As a former Mozilla intern, I can confirm that the company has an unusually great intern program!
Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were:
1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India.
2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship.
3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk!
4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.
I'm fairly certain the Google intern demo is more geographically/culturally diverse.
Really glad this guy had a phenomenal time at Mozilla. All of the top internship programs in the bay area are equally good and I hope he gets a chance to try some others :)
I interned at Mozilla too; my experience there was just as phenomenal. Free $3000 laptop, random games, free food, free apartment etc. However, I think the thing that I cherished the most were the people themselves, they were committed to their mission of making the web a better place. This is especially true of the Metrics team. So many of the discussions regarding privacy and the amount of information I could analyze seemed frustrating then, yet, it is only after a couple of years in industry that I realize the true value of respecting those who trust their data with you and using it to do greater good.
As someone who's been around the web platform and standards orgs for a number of years (on browser-side stuff, since 2006; working at Opera 2009–2013), I'd like to say that I think almost everyone working on browser engines (be it at MS, at Apple, at Google, at Mozilla, formally at Opera — and hopefully again in future) really care, quite deeply, about making the web a better place. From my viewpoint, what differs most is the views of those higher up in the organizations.
Certainly, the amount of resources people put behind stuff varies (Mozilla obviously cares deeply, to the extent of it being their foremost mission; Opera has historically cared about it deeply — it used to be a point that a disproportionate amount of specs were edited by Opera employee — and it is part of their "vision"), but at the end of the day, as an intern you're likely to be working with those directly alongside you almost exclusively.
If you care about working somewhere where people are truly passionate about what they're doing — go for any browser vendor working on an engine (I say this as to exclude Opera — while there are some contributions flowing from there, they are relatively sparse in number — though I wouldn't be surprised for this to change back to them investing heavily in their browser engine as their Blink-based products enter the market). Yes, in many ways Mozilla are probably the best (as there's no question that this view goes all the way to the top), but don't rule out the others.
Congratulations. You've officially been spoiled. :) You will take a job somewhere else some day and experience great anguish when it is significantly less awesome. :P
The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.
A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
I am looking forward to trying out new jobs, and love the freedom of internships for this reason alone. That being said, Mozilla will always hold a close place in my heart.
Am I out of line thinking Mozilla should be far more conservative? It seems vaguely irresponsible for a non-profit to be so lavish in the number of employees they have, their office, their perks.
I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative.
That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck.
I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.
There was a great TED talk a while back about this. [1]
People talk about nonprofits being "irresponsible" when they behave like for-profit corporations: advertising, perks for engineers, whatever. And yet the for-profits do these things because they work; advertising gets sales, perks get you better engineers (and it's usually cheaper than just bumping up salaries, because macbooks are shiny). If these things don't work successful corporations will stop doing them, and if they DO work we should stop giving nonprofits shit for doing them too.
That said, your point about Mozilla in particular coming crumbling down is interesting--I'm not sure I disagree. However, if they need smart people to pull them out of the hole, offering free macbooks isn't a bad way to do it.
Mozilla is more conservative with money than other companies. No corporate credit cards, no daily travel allowances, no daily breakfast, lunch and dinner (only lunch and only once a week, after all-hands).
However, being too conservative doesn't work in Silicon Valley because you have to compete with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for talent with their perks and benefits. Whether it's good or bad in the long term I do not know but it is a fact.
(disclaimer: summer intern here) It doesn't matter how MOCO spends money. If no one want to bid the search engine list on Firefox, then most of the revenue will be gone and MOCO cannot operate anymore. FxOS market is not going to generate a lot of revenue at the moment. If we talk about investment, it will take at least a few years to make good revenue. And that revenue will still be really low compare to what Google, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon are paying combined.
If Google thinks they have 95% they probably can give up on us, but I don't think that day will ever come in the next 10 years. Also, while MOCO is a corporation, its mission is not to make money. MoFo came up with MOCO because MoFo members wanted to be good citizens. They wanted to pay taxes to avoid stupid tax allegation. Read Mozilla history and you will have a good laugh.
If we fail, we will restructure ourselves. You can't guarantee Google will be around forever. We just have to do what we have to do today. If we are always worrying about money, we would not be building anything. There wouldn't be any startup because half of their customers will either move on or use another service.
You're probably over-weighting the trip to Paris, which sounds ridiculously extravagant. Fortunately, we were able to do it on the cheap since the majority of attendees were already living in or traveling through the region. The local Mozilla office which was able to host us during the workday. Opportunistic hack weeks ftw.
Cool blog post! From your resume it looks like you worked at Blackberry earlier this year. Do you have any thoughts about the differences (cultural, technological, etc) between working for a large company and working for a non-profit organization?
The differences are really night and day. Blackberry is too large to really have that "home-like" feel, it really just feels like work. Mozilla has character which I definitely feed off for motivation. The attitude of the people at Mozilla is much different than those at BB, as well. Mozilla and everything in it has life, Blackberry unfortunately feels much less-lively. Motivation at Mozilla is fueled by the love of the work and at Blackberry you really can feel the money is the end goal. Both companies are just really different for different reasons, but I definitely prefer Mozilla.
Great question re: "Blackberry V.S. Mozilla work environments" -
Related: one thing I've noticed some people don't place enough emphasis on when choosing initial internships/jobs out of school is the business models of companies, and the direct effect that can have on the working environment.
In this case, while Mozilla is technically a non-profit, rather than being funded by donations it makes the overwhelming majority of its money by sharing in the advertising revenue generated by the search engines which come pre-installed in Firefox (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...). Therefore, even if Mozilla does absolutely nothing in terms of improving any of their products, they will still continue to make money (in the short term, at least), which lifts quite a bit of stress off everyone who works there, and let's management take a longer view perspective in general.
Professional service firms (i.e. tech. consulting and agencies) are effectively arbitrage plays - they sell the time of their employees for $X / hr, but only pay the employee $Y / hr, and then collect on the spread. If these companies ever stop selling for just a few moments, the arbitrage breaks down (as they still presumably need to pay their employees...). Therefore, there will likely to be more "stress in the air" in these types of firms, as in some cases all it takes is 1-2 contracts to be canceled for the firm to be unable to make payroll.
Hit driven businesses (Which Blackberry as a whole arguably is not, due to the significant revenue driven by their enterprise server), have a different set of issues, which is that losing really sucks for morale - therefore if the company you work for is focused on building a better mousetrap, and slowly over time people internally begin to doubt the quality of the mousetrap they are working on, that can make it really frustrating to work there, regardless of the other perks the company may provide.
Seems like there is a growing trend by tech companies to spoil interns with the hope of improving HR. This is great and by all means take advantage of it.
[+] [-] abhinavsharma|12 years ago|reply
Sure, there's some perks like free food, laundry, free yoga and other things that are taken for granted at startups missing but some of my favorite things about it were:
1. Mozilla has the most geographically diverse set of interns of any Silicon Valley company I know. In addition to regular recruiting at North American Universities, Mozilla also recruits from the open source Mozilla community, and that means people come from everywhere. I was recruited on-campus but two of my roommates whom I lived with were recruited directly from the community and were from Argentina and India.
2. At least on my project (I worked in the Labs group), I got total freedom to scope out a project I wanted to work on, convince my managers about why it could be great, then go ahead and build it. This is a remarkable amount of flexibility for an internship.
3. You got to keep the laptop. Because Mozilla's open source, we just used the default OS X with no custom stuff. Since the value would go down after the summer, they let us keep it as a perk!
4. Once every two years, they fly out everyone in the company and a lot of people in the community to a single place to meet up (Summit). This might sound crazy in theory, but face time is invaluable in growing teams that are spread across the planet.
[+] [-] acchow|12 years ago|reply
Really glad this guy had a phenomenal time at Mozilla. All of the top internship programs in the bay area are equally good and I hope he gets a chance to try some others :)
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrikant|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|12 years ago|reply
Certainly, the amount of resources people put behind stuff varies (Mozilla obviously cares deeply, to the extent of it being their foremost mission; Opera has historically cared about it deeply — it used to be a point that a disproportionate amount of specs were edited by Opera employee — and it is part of their "vision"), but at the end of the day, as an intern you're likely to be working with those directly alongside you almost exclusively.
If you care about working somewhere where people are truly passionate about what they're doing — go for any browser vendor working on an engine (I say this as to exclude Opera — while there are some contributions flowing from there, they are relatively sparse in number — though I wouldn't be surprised for this to change back to them investing heavily in their browser engine as their Blink-based products enter the market). Yes, in many ways Mozilla are probably the best (as there's no question that this view goes all the way to the top), but don't rule out the others.
[+] [-] marcamillion|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|12 years ago|reply
The plus side is that you can use that anguish to effect change.
[+] [-] not_rhodey|12 years ago|reply
You're a software developer which means you have the opportunity to work virtually wherever and whenever you want. You can write software on a sunny day in the local park, inside a tent in the midst of an Arctic storm, or aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.
A laptop can be purchased for $200 and internet can usually be found free. There is no reason to compromise on a less than exceptional job unless you want to live in the idealized city apartment and collect a sizable salary.
[+] [-] ryanseys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|12 years ago|reply
I'm not suggesting they need to be extreme in the other direction, just somewhat conservative.
That Google money can't last forever and it seems like they should be stockpiling a large portion of it for the long term, not blowing every dollar -- living, effectively, paycheck to paycheck.
I wonder if the employees/interns there have a sense that it's all eventually going to come crumbling down. Because I get that sense every time I hear about how they operate, and I really hope it never happens because I think they're a good thing in the world.
[+] [-] lmartel|12 years ago|reply
People talk about nonprofits being "irresponsible" when they behave like for-profit corporations: advertising, perks for engineers, whatever. And yet the for-profits do these things because they work; advertising gets sales, perks get you better engineers (and it's usually cheaper than just bumping up salaries, because macbooks are shiny). If these things don't work successful corporations will stop doing them, and if they DO work we should stop giving nonprofits shit for doing them too.
That said, your point about Mozilla in particular coming crumbling down is interesting--I'm not sure I disagree. However, if they need smart people to pull them out of the hole, offering free macbooks isn't a bad way to do it.
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...
[+] [-] simanyay|12 years ago|reply
However, being too conservative doesn't work in Silicon Valley because you have to compete with companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. for talent with their perks and benefits. Whether it's good or bad in the long term I do not know but it is a fact.
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
If Google thinks they have 95% they probably can give up on us, but I don't think that day will ever come in the next 10 years. Also, while MOCO is a corporation, its mission is not to make money. MoFo came up with MOCO because MoFo members wanted to be good citizens. They wanted to pay taxes to avoid stupid tax allegation. Read Mozilla history and you will have a good laugh.
If we fail, we will restructure ourselves. You can't guarantee Google will be around forever. We just have to do what we have to do today. If we are always worrying about money, we would not be building anything. There wouldn't be any startup because half of their customers will either move on or use another service.
[+] [-] gkoberger|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callahad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sambeau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanseys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitcar|12 years ago|reply
Related: one thing I've noticed some people don't place enough emphasis on when choosing initial internships/jobs out of school is the business models of companies, and the direct effect that can have on the working environment.
In this case, while Mozilla is technically a non-profit, rather than being funded by donations it makes the overwhelming majority of its money by sharing in the advertising revenue generated by the search engines which come pre-installed in Firefox (see http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...). Therefore, even if Mozilla does absolutely nothing in terms of improving any of their products, they will still continue to make money (in the short term, at least), which lifts quite a bit of stress off everyone who works there, and let's management take a longer view perspective in general.
Professional service firms (i.e. tech. consulting and agencies) are effectively arbitrage plays - they sell the time of their employees for $X / hr, but only pay the employee $Y / hr, and then collect on the spread. If these companies ever stop selling for just a few moments, the arbitrage breaks down (as they still presumably need to pay their employees...). Therefore, there will likely to be more "stress in the air" in these types of firms, as in some cases all it takes is 1-2 contracts to be canceled for the firm to be unable to make payroll.
Hit driven businesses (Which Blackberry as a whole arguably is not, due to the significant revenue driven by their enterprise server), have a different set of issues, which is that losing really sucks for morale - therefore if the company you work for is focused on building a better mousetrap, and slowly over time people internally begin to doubt the quality of the mousetrap they are working on, that can make it really frustrating to work there, regardless of the other perks the company may provide.
[+] [-] mrmagooey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbhl|12 years ago|reply
Now, if only writing a blog post could replace your work term report. :)
[+] [-] ryanseys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iblaine|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st3fan|12 years ago|reply
I am not sure what you mean with 'improving HR'. Did you mean 'PR' ? Because Mozilla's HR department is doing a pretty great job.
[+] [-] AYBABTME|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanseys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gluxon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reubenmorais|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispy_|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] whatts|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanseys|12 years ago|reply