I still remember how it all started. Back in September 2015 I got a message from Laura Thompson about possibly working at Mozilla. Almost 9 years ago. It definitely feels a lot longer than that.

I knew Laura from the PHP community, and they had an opening on their web services team for a QA person. Working for a large, well-known company had been on my "professional bucket list" for a very long time. I took it and stayed there for almost 5 years before getting let go in the second wave of layoffs in 2020.

During my time there I wrote a lot of Python code. I wrote tests for web services (if you used Firefox and allowed notifications, I would test each new release of the notification service to make sure it all worked as expected as part of my duties), created a distributed load-testing tool that utilized Kubernetes and Google Cloud Platform, along with tests for other services.

Things went well until, like any tech company, they shifted priorities. Several key managers were let go and the group I was in was left to basically fend for themselves. "Go look for projects that need some help" was the advice my manager gave me.

That was not great advice. I'm not blaming them -- I am not the easiest employee to manage. Some of my fellow Mozillians told me things like "I have the wrong manager" or "they don't know what to do with you". I am not the easiest person to manage. I have a weird skill set, I get bored, I don't hesitate to complain. I make jokes and call bosses "dad" and "mom". Not everyone likes that sort of stuff, and it did teach me that ignoring the political game has it's downsides.

For a long time it didn't matter because I worked for Mozilla! It paid well, I worked from home, I liked my teammates and my managers over the years (even if they didn't like me). Working with smart engineers interested in solving hard problems in repeatable ways is always good.

When I woke up to an email that said I had a 15 minute meeting with Human Resources in August 2020, I knew I was done. But I wasn't mad or anything like that. It's just business. The severance was fair and I found work very quickly. And like that, I took a few months off to find the next thing and became a "former Mozilla employee".

But that is not what I wanted to talk about.

Earlier this week on Mastodon I did a multi-part post where I tried to tell people who were complaining about Mozilla and Firefox that they had no clue about how Mozilla was run or what it takes to create a web browser.

I mean, why do you think they build testing infrastructure that could run millions of tests in parallel? I could run tests against whatever version of Firefox I needed on multiple operating systems, all from the comfort of a CLI interface. It was awesome.

Even though Mozilla still champions Open Source Software and wanting a free and open internet (everyone benefits from this except corporations) I think it is important to understand how warped goals and incentives can get there.

The big elephant in the room is, of course, the fact that Mozilla is the beneficiary of a yearly $400-500 million bribe that Google pays under the guise of making them the default option for searching if you use Firefox. Of course, this bribe is really a way for Google to show what few American regulators who are paying attention that they don't want a monopoly in the field of web browsers.

I'm not even sure they need to pay it any more. Some day they will decide to stop and then Mozilla will be no more.

This warped their priorities. All that money without any real accountability other than "don't piss Google off" I guess.

But what I saw were some folks who were good at leadership, some who fell into leadership at Mozilla because they were in leadership at the foundation, and some folks who should've been fired for their actions but were instead protected.

Look, there was some extremely talented engineers who work there. I was grateful to be exposed to so many of them, 99% of whom were happy to help me when I had questions or wanted to learn more.

But it always felt to me like the senior leadership either didn't understand or didn't care that Mozilla's reputation as a champion of everything free and open was all they had.

And they constantly did stuff that tore up that reputation.

• a failed mobile device operating system
• Attempts to build paid products led by acquihires who delivered underwhelming and incomplete products
• hijacking browser functionality to deliver ads for an American TV show that folks on the marketing side liked

Sometimes the people responsible for the failures paid the price. More often they were patted on the back, allowed to stay, and then leveraged their roles to move on to other companies. Usually with more responsibility and I am assuming large pay packages.

After one pretty spectacular failure, I remember an email sent by one of the senior management people telling us to take it easy on the people who fucked up because they "tried hard".

But after a while I also saw what happened to the folks who spoke up about these mistakes. They usually ended up leaving -- either being pushed or jumping with a hand on their back.

This was not the case for me. I made a strategic error and agreed to work on a project in a language that I did not know with a team that did not seem to really want me around. Maybe I was being set up to fail. Maybe I was sabotaging myself. I wanted to move up in the ranks and get more money and more responsibility.

Either way, it didn't go well, I floundered and got nothing done, and was surprised I survived the first wave of layoffs. A lot of people who I had become friends with (and shared some of my own more troublesome traits) got let go.

Eventually I did too.

But I did learn a ton there. It was great for learning about the discipline necessary when working on online systems that literally millions of people used every day. If you half-assed it, everyone suffered.

I didn't work on the browser at all but I interacted with a lot of people that did. It's a hard project. You have to maintain so many different versions across so many different operating systems. Weird bugs. Problems from operating system vendors. Google deliberating changing their products to not work well in Firefox.

It is not easy. This is why I get annoyed at people who seem to think building a web browser out in the open is "easy". They demand their pet features be given top priority. They moan about old bugs. They moan about the application not behaving they way they expect. Complain about "selling out" and "telemetry is an invasion of privacy". An endless stream of complaints.

You have no goddamn idea.

It is so hard to get that across to people convinced they are right. I might be wrong about a lot of things, but I am not wrong about this part.

Mozilla has warped priorities because of their funding sources.

Firefox is a very difficult project to work on.

I do not regret my time there.

I still believe in an open internet.

I'm just sad that Mozilla is always on the verge of extinction despite so many great people working hard to live up to the ideals.