Mozilla needs to get their shit together.

I had my internship offer signed by Brendan Eich. At the time I was a closeted first generation PhD student who only did a PhD because it paid about the same as being a pizza delivery driver with slightly better hours and benefits, but I nearly turned it down because I was on the verge of dropping out and travelling the world like I'd dreamed for a long time, and I wish I had, they ratfucked me.

By the time I got there, they had cancelled the project I was going to work on. I designed a UX research study all on my own, and my main feedback from my managers (plural -- one who oversaw the project and another who oversaw the day to day in the SF office since they didn't trust the interns to not just smoke trees on the roof all day and run roughshod over the Castro all night, which had happened enough times they had to institute "A Policy")

Imagine every day, going into work desperate to stay in California, as your "manager" takes everyone but you out to lunch, and your other "manager" often shows up to meetings an hour plus late with excuses like they "went jogging" as he casually mentions he doesn't even use Firefox outside work.

Apparently I pissed off a bunch of senior people by loudly declaring rather than waste money on the doomed venture that was FireOS, they should focus on the memory leaks that were driving people to Chrome. (Which in turn, would give Google leverage to reduce the money given via the search bar placement they paid for, which was pretty much the sole source of income for the company.)

What I'd hoped would happen is I'd get hired at Mozilla or somewhere else in the Bay that summer.

Instead, it was the beginning of the end, and not just for my dreams of Californication or whatever -- Google moved into the same building around that time and started poaching people with cutesey social media posts about cakes and shit to cover inviting the engineers over.

Within one CFAA expiration of that summer, I'd be sitting on K Street with a letter opener on my desk because they were too cheap to have anything but a short conversation about the exits after Charlie Hebdo.

(You haven't truly lived until you tell some powerful person's kid who just made a transphobic comment that this isn't a stepping stone to Google or a high school and they need to watch their fucking mouth, then watched their eyes go wide and hands shake as they try to stand between you and your desk because they know in that moment how few fucks you have left to give.)

Anyways, sorry to ramble -- I studied English Lit as one of my minors, so sometimes I post too hard when I have an all day migraine like the one I've had today, after I hit "add comment" on this I'm probably gonna go puke in the bathroom.

Mozilla is great, on a technical level, but anything in the realm of social informatics should be left to others, the company is dying because of their repeated failures on these issues stemming back to when they killed Persona[1].

Companies like Google and Facebook have abused their access to knowing whose nyms are whom, and not just to target them with bullshit advertising that induces psychic harms and delivers malvertising, but Mozilla is rotting from the inside out and has been for some time.

I met some great people that Summer after Snowden, but the good ones have almost all... moved on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Persona