Wow. I remember watching this fifteen years ago and seeing that young kid (Stuart Parmenter) join Netscape right out of high school and thinking, "Don't do it!". I, too, joined the industry early and by 2000, I'd pissed away the first half of my twenties pulling all-nighters working at tech startups while the rest of my friends were partying at college or backpacking around Europe.
Recently, I'd read something about Mozilla and wonder whatever happened to that kid. Well, looks like he's all grown up now. I'm impressed to see that he spent so many years with Mozilla. I wonder if he has any regrets at starting so young.
No regrets at all. I've been very fortunate to work with many amazing people throughout my career and have learned more than I could have ever imagined back then. The tech world is always evolving and never boring. Those early years, including all the ups and downs of the industry taught me things that would be very difficult to learn these days.
People should step back and think about all the things they do in browsers today. Without the hard work of thousands of people from Netscape and Mozilla, you probably wouldn't be doing most of those things. I'm proud to have been able to play a small role in that.
I read about jwz in months old copies of Wired in the 90s and basically wanted to be him. Then he left the tech industry because it was so shitty which made me question that plan.
I wrote jwz a fan email back then because I was afraid I'd have to give up who I am to work in computers. I'm not much of a goth anymore, but it was exciting to see someone like me in such a prominent position.
I think like a lot of you I probably can't watch a documentary without feeling "omg that guy was biased!" but I felt like they were pretty even-handed here.
- long hours
- stock options are a lottery, a stupid tax
- "and I won the lottery"
- the countdown timer at the open-source launch, the last minute typo of domain name, the person who observed it and directed the fix - that was awesome
- the realistic portrayal of burnout and long hours
- the sale to the giant evil internet corporation
- the original reply to jwz's "AOL is buying us and here's why its not so bad" mozilla.org post
I use Mozilla (Firefox) as my "daily driver". At work I recently had to switch to Chrome because they offer a USB/serial device API through extensions. If Firefox did too I'd maybe work overtime to port that shit over because I love Mozilla. What an organization.
I feel bad because these guys did waste a bunch of their time building a fucking web browser. But maybe, just maybe, the web would suck a lot less without mozilla.org and their free codebase. And then, I did start to get the idea, "hmmm, maybe it'd be good to write HTTP again... this time with sessions baked in..." and wander off into "Can I implement that?" territory.
I absolutely agree. When I watched this for the first time ~6 months ago it was crazy how much of this relatable oh-so-familiar stuff was taking place before I existed, the central date of March 31, 1998 being about 3 months before I was born.
Programmers these days stand on the shoulders of giants, most of them still living and breathing. And it is a priceless gift that it is so much easier to learn this craft when you're starting out.
It is a huge mistake to be the smartest person in a room, so I seek out people who floor me, people who are good at what I want to be good at. The Internet, built by our heroes, allow us young programmers to talk to our heroes as if they were people, and I suppose that helps us to discover that that's all they are.
Edit: If you enjoyed this, another personal-story-tinged entertaining-but-technical diamond I can recommend is a book about id Software, Masters of Doom.
> And it is a priceless gift that it is so much easier to learn this craft when you're starting out.
It truly is. I started my career in July, 1999 and even though there was an open source movement, it was nothing like there is today. Young people can post code up on Github and even participate in huge open source projects that affect millions of people.
Teach each other. Learn from each other. Grow together, and make the world more awesome than you found it.
This documentary glorifies the insane practice of working unreasonably long hours to meet a self-imposed deadline. What bad things would have happened if the Mozilla release date had just been pushed back? Probably nothing. And maybe the quality of that initial release would have been better, and the people working on it wouldn't be burnt out afterward.
The cynicism that jwz wrote with in this time period about what it's like for young people working in tech was influential on me. I do believe it also comes through in some of his segments in the film.
It doesn't glorify it, it clearly shows the effect such behavior has on one's personal/family life, and how it can all be in vain anyway. It's clearly a crunch-is-problematic message, if not an anti-crunch message.
agreed. I can't believe I had never seen this until a few months ago. Speaking of great tech documentaries, just got done with Jason Scott's BBS documentary, which was fantastic.
Look closely and you'll see Don Melton ("Gramps") who was responsible for the Mac port at the time, then went to Eazel, then to Apple where he managed Safari from its creation. He's now retired from Apple and does some entertaining podcasts and speaking.
Gramps was my first manager @ Netscape when I was hired after contributing patches through Mozilla. He is wickedly funny as were a lot of the rest of the people that worked there. One of these days I need to write down some of my recollections of that time.
> FF users have almost halved over the last 2 years,
That's not what your linked chart shows. First, the chart is a % market share, not raw user counts. Second, ~18% down to ~13% isn't really "almost half" anyway.
Yeah but significant still. 27.7% of their pie disappeared.
Recent versions of Firefox have introduced third party plugins (like pocket).
After the Eich thing, they lost the "hacker" cred and their talent was pretty easy much poached. Further, the concept of merit - overlooking the political in lieu of skill / talent - is no longer a core value of the organization. [1]
Recruiters were all over linkedin and taking away the best talent left and right.
You don't have to read any of the political culture ranting of ESR (and you probably shouldn't unless you're masochistic) to have seen that Eich was railroaded and screwed and witch-hunted pretty hard.
It seems very reasonable to interpret that whole situation as Mozilla acknowledging the importance of politics over technical leadership--fair or not, when you broadcast your realpolitik that hard, you're gonna lose people.
> when you broadcast your realpolitik that hard, you're gonna lose people.
Hacker culture may not necessarily be aligned with Eich's personal views / situations. But crucial underlying concept is ignoring nebulous things like that. So taking action / reforms based off the premise feels like a Chesteron's fence [1].
Recently, I'd read something about Mozilla and wonder whatever happened to that kid. Well, looks like he's all grown up now. I'm impressed to see that he spent so many years with Mozilla. I wonder if he has any regrets at starting so young.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartparmenter