Leaving Mozilla

After more than 15 years, I will be leaving Mozilla on July 21. Friday, June 12th will be my last “real” day, as I am planning on using my 200+ hours of vacation backlog. I've had the honor of working with some of you, and others have no idea who I am, but you might have a sticker of mine. While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure: You Are More Important Than You Think I'm not referring to you The Corporate Entity or you the Collective Organization. I mean you. The person reading this right now. I have beat the drum for mentoring for quite some time. Mentoring is a lot of things, but essentially, it's finding someone else to talk to. In a company full of fellow introverts, I get that idea is uncomfortable and hard, but really, it's one of the best things for both you personally and your career. You're smart and can both learn and teach, no matter what your level of experience or background. Please try it. You Are Part of Something Far Larger If you're working here, you're one of the fortunate. There are a bunch of people who wanted to build a browser that could stand toe-to-toe with ones built by people with a lot of money. A browser that put their interests first. That worked how they wanted. We're the lucky, tiny portion that can get paid, but it comes with a price. It is our obligation to listen to the people who aren't lucky enough to get paid. The folk out there are our community. They're our peers. They are the ones who trust that we will continue to work for them, because if not, they'll find someone else who will. We run the very real risk of losing those people. We're also pretty small It's too easy to think that we're big. We're not. We're a niche browser that is lucky enough to get well funded. We shouldn't try to be like the big browsers because that's not what our Community wants. Think of it this way; imagine living somewhere filled with McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's. We're that cozy little Mom & Pop diner where customers say hi to each other, pour each other coffee, and clean up tables.

It's the sort of place that folk meet up to chat at tables, have a pretty awesome sandwich, and ask the owner who runs the grill if he thought about having the pork chop come with rice instead of a baked potato. People have to seek us out. They're doing that because they don't want to use the browser that they literally have at their fingertips. They also seek us out because they don't trust the other big browser that everyone insists that they should be using. The folk that don't care about that already use those big browsers. So, if people are looking for an experience that is absolutely not like the one they already have, why would we ever seek to emulate what those browsers are doing? That doesn't mean we can't become big. We did this before. When we listened to our Community, gave them what they wanted, let them work with us to build something amazing, they told their friends. That was our growth phase, where we had ever increasing DAU (to use business terms). For regular folk, that's when they installed us on their uncle's laptop, their neighbor's phone, and their classmates' desktop, because their work was part of what made us special. They told their company about how we were a great alternative because they were proud to be part of what we were. That's something you can't build with just posters and stickers alone. So, that's it. TL:DR;

Respect yourselves. Help each other out. Remember who you're working for.

If you want to stay in touch, I'm not that hard to find online, although I might spend a few days screaming at the ocean.

Right, so that's the note I sent when I left. Now I get to talk about all the things that bothered the hell out of me. Mind you, I would have preferred to stay longer, but things got to a point where it just wasn't fun anymore. (Considering that my career has been supporting stuff that no one else wanted to deal with. When everyone else ran out of the room, I was the one that would sigh, raise his hand, and take on the task. This did not do wonders for my career, but it was honest, hard work and constantly challenging.) My career generally has been weird, because I'm not the kind of person to jump ship after a year or two.

That's about the point when I feel I actually understand not only what I was handed, but how it fit into the larger org, and I can actually improve things more holistically. Not all of those improvements radically changed things. I've heard it as “Keeping the campsite clean”, little changes and improvements that make everything else generally better. I've had previous opportunities to “ride the rocket” with various companies and they've been moderately entertaining. Often the trajectory of that start-up rocket was “into the ground". In fact, the majority of companies I was with no longer exist, Netfix being the odd-duck out. It's often said that Mozilla survives in spite of it's Leadership, not because of it, and it absolutely rang true lately. So, let's go over a few things that bothered me. These are all opinions from someone who worked in a trench there for 15+ years, but, the bonus was that I never got the chance to think that highly of myself. I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. They have to search it out, figure out how to download it, ignore all the warnings and “suggestions” that they should keep using whatever the native browser is, avoid all the ads for Chrome as the better replacement browser, ignore all the sites saying “Your browser is out of date” because they couldn't be arsed to test things in Firefox, etc. Firefox users are not normal. They are deeply abnormal, and frankly a lot of them are proud of that. The problem is that Leadership doesn't know how to deal with that. Mozilla, born of being niche, and started by a bunch of abnormal folk, is deeply abnormal. Mozilla is open source. Like, really open source. Pretty much every line of code they write is published somewhere. (There are some private repos of course, because they're not going to leave the keys under the doormat, and there are some repos that aren't public because the folk that wrote them are exec types that don't understand the power or motivation of Open Source, but they're weird and those projects don't last long anyway.) Pretty much no other company in the Tech Industry is like Mozilla. So it's really hard to hire people with experience running traditional Tech Industry companies that have any clue about how to deal with being that level of open.

They all come from worlds where The Black Turtlenecked God told you “Do Not Tell Anyone about Anything”. The idea that they literally give things away and are actually transparent as hell is like telling them Mozilla employees are martians. They smile, say polite things, then ignore our history and actions and do things that they know because the concept of anything alien is clearly evil. This sort of thing manifests in weird ways. One of the more hilarious ones is the “Chase for the DAU” (Daily Active User). Mozilla's DAU count has been dropping for years. There's all sorts of reasons for that. I bet you can come up with a few yourself. Of course, New Leadership comes in with guns a'blazing and Big Ideas for how to make DAU go Up. Those proposals seldom work because those Big Ideas inevitably are “We should copy what the Big Browsers do!”. Remember when I said that our users are deeply abnormal? Yeah, they already have that feature in the browser that's already on their machine. If they wanted it that bad, they already have it. I told someone once that imagine being in an area where every restaurant is McDonald's, Burger King, or Wendy's. Opening up another burger stand isn't really going to cut it. But if you open up a diner where folk know your name, and customers can pour coffee for other folk, or help clear dishes, or talk with the guy at the grill and try to convince him to add teriyaki spam and grilled cabbage on rice to the menu, you might wind up becoming the neighborhood hang-out that folk tell visitors about. But, sure, if the DAU numbers are down, clearly New Thinking must be the answer! Maybe? I mean, thinking that's different than what was currently being done is probably a really good idea. The thing is that's also when the delusions set in. Every New Leader thinks “We've got to think like a Start Up!” I mean, they do know that most start-ups fail, right? Mozilla is a 30 year old company. They are the polar opposite of “start-up”. In fact, for the past 15 years, they've been "thinking like a Start-Up[1]" in various flavors and now they have the lowest DAU ever.

Instead, I dunno, maybe look back at that 30 year history and see what they were doing when they had positive DAU and do that again? I'll give them a hint because I was around then: It wasn't chasing the latest fads. It was doing what they're good at, being deeply abnormal, and helping folk make what they really wanted. Back then, not only were we publishing all of our code, we were working with folk to make a better browser, regardless of where they were or if they were part of our org chart. Doing that excites people. Knowing that what you're working on can go into a product used by others makes you faithful about that product. Knowing that your opinions and ideas can change the most complex application on your computer makes you want to share that application with others. Having a sense of ownership, no matter how small, makes you a member of a Community that advocates for that browser and makes you want to install it everywhere. That beats any clever marketing project, ever. I know this, because I saw it happen, repeatedly. Of course Leadership doesn't get that. That's one of those “martian” things, that is clearly wrong and bad because it wasn't part of their MBA syllabus and Meta didn't do that. (I mean, the fact that Facebook is a community message board, and thus has more contributions from outside of the company than inside, may skip right by them, but whatever.) Another fun example of “not clear on the idea” happened after Mozilla decided to chase the Enterprise dollar. Don't get me wrong, that's an incredibly rich seam to draw from. Short of getting government contracts, there's no better source of reliable income. Of course, getting that “enterprise” gold isn't easy, and comes with lots of strings and conditions, usually in the form of ISO standards. One of them is that you need to prove that your code and infrastructure are secure. (No bad guys getting in and doing bad guy things.) There are ways to address that sort of problem. One is to follow the guidance and install essentially spy-ware and locks on company issued devices to make sure that "noting bad happens". Basically, fortify the walls so that the Outside People don't get your valuable data. Again, Mozilla is abnormal. Normal companies secure things because if bad people saw their code they could write exploits and do bad things.