Lots of people on this thread are complaining about Mozilla doing too many "unrelated side projects".
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.
This is not a case of gallivanting engineers running free.
All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.
In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots
Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.
But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.
Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.