Mozilla is restructuring and on the spot laying off 70 of its employees

In the span of the week Mozilla announced the announcement of a restructuring internal, due to a drop in incomeAs such, they continue to rely heavily on search engine royalties.

Recently, there has been a decrease in such deductions which in 2019 and 2020 were planned to compensate with the development of new payment services, for example, Firefox Premium and Private Network, as well as areas not related to search engines. Ultimately, the forecasts did not materialize and the development of new payment services took longer than expected.

It is because of that Mozilla intends to start living within its means and adapt in advance to possible pessimistic financial forecasts, for which it was decided to reduce costs by laying off employees.

In Mitchell Baker's note to employees, it says:

"Hi everyone,

“I have news that is difficult to share. With the support of the entire steering committee and our board of directors, we made an extremely difficult decision: Over the course of the day, we plan to eliminate approximately 70 roles from across MoCo. 

This number may be slightly higher as we are still being consulted in the UK and France, as required by law, about the exact roles that could be removed there. We do this with the utmost respect for all those affected and will do our best to care for them by offering generous compensation and support to help them find other jobs. Most will not join us in Berlin. J '

“This news is probably a surprise and I regret that we could not have been more transparent with you along the way. It was never my wish. The downsizing was something the Steering Committee considered in our 2020 budget and planning exercise only after exploring all other avenues. The final decision was made just before the holidays with the job of finalizing the exact set of assigned roles that will continue in early January (there are exceptions in the UK and France ...)

Mozilla currently employs approximately 1,000 people around the world, of which at least 70 were fired  (which represents 7% of the total staff). The layoffs may still continue as a final decision has not been made to cut workers from Germany and France.

Company management also considered closing the innovation development fund, but decided not to do so yet, recognizing it as necessary for new product development, as Mozilla allocates $ 43 million to create new products. Mozilla will continue to invest in innovation, as it considers work to improve the Internet to be one of its main tasks.

It is noteworthy that This is not the first wave of layoffs from the company, Since in 2017, 50 employees involved in the development of the Firefox operating system were laid off from Mozilla.

This time, a wave of layoffs affected engineers involved in quality testing (QA), security and release management, as well as the developer of the Cranelift code generator for WebAssembly has also been fired.

Brendan Eich the creator of JavaScript and former Mozilla executive, hinted that spending should be cut in a different area and presented a growth chart for Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Corporation board of directors, depending on the decline in Firefox's market share. Since leaving Mozilla's Brendan Ike in 2014 the baker's compensation amount increased from $ 1 to $ 2,5 million per year.

According to Mozilla's financial report For fiscal year 2018, Mozilla's revenue decreased by $ 112 million to $ 450 million, of which 429 million were received due to deductions for using search engines (Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex), cooperation with various services (Cliqz, Amazon, eBay) and placement of contextual advertising blocks in the homepage.

Of these, $ 277 million was spent on development in 2018, $ 33.4 million in support of services, $ 53 million in marketing, $ 86 million in administrative expenses, $ 4.8 million in grants.

Source: https://blog.mozilla.org