Leaving Mozilla

Who?

Date: 02/10/2021

Why?

Having worked on Firefox for Android at Mozilla, Emily brings up some of the reasons why they’re leaving Mozilla (and ending their work on Firefox for Android) on their blog. The first reason was that she was merely looking for something new. However, it wasn’t merely that – she was also burnt out as well.

So if it’s so great then why am I leaving? I know it’s not a satisfying answer, verging on cliche, but I’m just looking to do something new. That and.. I am also extremely burnt out.

She mentions how she really cared for the project, and while it wasn’t asked of the team, they were working way too much.

The very small mobile team has been through a gauntlet in order to ship a full rewrite of the flagship Firefox for Android browser (partly during the pandemic no less). Working too much during the week for the last 2 years was normal for me

Unfortunately, it didn’t just end past the launch of their rewrite…

And when we finally did ship, I WAS proud of our team and what we had accomplished, but the release just felt like a blip in our planned schedule before jumping into more sprints and fires and thinking about the next iteration.

Another problem were some end-users from the community. Somehow she managed to become the target of a number of attacks from them (the end-users.) Having put her everything into this project for the last few years, she felt hurt.

it left a terrible taste in my mouth after all of the blood, sweat, and tears I had put into this project. For someone who thought of themselves as an empathetic dev overworking myself FOR the end users and product, this hurt and I’m not sure I ever really recovered.

And these attacks were over a wide variety of things, even jokes that she made on twitter.

In response this tweet was posted all over Reddit and 4chan and then there were coordinated doxxing attacks, multiple 4chan threads full of violent sexual and death threats, troll PRs opened in our repo, all of my photos pulled off of my Instagram and posted into these threads with disgusting commentary, and actual calls to my work from fake “journalists” to try to get me fired.

Eventually things did slow down, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough.

While the pace is slowing down now and there’s a promise of no more deadline crunches, I just feel that I haven’t been able to catch my breath no matter how much time I take off.