Matthew Wilson, a former Google Chrome engineer turned startup founder, writes about Rust, team management, AI, and raising startup funding.
HN cites his Rust startup post as a caution (not worth it unless CPU-bound) and his Chrome team write-up for engineer counts.
> so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour
I don't think that's correct. IIUC, Software Dev was 260M for Mozilla + Mozilla Corporation + Mozilla Foundation + MZLA Technologies Corp. + Mozilla Ventures + Mozilla.ai. With large increase of 40M from 2023 to 2022 so I'd bet a good chunk of that is going to Mozilla.ai knowing how the rest of the corporate world is acting right now.
Like the Chrome Mobile team is 40 people [1]. I can't image that web + support is going to more than 4x that so you get to ~160 people which at 300k a head is 48 million. I don't see how out of the 6 organizations that 93% (700/750) of the employees are working on FireFox and not a different thing.
48 million just in salaries against the $494 million that Google gave Mozilla in 2023 just seems like it should be extremely possible to save at least half of it. Sure, we've gone beyond the initial ~$150M but for all (?) of Mozilla's life the payments from Google have covered software development [3] and for Safari the payments were in the billions so if Mozilla focused on making a better browser with higher market share their payments would go up as well.
[1]: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205
[2]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
Easier than C or C++ for sure. But how is Rust as easy as a GC'd language like Java or Go?
They have strictly less constraints to deal with, and (in my experience) less superfluous refactoring sessions due to the overly conservative nature of the borrow checker. I like how Matt Welsh put it in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454:
> What really bites is when you need to change the type signature of a load-bearing interface and find yourself spending hours changing every place where the type is used only to see if your initial stab at something is feasible. And then redoing all of that work when you realize you need to change it again.
Perhaps you're instead speaking of a specific situation or kind of program where the borrow checker happens to work well?
Mozilla claims over 700 of their 750 employees work on Firefox. It's a bit harder to find out the number of people working on Chrome. The founding director remarks that there were 40 engineers working on Chrome mobile in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205. That's obviously just a slice of the whole team. Search results suggest a range of numbers between 23 and 500. There appears to be about 12k in the whole department building Chrome, Android and the other software shipped to users. From all that you can extrapolate that there likely isn't a huge disparity between number of engineers on both browsers.
2019:
>Chrome, with an emphasis on making the web great for the next billion users. The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.)
https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-successful-teams-at-google-c06124959205
"MY" Mozilla has 46 engineers ;)
But if you think ludicrous big teams can make "much" product you should read "The Mythical Man-Month"..again ;)
The ~23 was from 2012, sorry about the outdated information
Being pushed/forced to implement top-down efforts, forced to comply with management's directives instead of being empowered to build things bottom-up
https://sifted.eu/articles/deepmind-talent
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researcher-quit-google-openai-bard-training-on-chatgpt-report-2023-3
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-07-13/ex-google-scientists-kickstarted-the-generative-ai-era-of-chatgpt-midjourney
https://mdwdotla.medium.com/why-im-leaving-google-for-a-startup-88be418236d8
Rust is fantastic for writing robust, secure, high-performance software. Rust is definitely a much, much better C++ in almost every respect. No doubt there.
However, for many problems, the sweet spot of a good-enough static type system and garbage collector - effectively a better Python - is a better fit.
This article explains things well, IMHO: https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454