https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265...
I wonder how Tor will handle this...
Just looking at Mozilla, there seems to be a lot of security engineers, who are probably going to have to swallow this area of responsbility.
Thing is that even in very mature organizations, preventive actions are not and are unlikely to ever be good enough to not have any need for detection / IR specialists.
Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web browser engine.
Deleted Comment
When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine. Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla have cut an R&D project. Whether that is still as useful to Firefox as it was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or marketing take the hit.
Dead Comment
How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?
It’s an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don’t know how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the blood out of our institutions like this.
It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved at a high level from the start:
>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun...
Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.
Servo is/was cool, and some cool stuff that originated in Servo made it into Gecko, but make no mistake that Gecko and Gecko developers contribute far more to the open Web than Servo ever did.
Do you have source on that?