Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Thursday August 13 2020, @05:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the here-today,-gone-tomorrow dept.

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

Tweet.

Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:19AM (6 children)

    by petecox (3228) on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:19AM (#1036025)

    As Linus once said, security bugs are just bugs. So having a separate task force away from the programmers that originally wrote the bugs isn't necessarily good management. If they fix their own stuff, they might be less prone to introducing new issues.

    I'm not surprised Servo isn't receiving love. Quantum folded in the cool bits and there's too much inertia from Gecko to replace it.

    Mobile is set for a renewal with GeckoView, where they've thrown out the existing Fennec code.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:06AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @08:06AM (#1036037)

    Good QA needs a separate review/triage team because the people that wrote the code often can't see the remaining bugs, which is why those bugs still exist. Writers need editors for exactly the same reason. 'Many eyes' isn't just a slogan, it is a core part of good engineering.

    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:26AM (4 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:26AM (#1036070) Journal
      When you find the bugs you created, you tend not to repeat the same mistake again.
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:59PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:59PM (#1036130)

        Still, you often need someone else to show you what you wrote instead of seeing what you meant to write.

        I don't know about you, but it is really easy for me to read code as how I imagine I wrote it instead of how it is.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:38PM

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 13 2020, @02:38PM (#1036149) Journal

          Sure, which is why you have to keep going over it until you figure out where you screwed up. Handing that job over to someone else does nothing to improve either your debugging skills or your coding skills. Sometimes the best thing to do is put it aside for a day and approach it with fresh eyes and a fresh mind.

          It might be inefficient at first, because it would be quicker to give it to someone else, but in the long run, you broke it, you fix it is cheaper.

          People learn from their mistakes. Do something right 100 times, you learned nothing. Do it wrong once and fix it, you learned something. Have someone else fix it, what have you learned?

          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25PM (1 child)

        by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25PM (#1036316) Journal

        When If you find the bugs you created, you tend not to repeat the same mistake again.

        FTFY

        The GP comment was about finding the bugs you didn't know you wrote. (That includes finding the bugs in code that perfectly implements the specs, which had a mistake.)

        --
        Wit is intellect, dancing.
        • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:07PM

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday August 13 2020, @11:07PM (#1036345) Journal
          I've found a few while doing refactoring or adding a feature. We probably all have. It's the same as real life in a way: you're doing something and you realize that it gets you thinking that maybe you made a mistake elsewhere in your life.
          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.