The problem is you need money to hire venerable engineers. And you need to hire a lot to maintain a modern browser. Yet every attempt by Mozilla to monetize and diversify has generally been met unfavorably here on Hackernews.
Can you explain why? What does this CEO do that is worth this much money? At the very least a CEO shouldn't be earning millions when the company is slowly dying. Have a sane base salary and give the CEO bonuses tied to the performance of the company if you must, anything else is plain ridiculous.
A salary of 2M is not even 1% when it comes to the labor costs of the people they fired.
Maybe they dont need the CEO in the first place but that's an entirely different discussion.
I know of no country/city where someone needs 2M to live comfortably, but I haven't even called it ridiculous. What I called ridiculous is that seemingly this CEO does not have their salary tied to the performance of this company.
Anyway I find your analogy ridiculous. Lets just not hire CEOs or upper management at all. It will work for some and fail for some others but it does not prove your point.
Now that's ridiculous, it feels like you're misunderstanding me completely. I never suggested that CEOs or upper management shouldn't exist. I just think that in some cases they do not deserve the massive salary they are getting, millions per year is a crazy amount of money to earn anywhere, how can you possibly argue that it's not?
No it isn't. And maybe it's time for these executives at the top to take a pay cut given the state of their business, in order for the latter to survive.
Only in very specific locations and roles.
I'm not saying I agree with it morally — I think CEO's are paid an insane wage and the wealth disparity in the United States is disgusting — but those are the unfortunate economics.
Is it? I bet you'd get plenty of great candidates for a 250k salary.
there are plenty of capable people, but vetting those without experience is risky, and the wrong choice could be a death sentence. so everyone (except Kraft Heinz) chooses the safe low risk choice. what that risk calculation leaves out is the risk of buying an expensive ceo, having the company stagnate, and being irrelevant in a couple years.
So that CEO's salary represents half of one percent of their total spend.
They could cut exec salaries to zero and they'd still be bleeding to death.
it's an entitled mentality i find exist here on HN about open source. It seems that there are many here who expect a high quality, free project. And apparently, the donations should be enough to sustain it.
It's not wise to assume a browser that's funded and developed by Google will respect the user's privacy. People who depend on advertising will never do or say anything that offends the advertisers. Scientific articles published by the pharmaceutical industry are regarded as suspect.
Open source developers on some corporation's payroll have the same problem. Are they adding this feature because it's good or because the company wants it? Why they're working on the project matters. What's their priority? Good technology above all else, or meeting the needs of their current employer?
If they're doing it for money, good technology will eventually be sacrificed in the name of profit. People will commit hacks that happen to work at their jobs and next thing we know we're stuck with them and have to maintain the stuff forever. And that's what happens when there's no malicious intent involved.
Donations are regarded favorably here precisely because they don't create any obligations for the developer who receives them. They don't create a conflict of interest.