Recently, I'd read something about Mozilla and wonder whatever happened to that kid. Well, looks like he's all grown up now. I'm impressed to see that he spent so many years with Mozilla. I wonder if he has any regrets at starting so young.
People should step back and think about all the things they do in browsers today. Without the hard work of thousands of people from Netscape and Mozilla, you probably wouldn't be doing most of those things. I'm proud to have been able to play a small role in that.
No matter how shitty either industry is, I'd much rather own a nightclub and have my entire life be about the music than work in tech at all.
I think like a lot of you I probably can't watch a documentary without feeling "omg that guy was biased!" but I felt like they were pretty even-handed here.
- long hours
- stock options are a lottery, a stupid tax
- "and I won the lottery"
- the countdown timer at the open-source launch, the last minute typo of domain name, the person who observed it and directed the fix - that was awesome
- the realistic portrayal of burnout and long hours
- the sale to the giant evil internet corporation
- the original reply to jwz's "AOL is buying us and here's why its not so bad" mozilla.org post
I feel bad because these guys did waste a bunch of their time building a fucking web browser. But maybe, just maybe, the web would suck a lot less without mozilla.org and their free codebase. And then, I did start to get the idea, "hmmm, maybe it'd be good to write HTTP again... this time with sessions baked in..." and wander off into "Can I implement that?" territory.
Devastating comeback.
remember Andy Baio released made this film viewable in 2008 and wrote about ~ http://waxy.org/2008/06/code_rush/
As a younger person, this is a piece of history that was never taught.
Edit: If you enjoyed this, another personal-story-tinged entertaining-but-technical diamond I can recommend is a book about id Software, Masters of Doom.
It truly is. I started my career in July, 1999 and even though there was an open source movement, it was nothing like there is today. Young people can post code up on Github and even participate in huge open source projects that affect millions of people.
Teach each other. Learn from each other. Grow together, and make the world more awesome than you found it.
They're kind of shifting more from technology into politics. I heard they were cutting employees and divisions a lot.
I know former employees have to sign a waiver not to talk about their layoff, but why hasn't Mozilla's layoffs gotten any press, but startups do?
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm gives a clue.
http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/07/firefox-...
That's not what your linked chart shows. First, the chart is a % market share, not raw user counts. Second, ~18% down to ~13% isn't really "almost half" anyway.
Recent versions of Firefox have introduced third party plugins (like pocket).
After the Eich thing, they lost the "hacker" cred and their talent was pretty easy much poached. Further, the concept of merit - overlooking the political in lieu of skill / talent - is no longer a core value of the organization. [1]
Recruiters were all over linkedin and taking away the best talent left and right.
It seems very reasonable to interpret that whole situation as Mozilla acknowledging the importance of politics over technical leadership--fair or not, when you broadcast your realpolitik that hard, you're gonna lose people.
Hacker culture may not necessarily be aligned with Eich's personal views / situations. But crucial underlying concept is ignoring nebulous things like that. So taking action / reforms based off the premise feels like a Chesteron's fence [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
