Leaving Mozilla

https://www.emilykager.com/writing/2021/02/10/mozilla.html

by dmm • 5 years ago

174 162 5 years ago

The cherry on top was being specifically targeted for harassment that same week after the release by unhappy users of Firefox looking for someone to direct their frustrations at.

Thats lovely.

coldpie• 5 years ago

I work on an open source project which is popular, but definitely a lot less used than Firefox. I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one. While I don't do that anymore, it does still give me with a strong sense of maintaining a "firewall" with the public. I don't put myself out there as a public face more than necessary. I don't have work email or any of that on my phone. If it's not work hours, I'm not dealing with it. The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been, and these days I find the less time I spend around technology, the happier I am.

hutzlibu5• 5 years ago

"The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been"

Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"

iggldiggl• 5 years ago

I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one.

That's funny, because going through old usenet posts from the 90s I got precisely the opposite impression – noticeably more people posting under their full names than you'd find a decade or two later in comparable forums.

I've also made the same observation for the online community of a long running simulation game I frequent: A lot of the old-time members dating back to twenty years ago or so are posting under their full names, whereas with newer members abbreviated (last) names or outright pseudonyms are clearly predominating.

codys• 5 years ago

I was curious about this, and went searching, and it's fairly difficult to figure out exactly what is being referenced.

There is a reddit thread that links to deleted tweets that appears like it might be related: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb

chordalkeyboard5• 5 years ago

Thanks for the link, always good to get more sides of a story.

SemNome• 5 years ago

You can see them through archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20200731211652/https://twitter.c... https://web.archive.org/web/20200731235001/https://twitter.c... https://web.archive.org/web/20200801025736/https://twitter.c...

dessant• 5 years ago

I remember seeing her tweet as I was struggling to migrate away from Firefox for Android since I also got surprised by the half-baked release, and closing the Twitter tab in disappointment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200801082154/https://twitter.c...

Despite maintaining two of the handful of extensions currently available for Firefox for Android and developing for the beta versions of Fenix leading up the release, I had a very hard time finding my footing as a user in the new browser, and I ended up switching to Samsung Internet.

I'm not familiar with the harassment she has suffered, and it's saddening if people have singled her out, though I can see how people might have overreacted to her nonchalant attitude about the workflows of millions of users being thrown belly up.

__turbobrew__• 5 years ago

That tweet left a bad taste in my mouth as well.

The team was understaffed so the OP took up the slack by working massive overtime to push out a half baked release. Users complained about the half baked release, the OP gives the users the finger, and neither party seemed happy with the outcome.

I'm glad to see that the OP has identified that work-life balance is important; it isn't worth burning yourself out for a job.

throwaway123x2• 5 years ago

FireFox is my main driver and I still use it on Android... but I have to say the android refresh wasn't great. It's full on random usability errors, it crashes, and they started curating extensions for mobile.

That said, I do appreciate all the work FireFox devs put in to give us a Chrome alternative. Misfires happen. I hope FF for Android keeps getting better with time.

dralley3• 5 years ago

I've never seen a crash, and personally I can attest that the new version is much snappier and more responsive. I don't like every aspect of the UI but it was a worthwhile upgrade IMO.

re: addons, a lot of people were understandably upset about this, myself included for a while. With that said, in the months after release every extension which had been disabled by the upgrade started coming back online as the extension API was slowly added back after the rewrite. I can certainly sympathize with the maintenaince headache of trying to maintain one old decrepit piece of software while simultaneously trying to get the one one out the door, since that's exactly what I've spent the last 4 years of my life doing.

skinkestek2• 5 years ago

There's a story here:

Many extensions, including some major ones are still broken on Firefox desktop and I think people are afraid this will happen on mobile as well :-/

adamcstephens• 5 years ago

I hope Emily can learn to separate work from not-work, and set those boundaries early in any new role. It's not healthy to work all the time, and we all need our own time.

mjip• 5 years ago

I'm sure you didn't intend it but your comment comes off as a bit condescending (a good litmus test for that is checking how a comment like this would read if the author was an older, more experienced man). Setting appropriate work-life boundaries is a common issue now in the covid WFH era and something people at all levels are struggling with. I've found uninstalling Slack on my phone to be helpful in enforcing this.

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

I still use Firefox. I’m sticking around. It’s becoming more annoying to use, but I’d rather support Mozilla than anyone else.

The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me.

To the author, thanks for your efforts.

ppf• 5 years ago

I'm becoming more and more of the opinion that the web is dead and Google has won.

alfiedotwtf• 5 years ago

Same. But I’ll continue to use Firefox until someone turns out the lights...

jakub_g3• 5 years ago

It's not true, at least until the only allowed engine on iOS is Safari. And it's the Safari, not Firefox, who sets the lowest bar feature-wise and in dev experience for several years already.

corobo• 5 years ago

Maybe 5 years ago. There's all sorts of things pushing against Google now.

Honestly the only reason I have interact with Google now is

* Work uses it for email but that's pro me not personal me * YouTube * Calendar automations

Darmody• 5 years ago

Why it's becoming more annoying to use?

I've been using as my main browser for years and it only gets better.

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

It's all the non-sense from Pocket to access to location settings isn't getting synced, etc.; I am being unfair though, it's not a problem.

fireattack5• 5 years ago

To me, using Firefox on desktop is easy. It is at least on par with competitors, if not better.

Firefox on Android on the other hand (the one the author worked on), IMHO, is simply an inferior product.

This is kinda understandable due to their small team size (and it looks like they're overworking too), but what I didn't get is why they kept revamping it. I don't have a clear timeline, but in my recent memory they at least did it twice.

Also, plenty of "great features" for some reason stay in beta/alpha/nightly forever. This is particularly obvious if you visit /r/Firefox on Reddit frequently; you see "oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!" as answers for help/feature request threads too often. It's like they never finish these features to push into release channel.

Anyway, it's getting harder and harder to stay using Firefox on Android. Especially after they essentially killed the extension ecosystem in Fenix.

eloisant2• 5 years ago

Inferior to what? I have yet to find a browser that blocks ads on Android as efficiently as Firefox+uBlock.

nicoburns3• 5 years ago

I was with you up until a couple of months ago. But IMO the latest versions have caught up with Chrome. They've sorted the performance (scroll performance and UI) issues with the new "fenix" version. The tab switching works great now. And the latest (stable) version even supports pull-to-refresh. Add extension support to that (notably ublock) and I've made it my default browser (and that's on merit, not for ideological reasons).

rolandog2• 5 years ago

One of the features I think is unmatched in other browsers is Firefox's ability to search open tabs on your other devices, and also to almost instantly send a tab to another device. I mainly use it from mobile to desktop (when I stumble on a site that I feel may be risky to let it run all scripts on a mobile phone).

jackric3• 5 years ago

I wanted to make Firefox my default Android browser, out of principle. After 6 weeks, I uninstalled it and am back in Brave.

The Firefox address/omni bar seemed designed to lean 90% toward a search engine search, even if I had completely typed in the hostname of a previously visited page and hit "Enter". The cynic in me guessed this was deliberate to reap referral commissions from Big Search Engine. Pissed off, uninstall

m-p-3• 5 years ago

"oh for that, just use beta/nightly version!"

Like for accessing abou:config sigh

Klwohu• 5 years ago

Me too, at least it's still possible to drill down into the settings and use user.js to stop all the telemetry which verges on spyware. Chromium doesn't afford you that option.

traveler01• 5 years ago

I was all in for Firefox but I had to stop sucking it. Browser it's just inferior compared to Chrome or other Chromium browsers. As a web developer I can't have my browser crashing, slowing my work down and having an inferior developer mode which only feature I find useful are the rulers.

This, specially after I found out that the directors at the company kept getting their wages increased was the nail in the coffin.

I just can't stand knowing these people are getting rewarded for such a shitty job, even worse now knowing that they have small teams (obviously not able to deliver the products we expect them to) and worse of all forcing these people to overwork.

Google is not a saint, but neither is Mozilla. I'll just stick to the browser that better fullfil my needs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

apostacy2• 5 years ago

The window into the internet shouldn’t be controlled by big companies. It’s a principle thing for me.

That's exactly why I stopped with Mozilla. They are just a proxy for corporate controlled interests. And it is heartbreaking.

Every single battle, they have folded. Nearly every decision they have made has aligned with corporate interests. And then they issue a paternalistic statement saying that selling out is in our best interest.

- They embraced EME web DRM. They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means. They could have just done nothing. They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.

- They killed off RSS support for no good reason. The cost to maintain it would have been less than their office carpet cleaning budget. They don't see RSS as an integral part of the web. They see it as a toy, not worth including by default. And thanks to their attitude, RSS is actually becoming that way.

- They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.

The job of Mozilla was to be an EXAMPLE, more than to be popular. And they have accomplished neither.

I was with them since the start. Firefox was amazing when it was NOT compatible with Internet Explorer 6, and not trying to be! I'm so glad that they had enough faith in their own vision of the web to risk turning off less technical users. And we were all better for it.

Mozilla has failed us, and the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.

dralley3• 5 years ago

They embraced EME web DRM.

They did not. They fought against it until it was clear they weren't going to win the fight.

They didn't have to. They could have taken the position that if someone wants DRM they should do it via Flash or Silverlight, or some other external means.

That is not a reasonable position. Adobe was already in the process of killing Flash and Microsoft is the developer of Silverlight, and they were pro-EME. That's setting aside the multi-decade history of security disasters those plugins caused.

They didn't have to legitimize it as a concept. It would have been so powerful if they had just done nothing.

It would not, it would have killed them overnight. 99% of the population doesn't give a shit, they just want to watch Netflix (etc.), and they'd stop using Firefox the day Netflix (etc.) stopped working. That's true even of most Linux users which is the only population that might would care whatsoever.

They killed off XUL based extensions, and embraced a much more limited extension system (but at least it is more compatible and less differentiated with Google!). The functionality that was lost has not been restored.

XUL extensions were horrifically insecure and often caused terrible memory leaks that got blamed on Firefox - they also prevented proper sandboxing and multiprocess functionality from being implemented.

Although your defense of Flash and Silverlight leads me to believe you don't care much about security.

the best outcome is for the Mozilla foundation to go bankrupt, so that maybe we can pick up the pieces.

You're delusional if you think that anything good would come of that. If that's how you feel, why wait? Go build something now.

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

There's an inherent danger in catering to the privacy/security groupies: they don't want you to succeed. The reason for this isn't that they don't care about privacy or security. The reason is that their primary motivation here is ostentatious ideological purity. Absent a church at which they can profess piety and denounce impurity in others, they take to the Internet to do the same.

Cater to them at your own risk.

BlueTemplar5• 5 years ago

You don't think that "not wanting the GAFAMs to own the Internet" might also be a reason?

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

I'm sure they say that but they attack the people advocating their cause so often that I doubt it. You see, there's no range on their responses. DuckDuckGo using a favicon service without thinking about it would be as evil as Google intentionally using HTML5 Local Storage to bypass cookies.

walrus012• 5 years ago

That and.. I am also extremely burnt out.
Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me

We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

Yes, Please! Burnout culture is horrible and we need to respect our work/life balance. If you work for a company where you can't say "I'll get to that first thing tomorrow" then you should be working somewhere else.

Unreasonable expectations usually starts with management though. I had a "boss" who was very much my senior as far as age but had zero management experience and his benchmark for value was Lines of Code and Cards Completed instead of better value metrics like features delivered, velocity, bugs reported, etc. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long.

aloisdg• 5 years ago

In France we work 35h and I thin we should move to 28h. More and more company do the move.

https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/articles/travailler-4-...

hiq• 5 years ago

In France we work 35h

You, as a software engineer, work 35h / week? I thought it was mostly less qualified jobs. I don't know the law exactly, but none of my friends working in Paris work 35h / week.

sstephant• 5 years ago

In France white collars usually don't work 35h/week. We usually sign 'day contracts' with almost no time limits. On the plus side it is true we have additional days off, usually around 12/per year and if we don't have enough work we can even work less than 7h/day. I don't know any company that leaves you out of work though. In 2014/2015 I worked on an insane project where the estimated delivery date was far far too optimistic. I worked around 9~10h/day all week long sometimes on the weekend too. If I didn't have a 2 months break because I broke my ankle in the mountains I would have gone nuts. After this experience I told myself 'never again'.

Just to complete the story at some point we were referring to this project as the 'cursed project'. The project manager (who made the original estimates) went 2 months to the hospital with a serious depression at the beginning (he had priors). The surrogate acting project manager was at some point on the verge of psychological breakdown and became a heavy smoker. I (lead dev) broke my foot on my first day of summer vacation. One business analyst was hit by a car (survived but multiple fractures). Another dev had an unexplained swollen feet problem (2 weeks off, probably stress). Another dev, external contractor, was terminated because 'he lost the sparkles in his eyes'. And due to the insade delivery rate, sometimes 2 delivery in production per day, one of the ops got burnt out and eventually resigned.

benhurmarcel• 5 years ago

Most white collars in France work more than the theoretical 35h/week, usually around 40h instead, although there's no clocking so it's not really measured.

However the difference is compensated by extra holidays (RTT).

u678u• 5 years ago

Its not just that, the one week of PTO she talks about as if its really unusual.

walrus012• 5 years ago

That as well, and the part immediately next to it quoted:

but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.

and this

On the negative side, it has become increasingly hard for me to separate work from not work. I found myself “contributing” (read - working) at all hours of the day. Replying to issues, emails, and public chats when I was in bed at midnight, when I just woke up at 7am, in the car on the way to go hiking on the weekend, and then while ON the hike.

inoffensivename2• 5 years ago

I'm on a personal quest to reduce the average American working week

omosubi2• 5 years ago

idk if you're a millenial but I often think that this will be millenials' legacy - a 32 hour work week would be amazing

endisneigh• 5 years ago

I agree, but I think part of the issue as well is that many times there's just very little direction on a weekly basis so much of the work is wasted in the sense that it didn't need to be done that week. Overworking yourself (sprinting) to do work that didn't need to be done that moment is one of the most discouraging and demotivating things IMHO.

There have been times where I've worked and it was extremely clear what needed to be done at every stage and I worked 80 hours and wasn't burnt out at all.

TLDR: Spinning the wheel mindlessly is bad and I think accelerates burnout, in general it's not necessary to work more than 40 hours a week.

shawabawa32• 5 years ago

At my old job i switched to 4 days a week. I'm pretty sure I got more work done overall and only got paid 80% for it. It should be a no brainer for employers

buran77• 5 years ago

If it's just a few companies doing it the 20% cut means you will probably lose many of the top performers, especially the younger ones who are more willing and able to put in more effort for more money. If it's most companies doing it then you'll probably see an overall drop in morale and those top performers or people who'd rather have the 100% might actually deliver even less than the 80%. Keep in mind that the costs of living don't go down proportionally, if anything some bills might even go up after spending that extra day in your own home.

meetups323• 5 years ago

Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me [...] it would have been impossible to hit our deadlines and ship something I was proud of without it.

Seems like a good indication to push back the "deadlines" [1]. If the release is a month/quarter/semester/year later, literally no-one actually cares. If the release ends up being totally unsupported after v1 because all the developers got burnt out and left, people care.

[1] A term I hate - no-one dies if the software is late. Management just gets "upset", while continuing to take $$$$ bonuses.

hutzlibu5• 5 years ago

In her case it was probably not the working hours, but the working hours rewarded with hate. That kills your morale and energy more than anything else. When you put in effort for others - achieve your goals, but still get kicked.

passivate4• 5 years ago

We need to stop normalizing working beyond a 40 hour work week. I can accomplish far more and with greater clarity of purpose, mental acuity and motivation in an actual 40 hours, than I could if I attempt to push myself to 10-12 hours a day.

But normalizing any number is problematic. It depends on the job, and the specific individual. A warehouse packer or a burger flipper are unlikely to accomplish more by working less. So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week. This number might be the same throughout the year, or it might go up/down, etc. It might be co-related to other things (pandemic, life events, etc). And then you have some people that can be productive for 80 hours / week. (I want to explicitly make a distinction between warming a chair for 80 hours versus actually producing something valuable.)

The tricky question is, what is the threshold below which you are considered a poor performer? And the corollary - If you are one of those outliers who can be productive 80hrs/week - Should you be compensated more than your peers? I know that if I was one of those outliers (I'm not), I would expect to get rewarded for being more productive.

_qulr4• 5 years ago

So lets say each person can be productive for X hours per week.

I don't think productivity is the right way to frame things. This makes it sound like a human is nothing more than a tool. The reason people should work fewer hours is so that they can enjoy life outside of work, remain healthy, spend time with family and friends, etc. Not to maximize productivity for the stockholders.

Even if some person is capable of being productive working 80 hours a week, it's not clear that this is good for the person, either in the short run or the long run. Workaholism can be a bad habit.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

...but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.

Welcome to agile? I know the feeling, honestly, but in software engineering there's always more bugs to fix, more features to develop, more needs of the users that require your attention. Cutting a release should feel like letting go, and indeed at places it does, but ultimately once the release is out in the wild it's done. The only thing to do then is to move forward with the next iteration, the next sprint, the next release.

Sorry, but are there examples or cites for this harassment from the users? Was it fallout from the layoffs? I feel like I need a bit more context.

tyrust• 5 years ago

I feel like we (the readers) need a bit more context.

Speak for yourself. They provided a candid perspective about their career at Mozilla. I wouldn't demand additional context if they didn't already feel it relevant to provide.

jvzr• 5 years ago

I have no particular data for her harassment, but I've read here and on other media outlets some pretty angry comments about that Android rewrite. I can totally imagine some people venting on Twitter, and even targeting parts of the team. Though I can't say I've seen that myself... just hypothesizing.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

That's what I wanted to know. Was there targeted harassment like this from users? Was it just twitter flame? Did she get angry emails? I understand it has no bearing on the OP but I feel like it would add gravity to her experience if we had some context to empathize with.

_qulr4• 5 years ago

Welcome to agile?

Agile is not essential to software development. IMO Agile should be thrown in the trash heap of technology history ASAP. Does Firefox even need a "release schedule"? Why? There's rarely a good reason for fixed software schedules.

It's funny, Google had a pretty tight software schedule... until it came time to publish their App Store privacy details, and then they decided they didn't need a release schedule after all. Except it backfired because their software just assumed there would be frequent updates, and now the apps are showing warnings because they haven't been updated.

Death to schedules. Yes, there's always work to be done, but it doesn't have to be done by an arbitrary deadline.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

100%. There are a multitude of ways to deliver software, agile being one of them. Mozilla is/was pretty strong on agile methodologies. I worked with a guy who came from Mozilla and was an Agile Coach essentially.

legerdemain• 5 years ago

To put it bluntly: we don't need more context. The author has graciously shared a story about her private decision-making and intimate details about her emotional well-being. Even if some readers may want to probe further into her private life, she ultimately owes us nothing. We are reading her blog post out of passing curiosity, and not assessing the merit or evaluating the truth of any claims she is making.

Sorry to single out the parent comment. I don't know what the true intent was, but there's a trend on HN of commenters demanding to know private details they don't have an actual need to know. It's nice when the author answers questions but we should be happy with what we're given.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

You're right, we don't need more context. I would have liked more context. This isn't the first time I've seen a first-timer write about a toxic work environment to the point where they quit. I'm not demanding anything, just wishing I had more context to be more empathetic to her situation.

gm• 5 years ago

LOL, why would "we" need more context? It's her own experience, she's making her own choices, and she's telling her story. If she feels she was harassed, then she was harassed. She's not suing people, she's not shaming anyone in particular. That's really the end of it.

I'd not have the gall to demand evidence and pass judgement on the life experience of others.

This person owes us nothing, and if anything, we should thank her for sharing her story, and no more.

ascorbic2• 5 years ago

She personally got a lot of abuse on Twitter about the FF Android rewrite. Nothing to do with layoffs. She doesn't need to prove this to you, but it was all visible at the time so I'm sure you can find it if you don't believe her.

gabereiser7• 5 years ago

Never said I didn’t believe her, I do. I just didn’t know the extent of it as it goes well beyond harassment.

jakub_g3• 5 years ago

She was harassed pretty hard in a very sexist way on some 4chan-like discussion boards. If you're very interested in details, you can scroll through her Twitter few months back.

tppiotrowski• 5 years ago

If you really love your work or want to make an impact it’s possible to work “all the time”. This can be so rewarding but since most startups fail and the next big feature can flop it can take a huge toll on your life.

My dad always said it’s good to have at least 3 or 4 legs on your stool instead of 1. Family, friends, health, hobbies, faith, etc. That way if one of the legs fails the others can still support it.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket...

hutzlibu5• 5 years ago

Sometimes you have to go all in, though. At least if you want to make a big jump.

johncessna2• 5 years ago

For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered.

I think everyone remembers the time when they learned it's not worth it to work insane hours to make some sort of launch just so you get to do it all over again in 6 months.

I worked 22 straight days to meet an insane deadline. I delivered my stuff 4am the morning of only to be told that every other team was late and the inflexible due date that couldn't be changed, got pushed back 6 months.

oAlbe• 5 years ago

What was your reaction to that? I'm genuinely curious, as I've never been in the situation and wouldn't know what to do.

johncessna2• 5 years ago

Confusion, mainly. Part of me didn't understand why everyone else didn't commit to the team effort. Ah, to be young and have no responsibilities. Another part of me was genuinely confused how an immovable date got moved. It wasn't until later that I understood that there's no such thing as an immovable date.

What keeps me from being jaded (I think anyways) is being able to recognize when an extra push is all that the project needs and when a project is so doomed that not even a heroic effort of a small team will cause it to hit the target.

I also worked with a CEO who purposely gave tight deadlines just to get engineering to finish the work. He said if he gave us more time, we'd just ask him for more. Counterintuitively, I enjoyed that. It was certainly a lot more honest, and you knew the expectation wasn't perfection, it was to release something.

omosubi2• 5 years ago

Emily seems to have the gift of being able to be noticed wherever she goes - I almost never go on software development twitter (or any other area of twitter for that matter) but whenever I do she seems to have some recommended tweet listed alongside whatever I'm looking at - and now a top post on HN about leaving because she wants something different - impressive

muglug• 5 years ago

Speaking just from my own experience, maintaining open-source software can be unhealthily engrossing. The combination of wanting to please random internet strangers and everyone being in different time zones has, at times, overcome the flimsy work-life barriers I’ve tried to erect.

mauricioc• 5 years ago

The Firefox mobile rewrite (Fenix) is just fantastic, and for me it is a huge improvement over the previous version. Many thanks to Emily and the whole team that shipped it, it's much appreciated :)

ascorbic2• 5 years ago

The amount of abuse she got on Twitter after the FF Android launch was hard to believe. I don't understand how somebody thinks that disliking an update to a piece of free software justifies shouting abuse at an engineer who worked on it.

leereeves3• 5 years ago

I first joined Mozilla as an intern during my change-career journey mainly because I had taken one Android class, knew some Java, and applied on a whim at the right time to hit the recruiter’s inbox.

Is it that easy to become an intern at Mozilla?

ekager5• 5 years ago

Sorry, how many years of experience with professional software development do you expect your interns to have?

leereeves3• 5 years ago

If I offered internships I think I'd be lucky to get a few applicants, but I thought internships at top tech companies like Mozilla were very competitive.

sundarurfriend3• 5 years ago

It's clear from the other person's responses that they don't mean it as a jab (which you seem to have taken it to be). Many people have a mythical idea of needing to be a superhuman developer to get any position at a big name tech company. Reading this seems to have made this person realize that such positions might be not as out of reach as they assumed, and they were expressing surprise about that.

patrickscoleman• 5 years ago

If you read these comments, Emily, just want to say thank you for having the courage to share this in public. Burnout is tough but it gets better. Helpful for others to know they're not alone.

And thank you for Firefox on Android!

ekager5• 5 years ago

I read them <3 Thank you!

gwenzek• 5 years ago

Just wanted to see I love Firefox Android, I have been on nightly release for at least a year now, and it's great !

FloatArtifact• 5 years ago

Keep going strong! Thank you for making open source software a great place to be.

CivBase• 5 years ago

I'm actually very happy with the Firefox Android rewrite and I strongly prefer it over Chrome. It sounds like some people had problems, but I'd expect teething issues with any significant software changes. With such a big undertaking and how many people responded to the rollout (not to mention everything else that has happened in the last year), I'd be surprised if most devs on the project didn't find themselves burnt out at this point.

ausbah• 5 years ago

if anyone else here uses tiktok, highly recommend checking out her page. lots of pretty funny content about the tech industry

vlunkr• 5 years ago

She says in here that she "cared deeply about the product." Honest question, it is better to not care about the product?

As I've grown as a developer, I've become less personally attached to the products I work on. I still care that it's a quality product, and that it's stable, tested, etc. But I don't attach it to my personality or my self-worth. Ultimately what happens to it is out of your control, (assuming it's not a 100% solo project) so it's dangerous to have that attachment. I'm not sure that caring deeply about a project actually improves it in a meaningful way.

Also, this is a nice post. Sharing real stories about burnout and helping others understand it is great.

Vinnl• 5 years ago

It's been one of the most important lessons I've had to learn in my career and am still learning: not to care so much about everything.

That said, working on something that I care about is also one of the aspects of my job I love the most. I think the trick is to carefully pick a few things that you care about and focus on that, but then also to have a far more hands-off approach for pretty much everything else, and let others shape those things to their visions.

jakub_g3• 5 years ago

For some context: Firefox for Android, which shipped a few months back, was a rewrite from scratch, with new browsing engine (development of "old Firefox" was halted and there were no releases for >1 year).

Due to this, it initially shipped with no support for extensions except uBlock Origin, (which was a deal breaker for many long-time users; it now supports a handful of manually vetted extensions, but still not all AFAICT), plus of course when you rewrite from scratch, there will be some rough edges. Shipping without extensions was a sure way to enrage users, but having an app in development for 2+ years to ship "perfect v1" had its drawbacks too, so it was a tough call for Mozilla.

Despite that, and some edge-case UX polish need, I find new Firefox Android pretty ok and as a 2021 "degooglify myself" resolution, I've been using it for a few weeks now. So far so good, even if some aspects of it work differently that Chrome (for example, it's more aggressive in garbage collecting inactive tabs). When the small issues are resolved, it will be a very good browser.

glsdfgkjsklfj2• 5 years ago

the constant stream of negative comments from unhappy and rude users during the work week and outside of it was extremely draining

This is because mozilla is an open source aberration. The actual developers are super humans, but they are being led by people with the wrong incentives. This is what cause "rude emails from users". the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude patches/reports from contributors.

Open source organizations should focus on fostering the community and educating users. Not trying to champion new versions and rewrites themselves.

Mozilla at first focused on selling the default search spot (and spent that money on exec salary and moonshot projects not related to the browser at all). Now they are focusing on getting mobile users in order to sell their attached products.

When you pay for developers, and make your projects even more closed, you call that on yourself. You are now a company competing on the freemium market.

Case in point, i was an early contributor to Gaia (the mozilla phone OS). I could build and change the browser with ease. I would send in detailed bug reports. Now on android, I can barely get a decent build with the google libraries baked in, let alone make meaningful changes. I just hold off updates and hope somebody else do the work for me (for a while f-droid folks did :)

And I will not even get into my worse petty peeve which is the recent android addons non-techcnical-totally-political-whitelist. sigh. or the changes on every revision to the bookmarks. keywords, folders, etc. can't keep my data consistent for a while now :(

But to close in a good note: mozilla is not representative of opensource! it is much better elsewhere. thank you!

floatingatoll• 5 years ago

No. Abusers are responsible for their abuse. This is non-negotiable. The people on the Internet chose to be abusive. That's their fault. That is never anyone else's fault, period.

the opposite would have gotten you a nice balance of polite and rude

You are transferring some or all of the responsibility of "choose not to be rude to strangers on the Internet" onto the recipient, who received rudeness only once others had already made that choice. How dare you say that we can blame the recipient of abuse for the choices of others to be abusive. You have no right.

If you choose to be rude to someone else on the Internet, you alone are fully responsible, without regard for any extenuating circumstances whatsoever. If you are having a medical event, seek in-reality medical attention and prepare an apology when your medical treatment has progressed far enough. If you didn't mean to be abusive, apologize, and then demonstrate over time that you're becoming less accidentally abusive. If you thought that the shield of anonymity on Twitter would protect you from being caught, you're no different than someone who throws bricks into people's windshields on the highway. No circumstance whatsoever sets aside your personal responsibility for the words you produced on the Internet.

It doesn't matter what they did, what their employer did, what their software did. It doesn't matter if they could be perceived as being abusive to you. None of that matters at all. There is absolutely no room for blame-sharing or blame-transfer here. There are no excuses for choosing to be abusive in this way. You simply cannot transfer one iota of responsibility here. That decision terminates at you, and you alone.

ps. I don't know if you're abusive or not, and I honestly don't care. This isn't about you, whoever you are. This is about your attempt to transfer the responsibility for abuse in part or in full from the abusers to the recipient of their abuse. That attempt, and my detailed refutal, is the sole focus of my comment. The English word "generic individual target within a plural set" is, unhappily, "you". Some confusion may occur, and I don't have the English skills to mitigate that at this time. No doubt someone will chime in with a better way to phrase this. I endorse whatever corrections are necessary to resolve the tense difficulty here.

glsdfgkjsklfj2• 5 years ago

I did not read the article as people actively calling the maintainers names. But just showing dissatisfaction that their day-to-day work was disrupted without warning by a browser feature changing.

And arguing about actively offensive people, i agree is moot and not the point of my comment. But those will exist regardless if your project is big enough, unfortunatelly.

My comment is about people disliking (in a sociably manner) the work made by open source corporation like mozilla, and that demotivating the paid coders. That is totaly on mozilla.

musicale• 5 years ago

I did take one week of PTO right after our release!

;-(

It's disappointing but unsurprising that Mozilla apparently seems to facilitate a burnout work culture like every other tech company:

New/college hire -> work like mad with no life -> burn out -> quit -> repeat process for the next sucker in line.

eidelweissgirl• 5 years ago

I just quit my job of 10 years too. One of the big reasons it burning out. Working myself to death by doing 8 hours at work and also doing leetcoding, interview prep to get into FAANG.

pjkundert• 5 years ago

We’re all leaving Mozilla...

Give Brave a try; awesome experience, so far.

jlelse• 5 years ago

Thank you! I really like the new Firefox for Android, it made me switch back and I'm using it since the early beta versions.

I really can't understand the hate against people putting so much effort in creating nice user experiences. If you're not happy with Firefox, just use something else, but don't threaten the developers!

Leaving Mozilla

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