Hey, wondering how things are going over there at Mozilla. Was considering a jump ship but have heard bad things particularly about new product direction and process. Any thoughts? How’s the leadership?
Every once in awhile Mozilla makes a squeak and people remember they exist. Otherwise I can't think of any reason to join - they have barely any market share left, they've been defeated in the browser wars, and their leadership is really questionable.
Leadership sucks. I'm in the process of applying to other companies. Almost 80% of the people I talk to are interviewing. We are rapidly losing marketshare. Leadership makes bad decisions and generally has no vision. When the moves they make don't impact marketshare the blame gets passed down the chain. ICs and line managers end up getting pushed out, leadership says the problems solved and promotes a few of the same people who got promoted the last time this cycle happened. Rinse and repeat. Firefox will allow Mozilla to stick around for a while because even with tiny market share it has value to Google for anti trust reasons which is why they continue to renew the search deal and continue to allow Mozilla to keep chugging along even though it should clearly be on a death march. But there are no interesting projects to work on and the smart engineers that once worked here are rapidly jumping ship.
All reduction in force. No plan ahead. Internet freedom or speech freedom? The only open thing in Mozilla is open source.
Why not go to a real company?
Like Uber maybe?