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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future.
The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman.
Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services.
[...] In 2018, the Mozilla Corporation said it had around 1,000 full-time employees worldwide. Mozilla previously laid off 70 employees in January. Several sources have told ZDNet that the recent layoffs accounted for nearly a quarter of the organization's workforce.
Main casualties of today's layoffs were the developers working on the company's experimental Servo browser engine and Mozilla's threat management security team. The latter is the security team that investigates security reports and performs incident response. The security team that fixes bugs in Mozilla products is still in place, according to sources and a Mozilla spokesperson.
Changing World, Changing Mozilla
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @08:10AM (4 children)
Why on earth would that influence you ability to study? I don't get it. Is it because you think the black are out to get you "with their gangster attitudes" or is it the indian women who distract you with their bollywood dancing and singing? You were in a room with 57 other people, I'm not saying your should be that awful excusist "colorblind" thing, where apparently we are only equal if we don't have colors, but they're just people, where they are born, their gender or color why would that matter at all?
Don't get me wrong I get it you had social issues, so do I, so severe that I can't have a regular job because it gives me anxiety and stress.. but my social issues are colorblind.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @11:56AM (3 children)
It has nothing to do with them being "out to get me" or distracting me with ethnic activities. It has to do with feeling like I fit in, and having the confidence that I've got the intelligence and persistence to learn what I need to know. When the whole educational program is full of people with backgrounds basically identical to mine, who look like me, and have a ton of shared experiences, then I'm constantly thinking, "Hey, if they can do it, so can I?" Conversely, if the room is full of people who seem very different than me, then just because most of them can understand the lesson and complete the programming assignments doesn't necessarily mean that I can do it too. I wouldn't feel as comfortable asking a classmate for help, or tutoring (which is something I did do with some of my white male classmates, and it made a big difference).
I don't have any such concerns now because I'm comfortable established. I'm not a nervous 18 year old kid struggling to understand what variable assignments or programming language expressions mean, worried if I have what it takes to succeed, and nervous what my classmates think of me. So hopefully my treatment of peers, managers, and junior staff at work is colorblind in all of the good ways. But as a beginner it mattered, and being a white guy in classrooms full of white guys (including 7 of the 8 professors in the department) helped.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @05:30PM (1 child)
So you weren't properly socialized as a child, and are less comfortable around people who don't look like you. That's a good argument for enforced diversity in K-12.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Friday August 14 2020, @10:41PM
Maybe that is the case for him, but it is far more difficult to push that diversity where people live than where they work. My mother was a freaking George Wallace (the Trump of his day, targeting the same demographic) supporter. My experiences with people who looked different than me (let alone those from other cultures) were very limited and my views were tainted by my parents and others I knew. Going off to college was a real eye opener, although it took years for some of those lessons to take root. Mostly I learned that most of what I was taught to believe about people, either consciously or unconsciously, was just bullshit. After decades in the workforce I have definitely learned race, sex, etc. doesn't mean squat, it is what a person is willing and capable of learning that matters.
I think the point the GP was making is that most minorities breaking into professions dominated by a single majority group have a lot of questions they have to ask (and answer) themselves above and beyond that of the established group, and their successes and failures are as a result subject to much more internal pressure on their own belief of whether or not they are capable of success. The less confident and most borderline in the established group are far more likely to succeed anyway than those in minority groups as they do not face that extra pressure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @09:47PM
Okay, that makes more sense to me. I have never felt like I belonged in any group, so perhabs that is why I had difficulties understanding. It's not like im sad about that fact and perhabs there is some hacker community out there where I feel like I belong and that would be great, but I'm also quite happy working alone hacking away on stuff I find interesting.