Many of the decisions Mozilla has made throughout the past decade have felt more like it’s a resting place for a professional-managerial class, post-capital set of leadership who want to perform tech-goodness from within the same playbook as a big tech company. It’s somehow rudderless and declining, but has plenty of time and connections to chase old-boys-club vanity projects like this. Next up they’ll be next to CrowdStrike on a Formula 1 car.
I’m not saying non-profits should necessarily give off the opposite vibe of being derelict and desperate, but even startups choose to run austerity measures when in decline.
I’m not sure why this is interesting. Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft, you likely could have retired a very long time ago.
“We don’t have good, unique data” is a pretty good out to keep Wang collecting extreme payouts and fleecing the leadership that has built trust in him, because it also plays to the one place where he’s demonstrated profitable expertise. It’s plausible enough to not be seen as a deflection.
I’m not sure the incentives are really aligned when you’re pouring that much cash and liquid RSUs at someone on normal vesting schedules. News stories of some of the acquisitions state that there are engineers in Meta’s AI organisation clearing 8 figures of compensation. If you didn’t think the strategy was successful, it’s rational (if not very principled) to continue to make excuses as to why until the gravy train stops and then use that to fund your retirement and the things you’d want to do instead.
I’m not an AI stan by any means and certainly no fan of Andreessen, but using the term “clanker” immediately biases your statement and can discredit what is a well-referenced or well-meaning comment.
The difference between HR, which is often policy and governance driven, and “people operations” probably points enough to the dynamic here. He wants to avoid red tape, hire and fire fast and accept the minimal risk of consequence, and HR sounds like they held him back from liquidity in human capital.
> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.
I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.
I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
It feels like the output you’d get from an LLM if you had asked it to write in a literary style. It’s not well-written, and reads more pretentious than capable.
9front is a legitimately cool software project and from what I can tell a cool set of people. I find it bizarre how many people have a negative reaction to a community that doesn't dress itself up in Corporate Memphis and idolize startup-world demigods.
We need more of this type of project today. It is the old Internet, still alive.
Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.
> but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand
This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.
The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.
I feel like a lot of people that are looking for a nostalgic device can get the experience they need by uninstalling most applications and then turning off all notifications first. In doing so, you don't end up with a device that is much different than an old Treo 650 - PIM functionality, messaging, and no growth-hacking loops.
> Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.
It has nothing to do with the state and has to do with getting the RSUs to pay the down payment for a house in a HCOL area in order to maybe have children before 40 and make the KPIs so you don't get stack-ranked into the bottom 30% and fired at big tech, or grinding 996 to make your investors richest and you rich-ish in the process if you're unlikely enough to exit in the upper decile with your idea. This doesn't include the contingent of people who fundamentally believe in the state, too.
Most people are activists only to the point of where it begins to impede on their comfort.
AI middle managers are coming. The highest-level corporate authority can and will continue to exist as a person that makes sure the AI systems are running correctly and skim profits off the top of the AI substructure, with the lowest stratum being an underclass precariat doing the hands-on tickets from an AI agent at a continuously adjusted market price for the task.
But the thing is that they really aren't rigorous economic studies. They're a sort of UX research-like sociological study with some statistics, but don't actually approach the topic with any sort of econometric modeling or give more than loose correlations to past economic data. So it does appear performative: it's "pop science" using a quantitative veneer to push a marketing message to business leaders in a way that looks well-optimised mathematically.
Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.
I’m not saying non-profits should necessarily give off the opposite vibe of being derelict and desperate, but even startups choose to run austerity measures when in decline.