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Comment by angrymozuser | Hacker News Reader

Disgusting that a "non-profit" that begs for donations and unpaid labor from volunteers makes millionaires of its executives. How many salaried programmers on Earth, let alone at Mozilla, get paid that well?

At Mozilla, developers are paid below market salaries and don't get private offices. Meanwhile, Mozilla took in $314 million in revenue in 2013 and $311 million the year prior--more than enough to pay its programmers well and give them decent working conditions.

The managers at Mozilla should be paid less than the lowest-paid full-time programmer.

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"Non-profit" doesn't always mean "charity". It's a tax designation reserved for organizations that are dedicated to public good. It doesn't imply that the people working there aren't top-tier professionals who should command high salaries.

You say that the programmers are paid below market rate -- so are the executives. A CEO of a company with $314M in revenue will rarely make that little in the for-profit world.

There's a lot of room for debate here, but calling the situation disgusting is over-simplifying it.

And as for their tax-exempt status and mission, I'm personally going to benefit a huge amount from just Rust. I think a lot of people are. It's hard to put a dollar amount on innovations like that.

> "Non-profit" doesn't always mean "charity". It's a tax designation reserved for organizations that are dedicated to public good. It doesn't imply that the people working there aren't top-tier professionals who should command high salaries.

Mozilla behaves like a charity, shaking down its users for donations that are tax-deductible. The Salvation Army has $3.75 billion in revenue and its Chief is paid $238,009[1].

> You say that the programmers are paid below market rate -- so are the executives. A CEO of a company with $314M in revenue will rarely make that little in the for-profit world.

CEOs pay is absolutely out of control[2], and using that as a baseline for what you think non-profit CEO salaries should be is absurd. Do you seriously think it would be that difficult to find people as equally competent as Baker and Eich to do their jobs for $100k? It's not like Mozilla is winning anyway; its flagship product has been losing market share for years.

> There's a lot of room for debate here, but calling the situation disgusting is over-simplifying it.

No it isn't. Mozilla's success, or what's left of it, is due to the programmers, designers, testers, and users who contribute to it. Fat cat managers shouldn't be getting rich off of their (often unpaid) labor. Taylorism has no place at an open source software foundation.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/14/charities-11_Salvation-A...

[2] http://www.epi.org/publication/pay-corporate-executives-fina...

Except this isn't about Mozilla Foundation, it's about Mozilla Corporation, which is most definitely not a non-profit.

I don't understand the idea that CEOs, leaders, and employees generally of charities should make less than a regular market wage. If you want the organization to be effective, then hire an effective leader. Pay for effective employees. This way the organization can accomplish its mission. It really makes no sense to me at all that a charitable organization should not pay its employees the same as any organization or company. (If the answer is that typical charities are poor, then sure. But you get what you pay for, in organizations, leaders and employees.)

This is market at work. If a person can run an organization as big as Mozilla then they can run a similar position also. So CEO of Mozilla can get a job in a 500-persons startup and get a juicy ~$5M/year pay. Most of people working in non-profit make a sacrifice actually.

I'm not saying the CEO of a company with around $100M in revenue SHOULD make that much, they make it in this market and a lot of people are not happy about it.

> This is the market at work

We hear this in the UK quote a lot about the pay of charity CEOs e.g. National Trust ( looks after old houses ) £180k salary, Dogs' Trust is £120k, Salvation Army £150k.

I think it's the result of the Boards and Trusts of organisations being staffed with Directors of other market organisations, rather than those concerned with the charity alone.

To them these salaries are par for the course, whereas to the potential donor looking in it is difficult to associate the levels of renumeration with the goals and performance of the charity.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that non-profits don't live in a vacuum. They need to compete for talent in the market just like any other company. This is just as true for regular employees as it is for leadership positions.

It's easy to just point a finger and say CEO pay is generally absurd (which is a point I personally agree with) and that as a non-profit, Mozilla should pay its CEO the bare minimum they can afford. The reality is, however, the less they choose to pay their CEO, the less chance they'd be able to find someone competent and experienced enough to effectively lead the company. This could have dire consequences on the ability of Mozilla to execute on their mission as a non-profit organization, so a compromise has to be made somewhere along those extremes.

Personally, I think 800k is a reasonable compromise, considering the market rate for CEOs at 100M+ tech companies generally goes for much, much higher than that.

Well, it appears there are two different organizations, the Mozilla Foundation--which is the non-profit--and the Mozilla Corporation--wholly owned by the Foundation, it is a private company.

On the page you've described: "For each individual whose compensation must be reported in Schedule J, report compensation from the organization in row (i) and from related organizations, described in the instructions, on row (ii)."

For Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, and James Cook, they all have their salaries and bonuses listed on row (ii), indicating it's from a "related organization". Further down a few pages, the only related organization that is listed is the Mozilla Corporation.

Ryan Merkley, Mark Surman, Christopher McAvoy, and Christopher Lawrence are the only people who are listed as having their salaries paid by the Mozilla Foundation, and their salaries are much more modest, in the range you had discussed.

I don't know how Mozilla Corporation makes its money.

EDIT: this old page says "contracts with Google" http://www.technobuffalo.com/2010/01/01/how-does-the-mozilla.... I suspect those have been replaced by "contracts with Microsoft" now that Bing is the default search engine. It would suggest the CEO is not in any way being paid with donated money.

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