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Comment by cronjobber | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla has quickly been identified by a few as a way to make a quick buck

This is always, always so fascinating to me, to see how many people will never ever consider this, at least in public.

There's this most basic of basic incentives, money, a huge pile of money sitting around, and everybody piously pretends it doesn't matter to everybody who's in control of it.

So fascinating.

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Exactly! Why are Mitchell Baker and other execs at Mozilla being rewarded for lack-luster performance with nearly $1 million a year in compensation, meanwhile the actual programmers that toil on Mozilla's products go underpaid or even unpaid?

Source or link to actual salaries?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230668

Notice also that this topic was quickly flagged off the front page, just like the linked one.

I won't comment on whether I felt I was underpaid in my years at Mozilla (though I'll say I do make more now, at a for-profit company), but it is at least worth pointing out that Mozilla's bonus system extended to everyone. And until early 2015 it was based on company-wide performance, so even if you had a project that was languishing you could still get a good bonus if the company as a whole was doing well (in 2015 it switched to a significant chunk being based on individual performance and metrics, and I wasn't there long enough afterward to have a worthwhile opinion on how that change turned out).

> though I'll say I do make more now, at a for-profit company

That's what I meant by underpaid. It's well known that Mozilla pays below-market rate salaries. Instead it deceptively uses its supposed non-profit status (actually a for-profit owned by a non-profit shell) to motivate people to take a pay-cut by working there, meanwhile Baker and a handful of others at the top are getting rich (even by Bay Area standards) off their under-compensated, altruistically-minded labor.

Disgusting.

Why talk with a sense of moral indignation as opposed to the lens of leverage? People aren't paid by what they deserve; they're paid by leverage.

Do engineers in the US have a professional association or union?

Google for a long time has operated / operates in much the same way. Huge pile of adsense money, think of the best way to persuade others to waste it all on whatever insane idea you have.

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