
Ask HN: What's it like to work at Mozilla these days? - throaway33121
They have an open position in my area but their Glassdoor reviews are really mixed. It seems like a great company with a great mission but I worry it&#x27;s a sinking ship and I&#x27;m not interested in changing jobs too soon in the future.
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jvehent
I've been at Mozilla four years, working on operations security, and I still
consider it the best job I've ever had.

I worked in banking and a few startups before joining Mozilla, and neither the
culture or technology were ever great. Mozilla has both of these things, and a
mission statement that still makes me want to get out of bed in the morning
(work for mankind, not for the man).

Is it a sinking ship? Only if we're not up for the challenge of fighting back
corporations that want to lock the web being walled gardens. Time will tell,
but someone should fight the good fight, even if it's a lost cause.

Plus, you get cool t-shirts, and work from home, which is definitely a
lifestyle improvement for me.

~~~
Jdam
All this "we make the world a better place" is actually the most annoying
thing for me as a user. Every time I open Firefox (not so often anymore), I
get some "save the world"-spam on the frontpage.

~~~
inanutshellus
Have you tried changing your default start page? ;-)

~~~
Jdam
I tried changing my default web browser. Worked.

~~~
celticninja
So what's your default web browser and how does it greet you?

~~~
dan1234
Not OP, but Safari. It greets me with a blank page, which is just how I like
it.

~~~
bjpbakker
Huh? Since when is the default start page of Safari not apple.com? Or did you
change it manually?

~~~
hysan
I don't know what it was like before, but when I got my first MacBook Pro
maybe 2 years ago, the default start page for Safari was blank.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I checked to see my defaults and the _Homepage_ is
still apple.com. However, the "opens with" settings are set to _Favorites_
(top of the list, probably the default) which explains why it opens with a
blank page. So the change was probably whenever they added the _Favorites_
page feature; most likely to compete with Chrome/Firefox/Opera/etc.

------
matt4077
They've made some bad decisions, but it seems that they've managed to right
the ship again, with the latest releases of firefox getting rave reviews and
some really exciting technologies slowly taking shape.

Firefox has been widely panned the last few years, but that may have been
somewhat harsh, and ungrateful to Mozilla as an organisation.

Yes, Chrome has been running laps around them. But that's mostly the result of
Google's willingness to outspend them.

There are currently two platforms that have/had the potential to significantly
harm Google's cash cow of search ads: iOS and Facebook. A lot of the time that
was previously spend on the "open web" suddenly moved into these platforms.
Sometimes, apps replaced search, such as for purchase decisions, where people
started searching in the Amazon app instead of google.com.

That made Chrome the single most important technology for Google: they needed
to push the browser to be competitive with iOS and whatever Facebook was
doing. Playing a game, or streaming movies needed to be as fast, easy-to-use,
and safe as doing those things with native apps. Developing for the web needed
to be as attractive as developing for native platforms.

In that situation, it's no wonder that Firefox lagged behind–the world's best,
and richest, software company was developing a browser, with what is likely to
be a budget limited only by the diminishing return of ever-larger teams.

There's really no guarantee that Google's incentives will forever remain to be
aligned with the users' as they are now. To pour all this misguided
disappointment on Mozilla and gleefully cheer their demise is foolish, because
sooner or later, it will be important again to have an independent, open, OSS
browser.

It's also somewhat illoyal, considering Mozilla's past accomplishments for the
web.

~~~
jgh
I feel like Chrome has been getting consistently worse recently. For example
there are some pretty rough video-related bugs - at least on macOS - that have
been around for at least a year. I guess that's what happens when you're on
top, you get complacent. Maybe Firefox has an opening.

------
leo2urlevan
(only my opinion here, nothing provided from my employer yadda yadda
disclaimer and whatnot)

I've been working at Mozilla for a few years now, although this is my first
job I'd say this is really great already. One Venn diagram I saw in the past
was about choosing your job and the title read: pick two among "interesting",
"well-paid" and "ethical". Well, I think you can easily get all three when
working at Mozilla, or at least that's my experience of it.

Also, I'd suggest that some people have very high expectations when they start
at Mozilla, hoping it works like a perfect anarchist (in the actual political
sense) and democratic organization. It's not the case: Mozilla _Corporation_
is a company (duh!). So it's slightly less corporate than the regular public
company (e.g. there are no shareholders), but it is still working like a
regular company: vertical hierarchy, meritocratic do-ocracy, OKR, you name it.
Some people don't like that and tend to be more virulent towards Mozilla than
they would be towards any other corporation, hence the bad opinions on
Glassdoor, in my opinion.

------
callahad
Like any large company, your experience will vary depending on your manager.

I've been with Mozilla for five and a half years. It's not all been roses--
I've weathered a team disbanding and a bad manager--but in the aftermath of
each, I've ended up in a better place, and I feel like there are still ample
opportunities for me to grow technically and inter-personally.

It _feels good_ to work for a non-profit that's directly defending the
neutrality and interoperability of the Web itself, both through advocacy and
the direct action of building a modern browser that's competitive with
products produced by, literally, the three largest publicly traded
corporations (by market capitalization) in the world.

Not only does the mission feel good, the salary and benefits are competitive,
and the remote / autonomous / trust-driven culture is worth its weight in
gold. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything to work here, and it's
fulfilling work.

Is the ship sinking? I don't think so. Our marketshare percentage has lagged
behind market growth, but our absolute user numbers are stable and
significant. We're back to focusing on core product improvements, and multi-
year experiments like Rust and Servo are paying enormous dividends. If you've
used Firefox, Visual Studio Code, Dropbox, or npm in the past year, you've hit
code written in Rust. We're also racking up wins in other areas: LetsEncrypt
started at Mozilla, and Google's recent abandonment of Native Client was a
direct result of the work Mozilla put into asm.js. WebVR and A-Frame.io are
taking on a life of their own after incubating at Mozilla. And I'm very, very
encouraged by the improvements we're landing in Firefox 57 and beyond: there's
plenty of room for growth, and we're aggressively pursuing it.

Mozilla was a turbulent place a few years ago, but the past two years have
felt better than ever. Join us!

------
dao-
Come help us prevent the ship from sinking. :)

I've been at Mozilla for ~11 years, worked from home for many years, now
splitting my time between the Berlin office and home. I feel good about the
work I do and don't intend to change jobs anytime soon.

There have been some leadership / management issues but it's not all bad.
Admittedly some people (e.g. those working on Firefox OS) were effected more
than others.

~~~
vanderZwan
> the Berlin office

There's a Berlin office? Wait, what am I saying, of course there's an office
for an organisation like Mozilla in privacy-obsessed Germany.

... are they hiring? EDIT: Yes!

[https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/](https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/)

~~~
gcp
[https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?location=Berlin](https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?location=Berlin)

Quite a bit.

------
ianbicking
I think there's a certain psychic load to working at a mission-driven
organization. Who are you working for? The mission? Who's interpretation of
the mission? Your manager? The company? Yourself? And then at times when you
don't feel like you are living up to your potential, or opportunity, or
expectations, then there's a tendency to internalize that. Having internalized
it, it can color how you look at the organization (and everything else),
usually with general distaste and resentment.

Anyway, that's happened to me at times, and I've seen it happen to other
people. I think the dynamics this creates inform a lot of the Glassdoor
reviews. I think it's emotionally easier if you have a transactional job: the
company pays you, you do something that makes the company money, or at least
do what your boss says to do. The pros and cons of emotional detachment are
beyond the scope of this comment.

Financially Mozilla is doing fine, and probably will continue doing fine. It's
not on my list of worries.

------
javaun
I dreamed of working on Firefox in 2004, took some scenic detours, and got
here in 2014. It’s absolutely amazing now. But my first year was extremely
difficult, especially as a new remotee. The Brendan Eich thing happened on
week 3. Chrome was eating our lunch, and Mozilla was focused on shipping a
phone. The company was split along that fault line, with platform engineering
straddling both sides. We were losing. We wondered if we’d survive. Some of
the Glassdoor reviews reflect what was indeed a tumultuous and uncertain time.

The culture was in tumult too, “old guard” vs. new. Some reviews were written
by people who made terrific contributions at one time, but couldn’t turn the
corner and took that anger out the door with them.

We re-org’ed (so many re-org’s!). We have an amazing executive and director-
level team. We’re well-run, in great financial shape. Our culture has changed
(inevitable), and I like where we’re going together. We’re lined up behind
Firefox, and we’re doing terrific work again.

I tell interviewees that working here can at times feel like living in a
Reddit thread. There are amazingly thoughtful, generous, and mind-glowingly
smart people working on the hardest problems across continents and time zones.
Sometimes there’s acrimony or trolling. We’re all here because the things we
create together can only be made here. We go head-to-head with competitors
50-100x our size. I could go to those companies, and I wouldn’t have a
fraction of the impact and the responsibility I have at Mozilla. No company is
a fit for everyone, but for someone like me, it’s hard to imagine being happy
anywhere else.

------
inanutshellus
Working for Mozilla would be a dream job IMO. Who cares what Glassdoor says?
It's one of the few techie corporations out there actively working to make the
world an eensy weensy bit a better place. Go work there. Go go go go.

------
zbraniecki
I've been working, in various forms, on Mozilla for 17 years now. I've joined
the project as a volunteer back in 2000, and ended up working full time since
2010. I worked in multiple roles during that time, mostly as an engineer, but
spent some time working on contributor relationships, contributor tech and
some market analysis even. I've worked remotely for most of that time from
Europe, but am working from San Francisco for almost 4 years now.

My personal experience has been very positive. I'm working full time on
projects that impact the shape of the Web, I have good work-life balance and
incredible number of highly challenging problems to solve.

I've been with Mozilla since they were a 40 person startup, through the crazy
days of releasing Firefox 1.0, sudden growth during Firefox OS days (I spent 2
years working on it!), and now I work on Firefox 57 and beyond. It's been a
great, if bumpy, ride and I can't stop enjoying it :)

I've seen bad culture fits, I've seen clusters of bad management and projects
that "felt weird". People who got into Mozilla through those usually ended up
leaving, but I'd say it's a vast minority of cases.

And wrt. "sinkin ship" \- It depends on us. Working for a non-profit has some
downsides. We need to stay open, inclusive, some things happen slower, we get
much more "negative feedback" from people who feel more entitled to judge our
work etc. But it also comes with some huge benefits. I never optimized
anything at Mozilla for profit, our leadership sees money as a tool, and we
can focus on what we solve with the tool. Some of my long-standing projects
are way too "altruistic" to ever exist at Google, Apple or Facebook, because
they don't impact the revenue stream. We can and use the Mozilla Manifesto to
reason about decisions all the time, and thanks to all of that - the Web
community really supports us. So, if we can get amazing products, we may not
have the marketing budget of big companies, but we have the support of the
global community. And releasing amazing products is something that depends on
us, not any external factor. Right now we're pushing for Firefox 57 and I do
believe we're on the right track to succeed (yes, I disagree with Andreas :)).

My take is that if you have the "NGO" muscle in you, enjoy spending a lot of
time on big problems, like the open-source community model of work (which we
drift towards with most projects, although there are pockets that are slow to
open up) and are not money-driven (not because they pay bad, just because you
can get better money as a hired gun at some corpo ;)), Mozilla is worth giving
a try :)

------
zerr
They advertise remote jobs but it is actually limited to several counties.
Also, they differentiate salaries based on your location.

~~~
gcp
Getting hired directly by Mozilla requires them to have a (minimal) legal
presence in your country. If that isn't there, you'll be hired through an
intermediary, but that is - as far as I know - possible essentially worldwide.

~~~
zerr
No, that intermediary option is also limited to some particular countries.

~~~
gcp
AFAIK it's more correct to say that only some particular countries are
excluded, but I'm not HR and I have no idea where your are getting that
impression from, so I won't comment further.

~~~
zerr
I got this information from Mozilla HR who clarified this with the hiring
manager, for the country in Europe.

~~~
gcp
Ok, so one country in Europe is excluded.

This is quite far removed from "remote hiring limited to some particular
countries". A large part of Mozilla's workforce is spread out through Europe,
so there can't be too many exceptions.

~~~
zerr
"... only available in particular countries which doesn't include your
country, unfortunately..." was the message from HR.

~~~
canuckistani
That's true, we can't hire everywhere.

~~~
zerr
A very small shop in a very beaurocratic EU country receives the invoices in
PDF at the end of the month, from another country far outside the EU, pays the
bill through standard bank wire transfer. Why Mozilla can't do the same?

------
k__
I was a contributor 3 years ago and my experience with Mozilla was mixed.

On the one hand, the people are skilled and super nice and I think you do good
stuff when working there.

On the other hand you work on big old software projects with all the tools
that grew onto them over the years. So if you on the technical side of things,
you better like maintenance work, hehe.

~~~
canuckistani
...and, yes there is a legacy problem with old code bases, but one trade-off
for interns, contributors, junior developers is that you get to make an impact
on a codebase used in a commercial project by hundreds of millions of people.
Terrible tools written in anger in 2003 are still in use, sure, and terrible
architectural decisions have been made, re-made, then made again over the
years. It's the kind of messy any codebase eventually gets to.

This codebase still has life in it though, and the proof is in how far Gecko
has come in the last year. Go run Nightly for a bit, compare it to Chrome or
current Firefox. It's a big deal.

~~~
k__
> Terrible tools written in anger in 2003

lolwat?

~~~
k__
Seriously, what was happening in 2003 that made Mozilla employees angry?

~~~
kbrosnan
Nothing specific. It is being used to convey that the code was written at an
emotional high or low maybe when the author was tired or under time pressure
to get something that worked.

------
gcp
_I worry it 's a sinking ship_

The ship already sunk once, it just keeps resurfacing every time the water
drops because the competition suffers from the CADT Model wrt their attitude
towards the internet.

~~~
falcolas
Wow. Glad Google kept that in it's cache, and even more impressively that JWZ
kept those pages online.

From 2003: CADT == "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers"

> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then
> (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer
> can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any
> of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/the-cadt-
model/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/the-cadt-model/)

------
vertex-four
Surely it depends what you're working on there? There'll be projects that are
mostly-ignored and slowly dying, and projects which are core to the
organisation's goals.

~~~
gcp
I'm sure it also depends a lot on your manager. Like in any corporation,
really.

