I started working full time for the Mozilla Corporation as a senior front-end web developer on November 28, 2011. After a brief stint on a sort of mercenary team we called “Flux,” I got reorganized into the marketing department and there I remained for the rest of my time at the company. Over the next 13 years I worked on a lot of projects I was really proud of, and a handful of projects I was less proud of. I also met a lot of really awesome people, and a handful of less awesome people. I liked my job and I was good at it.
Then Mozilla unceremoniously terminated my employment on January 8, 2025. I can’t really say it came as a surprise. Although I knew it was coming, on the day it actually happened I was still a bit stunned it was actually happening. But as soon as the call ended, as the reality firmly set in, any initial shock was replaced by a massive sense of relief. Like a great weight was lifted from my chest and my entire soul could take a deep breath and exhale in a long, cleansing sigh. I was free.
As with any job, there were good parts and bad parts about working at Mozilla. For most of my time there, the good far outweighed the bad. I was generally doing rewarding and enjoyable work, most often with people I really liked and respected, and the company culture was overall open and supportive. But all of those things had been on the decline over the last few years. The work had become less rewarding, I had more frequent interactions with unpleasant people, and the company culture had grown secretive and stifling.
Some time in 2020, for the first time since joining, I started to seriously consider leaving Mozilla. I wasn’t quite ready to make that move at the time, but the seed had been planted and continued to grow for the next few years. I didn’t like the direction the company was heading, and the marketing department was especially dysfunctional and corrosive during this period. Recent crops of executive leadership had become increasingly detached from the Mozilla mission and the open source community. They apparently sought to compete with bigger tech companies by running Mozilla exactly like one of them.
By mid-2024 my frustration had mounted to the point that I was on the edge of rage-quitting on any given day, just waiting for some final straw to give me a reason. By the time I was cut loose only a few days into 2025 I was very much ready to leave and, frankly, I appreciated the push.
As unhappy as I was for those final years, I held on for a few reasons. Foremost was the dread of looking for a job for the first time in two decades. I didn’t relish the thought of sending endless applications, mostly to be rejected or ignored. Then if I’m very lucky, suffering a gauntlet of awkward and humiliating interviews. Then if I’m very, very lucky, facing the tense ordeal of starting fresh somewhere new with all new people and processes and politics. Not to mention running the very real risk that another company might be managed even worse than Mozilla.
Perhaps I had been at Mozilla for too long and gotten too comfortable. I was miserable, but it was a misery I knew, which is its own sort of comfort. Leaving that familiarity for the great unknown was daunting as hell. So I stayed.
I was also clinging to a foolish hope that, if I could just weather the current storm, this-too-would-pass and the situation might improve. Mozilla was once a great place to work; maybe it could still be saved. Maybe the revolving door of executives would finally bring in someone who would repair the damage done by previous administrations. Maybe new marketing leadership would change tactics and actually value my team’s work, and let us actually do it. Maybe we’d at least get some different middle-managers who would hear our concerns and try to address the root causes of low morale instead of just punishing us for having low morale.
While I patiently waited for circumstances to improve around me, my circumstances just kept sucking and I kept slowly burning out.
Then they fired me anyway and, just like that, all my worries were gone. Ahhhhhh.
What followed
Just because I was happy to leave Mozilla doesn’t mean I had an actual plan for what to do next. I had ample savings to live on so there was no immediate need to panic. Unfortunately, I also had to move house around the same time all this was happening. The owners of the condo I was renting had informed me a few months earlier that they would be selling when my lease ended in April. Job-hunting and apartment-hunting simultaneously seemed like a lot to juggle, and the housing situation had a hard deadline, so I decided to focus on moving first and I would start looking for a new job once I was relocated. That also meant I could allow myself some time to just not think about work, to decompress and purge my system of toxins.
Having the move to hold my attention was a blessing. I hadn’t realized just how much job-related tension I was carrying until it was all removed. Suddenly I was feeling less anxious, less irritable, less despondent, and I was even sleeping better. Sure, I was also angry about how things at Mozilla had ended, and sad that what was once a company I was so proud to work for had gone so rancid. But now it was all in the past, and in time even the anger and sadness started feeling lighter and easier to carry, though I’ll probably never be fully rid of it. Lessons had been learned. Time to look forward.
I moved in March and took a few weeks to get settled before commencing any real job-seeking. I needed to put together a résumé, something I hadn’t done since 2005, so I agonized over that a fair bit. And I needed to build a new personal website, which was actually fun and the best part of this whole upheaval. Then I could finally begin the hunt in earnest. This is where all that dread that had kept me at Mozilla for too long started to come back around.
Looking for a job sucks, even at the best of times, and the current market is especially dreary. Mass layoffs and a tanking economy means there are a lot of people competing for tech jobs right now. Within hours of a job being posted, employers are already flooded with hundreds or even thousands of applications. Many jobs you see posted aren’t even real. You can expect to spend months applying to hundreds of openings before getting a bite.
Applying for a tech job these days is like whispering at a rock concert. Recruiters are overwhelmed and understaffed, and it’s pretty common that you’ll get no response at all. Or else some filtering algorithm doesn’t see exactly the right combination of keywords and you get punted automatically with a generic response within seconds of applying. Your best shot is to have a connection on the inside who can get your résumé in front of an actual human.
In my case, it also didn’t help that I was being pretty picky about what kind of job I was even interested in. My search had a few basic criteria:
One: fuck offices
I really don’t want to go back to working on-site in an office every day. It’s not necessary for the work I do, and it’s been proven repeatedly that working remotely is as productive if not more productive than working on-site. There’s certainly value in occasional collaboration in meatspace, but it doesn’t need to be all the time.
Obviously not every job can be done remotely. If you do anything with physical goods you have to go to where the goods are. If you serve customers, you have to be where the customers are. But my job primarily consists of transmitting bytes from one computer to another, something I can do from anywhere with electricity. My work also demands long stretches of focused time, working alone with minimal distractions or interruptions. Even in an office, most of my day is spent alone with my thoughts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that remote work is totally viable for a lot of businesses. Yet more and more companies are forcing people in remote-doable jobs to return to offices in order to justify how much money they spend on having offices. But mostly it allows them to exert more control over their employees, to keep workers edgy and tired and fearful. If you’re constantly worried about your boss peeking over your shoulder to catch you relaxing for a few minutes, maybe you won’t notice that they’re treating you like property and stealing your wages.
If I had to, I could possibly tolerate a hybrid situation working in an office for part of the week, but only if the commute is very quick and easy… like, 10-minute-trip easy. I don’t want to sit in traffic for an hour and a half, twice a day. Or walk a few blocks to the bus stop, wait for the bus, take the bus to the train station, wait for the train, ride the train, then walk several more blocks to the office by which point I’m already tired and annoyed and ready for a nap. Then work all day alone at my desk with headphones on, mostly talking to people via Slack and Zoom, like I could have done at home.
I’ve been working from home for 20 years and I don’t want to go back to office life. The mental load of having to be “on” all day, every day, five days a week, for weeks on end is unbelievably taxing for an introvert and I’m so much happier and more productive when I can be left alone. There’s still some remote work to be found, but the pickings are slim and getting slimmer.
Two: fuck AI
I am, to put it mildly, skeptical of the value of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” in its current form. That current form being not remotely intelligent in any way. Large language model chatbots are black-box hallucination engines, complex statistical models that pick the next most-likely word but are incapable of understanding anything at all. They may sound intelligent because they’re programmed to kiss your ass with natural language, but there is no thought or creativity behind it.
AI is also a massive economic bubble that is due to pop any minute. A lot of job openings I’ve seen are for AI startups or for established companies getting into the AI game. I don’t believe these jobs are stable. AI startups will begin to drop like flies, and the successful ones, if any, will be scooped up and consolidated by a few big players who will themselves be struggling to make fetch happen. I’m not interested in working in the AI space, so I ruled out applying to any such companies.
Even among non-AI jobs, I’ve seen plenty of normal job postings that include AI useage as a requirement. Usually some variation of “you will use AI tools to enhance your work quality and help you to be more efficient in making an impact,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Well I don’t want to use AI, and you can’t make me, so those jobs probably aren’t a fit for me either.
Like the return-to-office fever, a lot of companies are pushing their employees to use AI in order to justify their investment in AI, desperately trying to pump just a little more gas into this bubble before it all collapses. I suppose they think they can make AI profitable by sheer force of will. But the driving force behind all the AI hype is emphatically anti-worker. In their profit-addled vision, if an AI-assisted code-monkey can produce ten times as much code in the same amount of time, they can fire ninety percent of their code-monkeys with no loss of productivity. Which is not how any of this works. “Lines of code produced” is not a success metric.
Some menial tasks can and should be automated, but using generative AI to write actual code that needs to actually work is a self-defeating exercise. You’ll spend as much (or more) time reviewing, testing, and debugging the generated code as you would have spent writing it yourself. That is assuming it’s code you can write and not code you don’t understand but passively “vibed” your way through, which then just unfairly passes off the responsibility of reviewing, testing, and debugging to someone else who actually knows what they’re doing. Or, of course, just ship all your bugs and maybe nobody will catch on until the site goes down or the database gets erased or the car drives itself through a crowded playground.
The fantasy of AI efficiency has rapidly devoured the brains of every Silicon Valley MBA prick like a body-snatcher invasion. Predator-class oligarchs are positively horny to replace their annoying human workforces with a compliant, manufactured slave race that doesn’t demand a living wage and won’t whine about their “health” and “dignity” and “fundamental rights.” This will inevitably fail, but they will gleefully inflict heaps of suffering upon the rest of us before it does. And then make us foot the bill for their bail-out.
And I haven’t even mentioned all the clickbait slop, the misinformation, the plagiarism, the theft, the expense, the waste, the exploitation, and the fascism. No ma’am, I do not like AI and it’s not something I want to work with, work on, or work for.
Three: fuck React
I was looking for senior-level front-end web dev work, but the front-end world has changed a lot while I was entrenched in my specialty of hand-crafting semantic HTML and CSS. In the last decade everything has moved to JavaScript frameworks like React, which I haven’t used beyond a cursory dabble. I knew before I started looking that a lot of front-end jobs these days would require framework experience, and that I wouldn’t be qualified for those, but I hoped there were still enough openings in the market that matched my skill set. Alas, once I started looking it was even worse than I expected.
I swear, EVERY. SINGLE. JOB. wants React, or Vue, or Next.js, or Svelte, or Angular, or whatever other framework-of-the-month that team picked and committed to for life. Clearly, if I want to keep working as a front-end developer, I’ll have to hold my nose and learn one or more frameworks and a whole new approach to web building. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to. It’s not that I don’t want to learn something new; I love learning new things, I do it all the time. Rather, I specifically and explicitly do not want to use a JavaScript framework to make websites.
In my experience, React (et al) is almost always the wrong solution. React has
its place, I’m sure, but it has turned into the proverbial hammer that makes
everything look like a nail. I also know that React can be done well, but it
seems to almost never be done well. So many websites today are brittle and slow
and inaccessible and overcomplicated and unmaintainable because some smug
brogrammer learned at code camp that writing your own HTML and sending it
directly to the browser was passé. Instead, they decided it was much cooler to
use a fragile morass of JavaScript to tell the browser to write out a
lot of carelessly bloated markup with no concern for semantics because everything
is a div.
And don’t even fucking get me fucking started on fucking Tailwind.
I largely blame React – or moreover the developer bandwagoning of React – for the sad state of the “modern” web. I know this is all very old-man-yells-at-cloud meme, but in my day if a website was blank for several seconds before any content became visible, that meant it was broken. But now it seems taken for granted that you’ll have to watch a little animated spinner twirl around for a bit while several megabytes of JavaScript gets slowly chewed before finally spitting out a few kilobytes of atrocious HTML.
I know I would hate working with React for a living. Because I don’t just dislike React – I believe it is actively harmful to the web. It compromises user experience in favor of developer convenience. I’m fortunate that I’ve managed to avoid it for my entire career. Now every potential job I look at would require me to work the wrong way. It’s a grim prospect.
Thus, after a few months of dismal job searching, I considered my options and came to a conclusion:
Fuck work
I’m 50 years old as I write this in early 2026. The traditional retirement age, in the US at least, is 65. For most of my life I assumed that’s just how it is: you’re born, you go to school, you work until 65, then you stop. But when I was young, 65 seemed really old and forever away. No teenager is thinking about retirement. By the time I was 30 and well into my career, I latched onto the idea of 60 being a nice round number for “early retirement.” That was still a long ways off so I didn’t really commit to it, I just liked the sound of it and kept it in the back of my mind.
As I kept getting older – a bad habit I can’t seem to break – I did finally start to plan for retirement, still assuming 65, but with 60 as an early stretch goal if things lined up right. While working at Mozilla and earning a decent wage, I was also saving my money and contributing a chunk of each paycheck to the 401k Mozilla provided, with the company matching contributions (up to a point), for which I’m very thankful. Then around the age of 45 I had an idea; maybe I didn’t have to wait until 60. Maybe I could retire even earlier at 55. That became a new kind-of goal. Not a real plan, not even something I really expected to happen, but it was something to shoot for. Just ride this out for a little while longer and then walk away at the earliest opportunity.
I suppose that epiphanous moving of the goalposts a few years ago was a factor in my burnout. Don’t get me wrong, things at Mozilla absolutely did start turning sour around the same time. That isn’t just my imagination. But I also found myself much less tolerant of that souring. As I inched closer to possible retirement, my youthful optimism of “hang in there, things will surely get better” was turning into a jaded and codgerly “how much longer do I have to put up with this shit.”
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I’m sorry. I know it’s a lot to absorb and I tend to ramble. I’ve written this out like it was a linear sequence of events and methodical decisions, just because that makes it easier to read. The truth is my thoughts and feelings were all over the place at different points in the timeline, and writing it all down here has helped me to congeal it into some kind of shape. And believe me, I am leaving out a LOT. But now I do need to retcon a few details.
Firstly, I had in fact decided to quit Mozilla in October of 2024. Some highly toxic fuckery transpired and I finally knew it was time to go. My limit had been reached. The final straw had been laid. There had been, at long last, too much shit up with which I could not put.
Even so, I didn’t rage-quit. Maybe I should have but I wanted to pick my moment. If I stayed until the end of the year I could still collect my year-end bonus, a not insignificant sum. I also had the impending move so I decided I would try to hold out until that was behind me, targeting a spring ’25 resignation, maybe as late as June if I could stand it that much longer. Hence, getting the axe before I could quit really didn’t faze me; all they did was slightly advance my schedule.
Quitting was a big decision because I also knew that one day leaving Mozilla probably meant leaving my entire profession – yet another reason I stayed so long. The Reactification of the web has been pervasive for some time and my skill set simply isn’t in demand any more, especially at the senior/staff level. I could pick up React and earn a paycheck, but if I’m only working for a paycheck – and there’s no shame in that, a job doesn’t have to be a calling – I would rather do something different, something I might hate less.
I really did hope to find a non-React front-end dev job, though the odds were against me, but it was worth looking at least. That said, I should also confess that my job search was half-hearted at best. Not only did I know my skills weren’t in demand, I was also pretty fed up with the tech industry as a whole. Once I really started looking, the bleakness of the landscape just drained the remaining will right out of me. I wish I could find the right kind of dev job for the right kind of company, but I’m not sure that exists. The whole tech industry is nothing but scumbag billionaires and smarmy marketing and unbridled enshittification and oppressive management and AI psychosis and alpha-bro startup-hustle grind-culture bullshit and I’m just… so tired. I don’t want to do this any more.
So I tapped out. It had been a fairly good run for 27 years but now I had reached the end of my web career. As I was coming to terms with that, I did the math to figure out how long I could stretch my savings while I tried to find some other line of work to pay the bills, something I could do for another five or ten years until I would retire and hang it all up for good. I totaled up my expenses to estimate a comfortable budget, totaled up my savings across various accounts, and divided one by the other.
As it turns out, with good money management and barring any unforeseeable disasters, I probably won’t need to work ever again. That was actually a surprise and the biggest plot twist in this whole strange tale. I had just assumed I was at least a few more years away from retirement, but I found I could afford to do it right now. So that was that. When my unemployment insurance ran out in July of 2025 I stopped looking for work.
I am officially retired.
What’s next
I’ve heard about life-long workaholics that have difficulty adjusting to retirement when they’re ultimately forced into it. People who derived their entire identities from their careers, who were always chasing achievement and recognition and promotion, then suddenly find themselves directionless with no idea what to do with themselves or how to fill the void left where work used to be. I am the opposite of that.
I have never been a workaholic, even when I really like my work. I enjoy creating things, and I take pride in a job well done. I like learning and solving problems, and I like interacting with other smart, creative people (within reason; I do get peopled-out and need to recharge with alone time). I like making websites and I was glad I got to do it for a living. But never a day went by when I wouldn’t have rather been doing something else.
Sliding into retirement has been extremely easy. I’m just doing the things I would have rather been doing when I was working. So far that’s mostly reading books.
I used to read a lot when I was younger, but then came adulthood and work and errands and always, always something that has to be cleaned. Add bottomless streaming media to fill in the rest and before I knew it “I don’t have time to read,” which was a lie, of course. I could somehow squeeze in a fifth re-watch of The Venture Bros. but I couldn’t find the time to read a book? If you want something enough, you will make time for it.
A few years ago I started doing “Screen-free Sundays” so I could spend an entire day reading, without binge-watching or doom-scrolling or rabbit-holing. Making time to read again has enriched my life and fed my brain in ways no weekly team project backlog status planning meeting ever could. I wish I had done it years earlier.
Now that I’m neither working nor looking for work, I spend a few days a week reading, not just Sundays. I’ve read about 60 books in the last nine months, often alternating between comics and prose (some graphic novels are quick reads so that number sounds slightly more impressive than it is). Compare that to the 15 or so books I read in 2024, or the five or six per year I averaged for the previous decade. I even finally got a library card, because books are expensive and I’m unemployed. Time enough at last…
Art is another neglected passion that I’d like to rekindle. As a kid, when I wasn’t reading, I was drawing or painting. But that also mostly ended in adulthood when work got in the way. And like reading, I’ve always regretted that I didn’t make more time for art. Illustrating this blog post is the first artwork I’ve done in ages and it has both scratched an itch and reminded me how much more practice I need. I want to do some proper painting like I haven’t really done since college, but I’m still struggling to get over the hump to actually start.
Any artist can tell you about the fear of a blank canvas, an anxious decision paralysis before making the first mark. Right now all the canvases are blank and I don’t know where to put my very first first mark. I keep making excuses, like I have for years, but now I can’t blame it on being too busy. I have to set up my workspace, I have to wait for the muse to strike, I have to buy a new half inch flat brush and a tube of yellow ochre, I have to shave just one more yak and then I’ll be ready. But one of these days I’ll suddenly start and then we’ll just see where it goes. I’m not in a hurry.
Sadly, painting is bound to cut into my reading time. I just need to resist picking up too many additional hobbies if I want to maintain a healthy life/life balance.
It’s conceivable that eventually I’ll get bored enough and/or decide I need the supplemental income and I’ll seek some kind of employment again, even if just part time. I’m not looking to launch a second career, but nor would I refuse a little extra cash to further augment my savings. I’m open to freelance dev or design work if the right thing comes along, but it’s remarkable how quickly I’ve lost interest in coding for dollars. If I can figure out the art thing maybe I’ll sell some paintings. I’ve thought about setting up shop to sell stickers and posters online, and I’d really like to make some mini comics and zines at some point. More for fun than money. What I definitely don’t want to do is turn a hobby into a job and suck all the joy out of it. Heck, I’m just an over-talkative, middle-aged, unremarkable white dude with a lot of opinions… maybe I’ll start a podcast.
Meanwhile I’ll just be reading books, watching movies, and taking naps. That’s not such a bad way to live. I have no meetings, no deadlines, no drama, no stress, and nobody telling me what to do. It’s everything I ever wanted.