
Thank u, next - steveklabnik
https://words.steveklabnik.com/thank-u-next
======
nindalf
I'm surprised and disappointed to learn that Mozilla didn't value Steve's work
enough. The documentation, especially the book [1] which he authored, is the
gold standard that every software project should aspire to. As someone who
learned the language recently, it's possible that I might have abandoned it if
the documentation and learning materials hadn't been so good.

I also thought his work in evangelizing Rust on HN, Reddit and a million other
places was hugely important, and a big part of why there's a lot of positive
buzz around the language. Steve, I do hope you'll find the time to continue at
least a part of this work, because I think it's vital for the success of Rust.

[1] - [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/)

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks! To be clear, the doc work was my job, but the evangelizing wasn't.

I plan on continuing both, as much as time allows.

~~~
jules
Would it be possible to crowdfund that role? People on youtube apparently earn
a living by making videos in which they film themselves watching other youtube
videos, so it ought to be possible :)

~~~
steveklabnik
Maybe! I'm not sure I have the kind of skills needed to do such a thing.

~~~
jules
Maybe setting up a Patreon account and posting what you did each week is
sufficient. That seems to work for the youtubers, and it's more audacious to
ask money for watching youtube videos than writing docs and promoting Rust ;-)

~~~
raphlinus
I have done this, and just for reference, my Patreon currently brings in
$203/month. I am very grateful to my supporters, but making this scale doesn't
look easy.

------
codezero
This is a bummer on many levels, but also personally, a bit of a relief.

For a while I was considering going all-in to try to get a role at Mozilla. I
really believe in their mission, and I drink the kool-aid when it comes to the
browser market getting gobbled up.

What held me back at the time were the company reviews. The culture sounds
toxic, and the management sounds incompetent, and there's no force of change
that has done anything to change that in the past ~5 years.

So this is a relief, because random online statements are often a limited
glimpse into a company, and I've been worried that I made a bad choice by not
going for a role there, but seeing something like this come from steve is very
damning for Mozilla.

Best of luck Steve, I’m sure you’ll end up somewhere great.

~~~
callahad
Mozilla isn't a monolith. Like most medium and large organizations, your
experience can vary greatly between teams and management chains.

If Mozilla's mission and manifesto resonate with you, give it a shot. With
Microsoft throwing their weight behind Chromium, we're the last bastion
standing against a WebKit-derived monoculture. It's an impossible challenge,
but _it matters_ , and we've beaten the odds before. Current openings are at
[https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/](https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/),
and I'd encourage you to apply.

~~~
codezero
That's the problem though. From the outside, there's no way to know if you're
going to end up in the "good" part of the company or not. Sure, you can do
your best to screen the company, but it's not too hard in the short interview
process to mask a lot of the warts.

You could say this is true at any company, but it feels like more of a problem
when comparing a company with lots of really good reviews/testimonials to one
with very few good ones.

I think I'd have to have a close friend, or someone who I trust internally, to
convince me of the quality of a particular team at this point, and I haven't
got that. Also, I've moved off the career path, I think, that would be of
value at Mozilla.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _From the outside, there 's no way to know if you're going to end up in the
> "good" part of the company or not._

I think this is a serious problem in all sorts of fields, and I've never heard
of a good answer. Sometimes Glassdoor is enough to get impressions like
"healthy devops team, unhealthy frontend and sales teams", but with companies
where the same job title appears on many teams it's even harder to sort out. I
suspect you're right that it's a significant reason for word-of-mouth job
searches; they're a candidate's best form of diligence.

It definitely cuts both ways, too - no matter what the prevailing culture a
large company is likely to have teams out of sync with it. Places like Uber
and Riot Games that make the news for bad culture have teams who aren't
exposed to that stuff, and on the other side we've all heard stories of
localized tyranny and incompetence within otherwise-great companies.

~~~
codezero
Yeah, personally, when I am trying to find this out if I'm speaking with a
current employee who is on the team I would be working for, I try to drill
down to see if problems are related to poor middle management (a single bad
manager can destroy an entire team and any team that is connected to it), or
whether it's endemic in the culture, which is harder to suss out, but is
usually something you can infer when asking about over-arching company
strategy and how plans get executed from the top down.

------
raphlinus
Thank you, Steve. You have personally done more to make the Rust community
what it is today than possibly any other person. It speaks very poorly of
Mozilla that they don't value your work.

Perhaps 2019 is the time to start the Rust Foundation, as mentioned by boats
and others[0]. If so, you'd clearly be one of the founders. I would put my
name into the ring for that as well, as we're now in somewhat similar
circumstances. All it needs is some money, a lot for a pizza cook perhaps but
a pittance by Silicon Valley standards.

Wherever our paths lead, I hope they continue to intersect!

[0]:
[https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/rust-2019/](https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/rust-2019/)

~~~
steveklabnik
<3

I am really of two minds about a foundation. I've seen a few different
variations of this idea, and they all have a _lot_ of downsides, as well as
upsides. It's not clear to me that it would be a win.

~~~
leadingthenet
I'm genuinely interested, could you expand a bit on what the downsides /
upsides would be?

~~~
steveklabnik
The pros and cons are both related to a thing that many people don't think
about when it comes to non-profits: money. A foundation's job is to administer
money. The pros are that well, someone has to do that work. Collectivizing
helps; a random person giving $10 once isn't worth the management overhead,
but 10,000 people giving $10 (or whatever) means you have a more substantial
chunk of money. Additionally, projects also need things like legal support,
which a foundation is well-set up to manage.

The cons are, well, that work is hard, and you can also end up in a position
where you spend as much time fundraising as you do actually improving the
project. This is why people talk about "efficiency" in non-profits, ideally
these tasks take as little money as possible to do the administration, and
spend as much as possible on the project. Also, when you're in the business of
distributing money, you have to manage people's reactions to how you spend it,
some people are going to be upset that you picked project A over project B, or
person A over person B. That's also a form of overhead.

(and I'm not talking about MoFo here, I know _very_ little about it or how it
works. This is based on experiences with other non-profits and foundations
that I've experienced and/or heard about elsewhere, and from lots of other
people.)

~~~
leadingthenet
Ah, I see what you mean.

Thanks a lot for the explanation, I've never really understood how foundations
work.

------
weinzierl
> What I saw in Rust was something that the world really needed. And I wanted
> to help it get there. Beyond that, the only real way to get a job working on
> Rust was to work at Mozilla. And independently of Rust, that was something
> I’m really excited about.

A big part of what drew me into Rust is that the people behind it have
reasonable ideas which are very well documented. I know this doesn't sound
terribly exciting but the older I grow the more I appreciate that as something
very valuable - and amiss in many projects.

Besides other things Steve contributed a lot to these values by writing
documentation and first and foremost by being there and answering questions -
online and at the conferences.

> Well, the first thing is that I don’t plan to stop working on Rust. How much
> I’ll be able to depends on what’s next, but that’s the great part about open
> source; I can continue to help the thing I love, even if it might not be
> full-time anymore.

Glad to hear that he continues working on Rust. I really hope he will find a
job that allows him to work on Rust full-time though. Having to split ones
attention isn't often going well. Maybe this is kind of litmus test for Rust
even: As much as it hurts me to write this but if there isn't a well paying
full-time opportunity in the Rust space for someone like Steve then maybe Rust
isn't going anywhere.

------
fxfan
I want to say from his past blog posts- Steve is a very thoughtful writer. And
from all my online interactions in comments- a very respectful person.

Knowing him (whatever little) things must be really frustrating for him to
call Mozilla out in public.

Rust is what it is- not because its an amazingly well designed language - lots
of languages are very well designed Haskell, f#, Scala. But Rust has a very
public development and Steve has been great at managing the public aspect.

I sincerely hope Steve takes a public facing role again.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _Rust has a very public development_

I don't know how far Rust will go in adoption breadth and lifespan, but it's
already clear that it's had a major impact on the community. Both personally
and on HN, I've seen it drive a new cohort of people to take an interest in PL
design, low-level languages and safety guarantees, and even kernel design
theory. Talented people who have never previously gone in for C or C++ saw a
chance to start in on those fields with Rust, to all of our benefit.

It's obvious to me that Steve (and the Rust team more generally) deserve a lot
of credit for that. Their communication and community outreach have been
unparalleled, and it's sparked great deal of interest and engagement that
might otherwise have been missed.

~~~
nickpsecurity
" I've seen it drive a new cohort of people to take an interest in PL design,
low-level languages and safety guarantees, and even kernel design theory.
Talented people who have never previously gone in for C or C++ saw a chance to
start in on those fields with Rust, to all of our benefit. It's obvious to me
that Steve (and the Rust team more generally) deserve a lot of credit for
that."

Exactly. They've done what Ada and other safe, systems languages couldn't do.
They made it go mainstream with stronger protections than before on top of
thriving community. Quite amazing.

------
yanslookup
This surprises me on so many different levels. To me, Rust is nearly the same
thing as steveklabnik. Considering his level of engagement and enthusiasm I
figured he was one of those people making easy SV money.

Between this and Jess Frazelle (another household name) never getting a
promotion shows how _wrong_ this industry is.

~~~
chrisseaton
> To me, Rust is nearly the same thing as steveklabnik.

I thought it was designed by Graydon Hoare?

~~~
mixmastamyk
There's probably room for more than one person in building a new
language/platform.

~~~
chrisseaton
Well that's what I meant.

------
gavingmiller
> Why’d he quit? ... he told me this: at each stage of a company’s growth,
> they have different needs. Those needs generally require different skills.
> What he enjoyed, and what he had the skills to do, was to take a tiny
> company and make it medium sized. Once a company was at that stage of
> growth, he was less interested and less good at taking them from there.

This is an aspect that gets overlooked in many businesses & careers. I've
heard it phrased that companies go through 3 stages: Startup, Scale Up,
Optimize. The above quote is a sub-stage of Scale Up. Some people are built
for just a single stage and knowing how and where your skillset fits in is
crucial to career happiness. As well as knowing when to encourage employees to
move on.

Great post and I wish @steveklabnik continued success in his career!

~~~
resters
To borrow from the Harry Potter universe, early stage startups need
Gryffindors and Ravenclaws, but then as the company grows more and more
Hufflepuffs get hired, and sooner or later the company ends up on the radar of
Slytherins, who are focused mostly on obtaining fame and renown, and who are
more likely to have what muggles call "dark triad" personality traits.

What's most fascinating about the Hogwarts metaphor is that members of each
house each bring some useful value, but the core values of each are often in
conflict with the core values of the others.

At some point Mozilla went from being a heroic struggle that appealed to
people who had a specific vision for the future of the internet, and turned
into a status symbol like having Harvard on your résumé. This happens to any
successful startup. A company that would never have appealed to a lot of
workers suddenly becomes desirable (all else being equal) because of the
status associated with it. Not to bash MBAs, but this is why I advise a
"absolutely no MBAs" policy for startups.

MBA diplomas are simply status symbols and most people who have the degree
joke about how easy it was to obtain and how much partying/networking they did
while in school. They also graduate expecting to be placed in a leadership
role due to the degree, even though young MBAs typically have little to no
actual work experience or hard skills. I've seen overly confident MBAs nearly
sink funding rounds for startups because they thought they were being clever
with accounting and the investors saw right through it.

~~~
pcwalton
For what it's worth, I don't know if anyone here, me included, considers
Mozilla a "status symbol" on the resume. It certainly is nowhere near FAANG in
terms of inbound recruiter volume. People who want status symbols go to
Google.

(I chose Mozilla over large company offers a decade ago because the work
seemed more interesting, knowing full well it was more of a gamble in terms of
my career. I've never regretted the decision.)

~~~
tombert
I obviously can't speak for anyone else on this, but I have actually given ex-
Mozilla people a bit of a boost in the past when I've interviewed people
because I view it as a) a semi-prestigious company, and b) a company filled
with people who _really_ like programming.

------
jxcl
I've interacted with Steve a few times on the Rust IRC channel and he's always
been super awesome and helpful. He's also been very receptive to feedback on
the Rust documentation and helped me to contribute to it.

Thanks for all your hard work on Rust, Steve, and good luck with the future!

------
blub
Mozilla sounds like your average PHB-led corporation.

This is also one of the reasons I'm skeptical about Rust, since Mozilla is the
backbone of Rust development. They don't strike me as an organisation that can
shepherd a programming language long term and with their market share taking a
nose dive they're bound to get even more desperate and cut non-essential
projects or make new data-sharing partnerships.

Anyways, good luck on your next adventure. Based on your work, you don't
deserve to be the lowest paid in the team...

~~~
steveklabnik
Mozilla doesn't really "shepherd" Rust development. We've constructed the Rust
project so that Mozilla cannot control it; decisions are made via consensus,
and Mozilla employees make up ~10% of the overall Rust team. There's never
been some sort of mandate to do something specific with Rust from upon high,
and I don't expect there to ever be. If they tried, it wouldn't work!

~~~
Jare
The big concern is not that it wouldn't work, it is that they might try, and
that you may have been one of the things preventing that from happening.

All the best luck going forward, because you absolutely deserve it.

~~~
steveklabnik
If that's your worry, then you should be relieved by this change. This is one
more person who is involved with decisions in Rust who isn't employed by
Mozilla.

That said, to repeat, I don't believe this is something Mozilla would ever try
to do.

And thanks.

------
Phlarp
Why is it that nonprofit tech organizations see such value in maintaining a
San Francisco office location (looking at you Mozilla and EFF) only to lowball
employees on compensation?

Surely the perception of having a trendy location can't be worth more than
market salaries in the pursuit of talent? Are there other benefits to the
location besides perception?

~~~
ironmagma
> Are there other benefits to the location besides perception?

Definitely. Access to talent pool, networking opportunities, easy customer
research, marketing, and so much more.

~~~
Phlarp
It really seems like a double gut-punch from my perspective. I was approached
by a recruiter representing EFF when I graduated (state school in the midwest)
and while 75K for a fresh grad seemed like reasonable compensation for a non-
profit, when I viewed that in the context of both a cut for the recruiting
body shop and the high cost of living in SF for both a company and individual
that it was a farcical proposal.

Would the fight for digital liberties really be _that_ encumbered by a
location in Kansas City, Austin, Atlanta, or even a generic Valley office
park?

~~~
kiaulen
KC native here. I haven't been to SF, and don't ever plan to. I live 12 miles
away from my work (to the East, thank goodness), and bought a home a few years
ago in a very nice suburb for $160k. 3 bed, 2.5 bath, gigantic finished
basement and 2 car garage. My mortgage is like $1.3k/month

For the same $1.3k in SF, I could get a deluxe cardboard box by the side of
the road. No thank you. And KC is google fiber as well, so I'm getting great
internet for $50/mo.

I really think more tech companies should try KC or Austin. The cost of living
is much lower, so more of people's salaries becomes spending money.

------
fb03
Steve,

I don't know you but I wish I did.

You seem like one of those really lighthearted folks that make everything
better in life. From reading your answers on IRC and Hacker News, You are
always humble and eager to provide answers. When confronted with arrogance and
ignorance on several replies here, You reacted with facts and without ever
taking the conversation in an impolite manner.

You see, one thing I believe is the cancer of our current line of work (tech)
is the notion that we must obey blindly to some kind of savior or master, and
that we have to put up with the masters' erratic and disrespectful behavior,
for he is the 'bringer of the vision' to us not-as-enlightened folk. We don't
need to put names but several come to mind when it comes to FOSS and stuff,
right? In your case, I consider you a true master, for that you encourage
collaboration without ever being uncouth to others just because of a position
of power.

Your honesty and kindness shines specially in your post regarding Mozilla. You
are one of those people that are able to talk "uncomfortable stuff" without
making people reading it uncomfortable.

Thank you for being an awesome leader and I hope to read more and more of your
answers and informational posts here, take it from the unknown no-names of the
Internet like me: you are doing it right and being like this is gonna keep
making people gravitate towards your works throughout your life.

May you multiply your ability of connect people with your heart, a skill which
is much lacking in the current world of ever greater egos.

o/

------
rl3
In my opinion Steve's efforts have been nothing short of herculean, proving
invaluable to Rust. If Mozilla can't recognize this, then that is a tragedy.

Interacting with him on HN has been nothing short of a pleasure.

Best of luck wherever you go, Steve!

------
AceJohnny2
Steve, thank you for your work on Rust. I can honestly say that your writing
was the most important factor in getting me excited and into Rust. Your book
is a _pleasure_ to read, it's a gold standard. Overall, the quality of Rust's
documentation is a beacon in the field, and I understand you've contributed
much there.

I'm sad (and a bit angry at Mozilla) that you didn't get the career
recognition you deserved at Mozilla. I look forward to seeing what you work on
next.

~~~
vmarsy
Agreed, I've started spending more time learning rust, and the book + your
comments here on HN about Rust internals makes the learning so much pleasant,
thank you for those!

------
lbotos
For those that missed it, this is a subtle nod to Ariana Grande's "Thank u,
next" song/tweet:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl1aHhXnN1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl1aHhXnN1k)

[https://twitter.com/arianagrande/status/1058888117808070656?...](https://twitter.com/arianagrande/status/1058888117808070656?lang=en)

Never did I ever expect to see that on HN. <3

2019 culture clash is already wild.

~~~
chii
It's not really subtle thb.

------
wyldfire
> Furthermore, I don’t have any personal opportunity at Mozilla; I recently
> discovered I’m the lowest-paid person on my team, and Mozilla doesn’t pay
> particularly well in the first place. In order to have any kind of career
> growth

A tech company couldn't find a better evangelist IMO. Steve, you should be
commanding a top tier salary.

------
sambe
I wonder if he was told, repeatedly, "if you don't like it, leave". My
experience has been that companies who don't want to change say this to their
best employees, whilst dragging along their worst ones indefinitely. The best
eventually follow the advice.

------
topspin
Re Fuchsia: "They use a lot of Rust, and plan to use more."

When I look at Fuchsia source I don't see much Rust. There is Fargo, a Cargo
wrapper that integrates Rust into the Fuchsia build system, but I don't see a
lot of actual Rust code in the system.

What am I missing? I've cloned Topaz, Zircon and some other large Fuchsia
repos, but I see only a smattering of Rust source.

~~~
steveklabnik
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765780)

~~~
topspin
Thanks.

------
Xophmeister
I'd be interested to know more about what disenchanted him -- if he's
willing/able to share, of course -- from Mozilla, besides what he briefly
mentioned regarding pay and opportunity. I can understand the need to move on
from a position that is no longer of interest, but are there "political"
reasons? He hints at incidents, for example.

~~~
steveklabnik
I don't think it's particularly professional to get into more detail than I
did in my post, as much as I'd like to. As the saying goes, there are three
sides to every story. I'd rather focus on the future.

~~~
dao-
Why hint at it at all then? Without details it won't satisfy the curious nor
help fix whatever problems there might be. As someone who still works for
Mozilla out of conviction, this feels like an unnecessary low blow.

~~~
codezero
I can’t speak for steve, but having been in a similar position, hinting at it
signals to peers that if they are feeling similar things, they aren’t alone.
It’s easy for a lot of toxic culture to go unspoken, and to be gaslighted into
thinking things are great, a post like this helps reinforce that stuff (yes
vague) is not great and maybe it will lead more folks within Mozilla to pull
off the rose colored glasses.

Basically: it’s not for the general reader, but a specific subset of them, if
I were to take a guess.

~~~
dao-
Working for Mozilla, I feel I should be able to make sense of these hints, but
I can't. I have no clue what issues or missteps were deal-breakers for Steve,
apart from the compensation issue. Any organization of the size will have
/some/ problems, and I fail to see the usefulness of signaling that's so vague
that anybody can interpret it in any way they want.

~~~
ohithereyou
Maybe you should ask someone in your management chain why Steve was punished
for expressing his concerns, thereby ensuring you wouldn't have heard about
them internally at Mozilla.

------
vnw
Proponents of the open web should be very, very worried about the terrible
mismanagement of Mozilla.

------
coldtea
Perhaps it's time Rust (which in the meantime has been adopted from many
teams, from Microsoft, to Dropbox, FB and more) to get some more independence,
and have an independent structure and organization fund them.

If Mozilla doesn't play well with their core business, and actually innovate,
and piss people off even in their side projects like Rust, they'll continue
the race to irrelevancy in browsing market share and loose their search engine
placement deals. It's not that difficult to go from hundreds of millions per
year to nothing fast.

------
cevn
Steve, just wanna thank you for the excellen twork you've done at making Rust
more accessible to normal people like myself. Your book is an invaluable
resource to newcomers to the language.

------
gamesbrainiac
Departures happen, but the way in which they happen determines the culture and
maturity of a company; its sad to see Steve leave like this.

I hope you go somewhere that truly values you.

------
kup0
I'm not a programmer (yet?) in any large sense. I've done some simple old-
school web-dev including some JS, PHP, etc. and have only dabbled with other
languages otherwise back in college and on my own.

I've read through a large portion of the Rust book and really appreciate how
good it is. It's very clear and made me feel like I grasped quite a bit in a
short time. Maybe someday I'll be writing or contributing to Rust projects.

Thank you Steve!

------
nwmcsween
With regards to Fuchsia it's not really much new in OS design: a microkernel
with the same old issues of each 'component' being a server and the complexity
it entails.

If I could work on an operating system it would be something like
[http://www.barrelfish.org/](http://www.barrelfish.org/) but with a few big
changes.

------
nailer
> A company that thinks they can take webassembly (and their product built on
> it) to the next level

Epic? Unreal Engine was one of the first 3D engines with WASM output, and if
you thought you'd never work at a payments company and loved it, you might
enjoy gamedev (or gamedevdev in this case). Also Raleigh NC is a nice place to
live.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Raleigh’s nice. I grew up and went to school in Raleigh.

It’s not nice enough to move cross country.

~~~
mindcrime
I dunno. Last I checked Raleigh was one of the fastest growing cities in the
country. And I doubt _all_ of those people are coming from the rest of the
East Coast. I'm pretty sure at least a handful of people are, indeed, moving
cross country to relocate here.

~~~
peterstjohn
We both know Durham is better though ;P

~~~
mindcrime
And Chapel Hill is better than both! :p

All joking aside, colloquially speaking, I assume that "Raleigh" is shorthand
for the entire greater Triangle region when speaking to, or in regards to,
outsiders. Personally, I live in Chapel Hill, but I consider myself a "citizen
of the Triangle". :-)

------
realcr
Hi Steve, I looked at the title and I had this gut feeling of what the post is
going to contain. It was a real bummer to hear about your leaving Mozilla. You
did some serious job with Rust. My first contact with the Rust language was
through your posts here. There was a feeling that you are virtually everywhere
on the Internet where someone mentions Rust. Always very helpful with your
writings. On the other hand, I'm happy for you and hope that you can find a
place where your work is appreciated and well compensated.

Your post makes me a bit worried with what's going on with Mozilla, and also
for the future of the Rust language. I have mixed feelings about Mozilla
myself. Some people mentioned in the comments something about a Rust
Foundation. I will definitely be happy to chip in if it's in the plan.

Thank you for everything, and good luck wherever you go next (:

------
lenocinor
I feel fairly certain, Steve, that I wouldn't have learned Rust without you
writing the docs and having you contribute here on HN. Thanks! You're amazing.

------
ksec
1\. What happen to the Ruby and Rails part of the History?

2\. How on earth did you came from Pizza to Tech?

3\. I read it as if you were working on Firefox Pre 1.0 and Rust in Mozilla.
And I don't think that is the case?

4\. Finally someone pointing out the problem with Mozilla. ( Far to often they
want to play themselves as the Saint or as David vs Goliath )

5\. Have you thought about doing something with Rust and BlockChain?

Anyway Best of Luck.

~~~
steveklabnik
1\. It just wasn't super relevant! I left the pizza job for an internship at a
company doing PHP, then left that internship to do a startup in Rails.

2\. The pizza job was through high school and college, I transitioned to tech
after I had the degree.

3\. I have never contributed to Firefox, but I have been a passionate user for
years (I'm writing this comment in Firefox, for example)

5\. I'm not particularly interested in blockhain stuff. There is a lot of Rust
in that area though!

Thank you.

------
kureikain
This is sad.

I plan to do Rust in 2019 more. I'm amaze by performance of Rust
software(Parity of Ethereum). My friends who read HN that I talked to knew
Rust because of Steve. It sounds ridiculous but it's what I observed.

Mozilla do a lots of experiment and weird projects. yet they aren't willing to
put him on same level of pay scale.

------
tzs
> I started working at 15, when I took a job as a pizza cook. Over the next
> seven years, I moved up the ranks, to a driver, shift manager, and then as
> part of the “new store opening team.”

Driver is up the ranks from cook? I don't know why, but I always assumed that
it was the other way around.

~~~
steveklabnik
They're sort of close, status wise, at least at the chain I worked for, but a
driver has more requirements (I started as a cook at 15 and so legally could
not drive a car) and pays better (tips are substantial, cooks are un-tipped.)

------
anderspitman
Every good thing people are saying about Steve's contributions are true. His
efforts stand out not just within the Rust community but across every open
source project I've engaged with. Thank you Steve and good luck!

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teacpde
Really a bummer. I learned about Steve when he did awesome stuff with Rails,
and knowing him work on Rust and frequently answering questions about Rust
everywhere makes learning Rust a privilege to me. Thank you, Steve.

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norswap
Yet another Mozilla blunder. When is it going to stop? It's sad, because the
world is better for having Firefox as the only competition to Chrome (and more
generally Webkit/Chromium browsers).

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fxfan
Wyldfire's comment got me thinking- you should go work for Microsoft. They
value developer relationship immensely. And I hear they treat their employees
well, not just monetarily.

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scns
It saddens me that he got disciplined for voicing his frustrations

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zpallin
Steve, you have inspired me many times over for your diligence and incredible
work. Good luck on your future project, whichever one it is!

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keymone
Congrats and all the best!

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asudosandwich
The 2nd half would make a great cover letter to those organizations.

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Uhhrrr
The title comes off as kind of an F you.

~~~
steveklabnik
I understand that intentions don't always matter, but if you read the lyrics
to the song, I think it's more the opposite.

~~~
Uhhrrr
I accept this explanation, but am not going to look up a pop song to verify
it.

------
notbestcomment
If Mozilla paid well it would be known and people would actually criticize
them for doing so (being a non-profit).

~~~
codezero
The Mozilla Corporation isn't a not-for-profit, that's the Mozilla Foundation,
though I think your point is that they are intertwined and people would make a
fuss.

