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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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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.

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".

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