There are also hints at the contemporary adoption of remote work. One employee lives very far away, enjoying the cheaper housing and bountiful space of Michigan, only occasionally commuting into the Bay Area every few weeks for important meetings. In the doc, this is largely framed as an oddity, unique to the crazy work culture of Silicon Valley. Since then, though, it’s become increasingly normalized. According to a Gallup Poll, as of 2015, 37% of workers telecommuted at least two days per month. A dramatic increase from the 9% as of 1995, just a few years before the documentary was filmed.
Open sourced
Once they finally ship their project, it appears the effort was worth it. Shortly after release date, the source code was downloaded thousands of times. When Netscape went public, its stock boomed. Unfortunately, all of this eventually met an unexpected twist: Netscape was acquired by AOL.
Though the stock market was pleased (the price doubled after the acquisition announcement), employees were shocked. At the time, many people felt AOL symbolized everything wrong about the web (much like a certain unpopular social media company today). It was a private, corporate walled garden, basically, the antithesis of the open-source dream of the Mozilla project. The Mozilla team had to write an explanatory blog post to reassure the community about its intentions.
Although their attempt at browser dominance was somewhat unsuccessful in terms of sheer numbers, they were extremely ahead of their time. The notion of a major company making its software open source is incredibly radical, even by today’s standards. In the subsequent decade, many other companies began to lean on the open source software, though this was perhaps not always necessarily out of radical techno-utopian notions about free software, but seemingly as a cost-saving measure. Open source can also mean free software and a free labor pool to work on it.
Burnout
Despite their success, by the end of the doc, the employees seem to be grappling with the effects of intense burnout. It’s kind of dark. They complain about how the grind never stops, how they don't have time to read or hear about the world, and about missing their kids. One employee mentions that a doctor told her that if she doesn't stop working so much, she'll likely be dead by 40. Many of them leave the company — to join new startups, or to retire and try to recover.