Hacker News Reader

Comment by ntsplnkv2 | Hacker News Reader

> is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company.

Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

>Probably not but that is what the market cost is.

Is it really? The average pay for the CEO of a company of Mozilla's size is somewhere around $800,000 according to [1]. And a pretty large chunk of that is performance related.

Of course salaries may vary a lot between industries, but given Mozilla's performance, their CEO's salary appears to be on the high side.

[1] https://chiefexecutive.net/ceo-and-senior-executive-compensa...

Besides the fact tech skews much higher, especially tech in SV, Mozilla doesn't have stock or equity to pass around, so has historically had relatively high cash compensation for its size instead.

I think that has become less true over the years, but it does tend to inflate salary or salary+bonus numbers unless you compare to total comp elsewhere (including parachutes and other bonuses that may not make these sheets).

The numbers I quoted include new stock/equity as well as equity gains.

Also, Mozilla is a rather unusual tech company in many ways. Leading Mozilla comes with unique opportunities not easily found elsewhere. Monetary compensation is not the only incentive for people.

Less true if you consider only tech ceo salaries

I disagree. The CEO seems to be hinting at lean years ahead. She should be cutting her pay instead. Like Nintendo's management did during their Wii U years.

Sadly that kind of work ethic (and honor) is not present enough in the west.

Nonsense, there have been multiple cases in the west, e.g. John Chambers at Cisco, Michael Kneeland at United Rentals, Dan Price at Gravity Payments, Nicholas Woodman at GoPro.

Maybe it's like when a store has 20% off sale a couple weeks after they raised their prices 10%. Yeah, it's still a sale, it's just not as big of a price cut as you're making it out to be.

Raise your salary, sock some money away, then take a big public paycut now that your house is paid off.

Ok. So right now, as they are letting 70 people go, and obviously not doing so well, would be a good time to take a big public pay cut.

It would be interesting to see if the CEO bailed if her pay was cut in half. Many CEOs are not in a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. So they can walk away if you cut their pay without looking like an asshole. Then the board is stuck looking for a replacement who will accept 1.25M and the expectation that it could get cut again if the company doesn't turn around.

There are surely other studies but according to an MSCI-study the correlation between ceo salary and company performance is negative. Guessing there is some lower limit though. https://www.msci.com/www/research-paper/are-ceos-paid-for-pe...

Given their results that person is clearly not worth that money. I’d feel terrible as a CEO laying off those people while not docking my own pay.

> Probably not but that is what the market cost is. I have no doubt the executive chair of Mozilla has other offers.

This is a dangerous limb to go out on an HN, but what if they just didn't have a CEO? Do you think the quality of the resulting product would be significantly worse?

I’ll do it for 1.5.

Your price is lower, but maybe your cost is higher.

That would be a bargain if you had other offers for more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com