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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

This posts makes Mozilla problems better understood. One thing are slightly overpaid bosses, but there is more...

"After leaving MDN, I took on a dual role: WADI (Web Advocacy & Developer Initiative) and Firefox OS for TV Partner Engineering. With WADI I had the pleasure of contributing to the Service Worker Cookbook. With the TV role I got a beautiful 60" ultra HD TV where I helped partners bring their video sites and games to life."

it seems there are some jobs at Mozilla that might not necessarily contribute significantly to its success.

And it looks like overall management in Mozilla is not in the greatest shape:

"When things got a bit tough at Mozilla, I shifted to Mozilla's "Productivity Tools" team. My first two weeks were nothing short of hilarious; my new manager didn't know I was a front-end engineer, so I stumbled through completing a big python migration."

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> it seems there are some jobs at Mozilla that might not necessarily contribute significantly to its success.

Important observation, and it demonstrates where room for improvement is needed and actionable. One of the failings of Mozilla was not recognizing this and making active efforts to spin out useful (but not useful to Mozilla's core efforts) projects (for example, MDN should've been spun out long ago, similar to Thunderbird).

Best wishes David on your journey.

MDN is extremely useful for Firefox as it documents Firefox capabilities so web designers can use them. Without it people would think webkit=the internet.

Yeah places like caniuse are biased towards Chrome. They rarely add a feature that's only present in Firefox, but often add features only present in Chrome. Also caniuse is no full MDN replacement.

Caniuse is open source, anyone can PR in new functionality that’s only in Firefox (and I have).

What I saw is that the open source data is only partial and that PRs are often kept open until Chrome adds the functionality as well.

Let's face it, the answer to "caniuse" a feature that isn't in Chrome yet is "no".

It's a common pattern: The main revenue source (in this case licensing money from Google) isn't cutting it/drying up, so the company tries all sorts of things to try to come up with another success. In reality they're just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, which is usually not a recipe for success, but you also can't really fault them for trying - when no really good plan B ever materializes so you can just go all in on that, you're left with the scattershot approach, or just lying down and dying.

Or C, shrink down to the size you should have been all along.

This is unlikely to occur due to management incentives (grow clout, influence, status, etc).

What's a way to find/hire people who are immune to such things

I would think you'd have to hire someone who doesn't want the job to begin with

Hmm, My thoughts are more like hiring someone who cares a lot about the company's higher goals and vision, more than about his/her own career.

Maybe that's not possible to find in traditional profit maximizing companies, because who cares about maximizing the shareholders' profits

I was thinking more along the lines of old political leaders who willingly gave up power, like george Washington or Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, I agree. Maybe you could find someone who cared about some companies, but most companies don't have a vision at all. Is there anyone who actually deeply cares about nestles higher vision? I think if you could find someone both willing and able to do will as ceo while being completely uninterested in being a ceo it would go well, but there can't be many of those people.

George Washington seems like a good example to me -- then I understand what you mean. (I read on Wikipedia about Marcus Aurelius but didn't find anything except for that he was a stoic thinker? What that now means)

And maybe it's possible to find such people, like GW, for non executive roles, too.

What if maybe Nestle doesn't actually have a vision?

If they just picked words that sound good, as a PR thing, to sell more?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus probably because I was thinking of this guy, Marcus Aurelius just said he didn't want to be emporer but did it as a duty to the state, got them mixed up. I think nestle not having a vision is the reason it won't ever have a moral ceo, though, there's no reason for anyone to push a moral person to the top when morality will probably produce less results. Even if you find such people it's hard to promote them without a sense of ethics at the top I think.

Thanks for the link, interesting to read :-)

Hmm yes maybe in a way, some organizations can be "immune" to becoming more ethical / less depraved

Maybe the way to handle that, is to start another organization and try to out complete the wicked one

The biggest problem is that they're still doing B but they threw C under the bus (without a security team i don't see a bright future once the exploits come rolling in and when they finally realize C was the option all trust will be gone)

Contrary to Twitter speculation, we never had just one single security team, nor did we eliminate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24659174

Or D, go back to what built the organization in the first place instead of trying to be a non-evil version of Google.

> The main revenue source (in this case licensing money from Google) isn't cutting it/drying up

If Firefox weren't bleeding market share this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

The market-share bleed is ... amplified or mitigated, depending on your viewpoint ... by the absolute dominance of handheld Android devices (defaulting and manditory intalls of Google Chrome).

Firefox has slid some on desktop, but not nearly as much as broad numbers suggest.

Put differently: desktop is increasingly irrelevant to the modern Web. Which itself is likely not a good thing.

_______________________________

Late edit: Safari's marketshare, overall and by desktop/mobile segment, is virtually identical with its device share. Party like it's 1998.

Which suggests Mozilla's attempt at a mobile OS was not entirely misguided. It's preloads, bundling, and tying all over again.

Firefox OS was launched at a yoga retreat near Lake Tahoe because the head of marketing wanted to attend.

People don't leave jobs because things are going too well...

Mozilla is a mess, and they need to can anyone who can't contribute code

That would result in feature bloat and products, if they ever make it to market, that don't address consumer needs. Competent management is just as needed as technical contributions.

Mozilla already has a ton of useless products and features without a market fit due to incompetent management...

One of management's biggest jobs at a company like Mozilla is aiming developer resources at the problems that do address consumer needs. In the last few years, Mozilla hasn't really been doing that, so it sounds like they need new management because the current management isn't competent.

That's indeed exactly what happened. Lots of moonshot products that were dead on arrival such as FirefoxOS (and TV/IoT) or BrowserID, features nobody really wanted, while taking away features that people did want. Even right now, with their "refocusing" they killed or stymied features/products that people do want or at least gave them some rep with the power users and tech people (aka the people who will later recommend/install the browser to/for friends and family), e.g. devtools and MDN.

I can't stress enough how important and amazing MDN is.

It's probably (one of) the main things I think of for what keeps developing for the web a somewhat sane and cohesive experience.

MDM is great! And its filled with sample code! Almost like it was written by someone who can code...

That is just absolute unmitigated nonsense. Teams require more than just "people who code" and what you describe is a highway direct to disaster.

I recommend this read:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the company's overall health.

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