"She actually responded to my question about her salary in a q&a and said it was too much of a financial burden to ask of the c-suite to cut their salaries down to $500k“
https://mobile.twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/129323209098...
Could you imagine a chief something officer only making 500k? They'd be laughed out of the country club, which is against the Geneva convention.
But ... "fair" pay does not mean the same thing as "whatever is financially best for the company to pay its employees". Take the other end of that bargain: is it fair for Mozilla to pay their janitors a reproduction level wage? Most of us (except the hard core right-wing libertarians) say no, that's why we have a minimum wage (which many of us also think is too low).
The elision of the distinction between "fair" and "whatever the market rewards you for doing" isn't an argument, it's just crass market-worship.
Edit: this post is pretty clearly argued, and downvoting without even a comment is exactly the kind of ideological nonsense that this site simultaneously prides itself on not doing (contra Reddit), and yet hilariously symbolizes.
That's not true, I downvoted the past because it complained at being downvoted.
It's a very frustrating thing about this site, because, ironically, most people here think of themselves as nearly perfectly rational and open to new ideas, but in fact the opposite is almost always the case. If I think of myself as perfectly rational, that ironically gives me a way to think that anyone who disagrees with me must be trolling or must be saying something obviously wrong, even if I don't take the time to work out what that might be.
I admittedly added that just to complain, expecting it to trigger another wave of downvotes - because frankly, I don't care about getting downvoted. What I care about is how often this site turns into an ideological echo chamber for one of two popular worldviews, and on some level I wanted to try to call attention to that.
On an individual level the thing to do would be to upvote downvoted posts if they make some sense, they don't have to be great to be upvoted.
This usually comes down to pay. People who get high compensation offers elsewhere are likely to be good at it, but that means you have to compete with other companies for them. Even if you somehow did manage to find somebody that accepts your below market compensation, what do you do if another company just offers them more? If you pay them near market rate then there's much less incentive for another company to poach them. You're also less likely to end up with somebody that can't do the job.
It's one thing to pay market rate for execs who do an excellent job on a rising company for a for-profit, another for a non-profit in decline.
And it's a different thing entirely when it's in a global pandemic and recession. CEOs of FOR PROFIT companies with far more financial success have cut their pay if nothing else as good symbol for the rest of the company.
Most non profits ( and investment funds) keep an eye on administrative and management overhead. A well run fund or NGO will keep their administrative overhead as low as possible, most donors/ investors look at this metric.
Legal Aid lawyers / social workers or any number of other professions do not / cannot expect a market competitive salary. why is open source development any different ?
if C-suite is only working at Mozilla because they are getting market competitive salary, perhaps they the wrong hire.
90% of Mozilla Corporation revenue comes from one deal, and this has been the case for 10+ years. All the fancy salaries has not prevented Firefox from losing market share, nothing management has been able to do change this, why should they be paid this much ?
If the management has failed to achieve success as is the case , should not also bear the cost ? or also get laid off/ replaced ?
Another one would be an ex exec I know personally (who was also a founder). Worked two years straight w/o pay to keep the company afloat.
Oh and there are also worker cooperatives. They are usually very stable and have a much smaller income gap.
> dominate the competition
The people/companies who operate like this usually don't have this as a goal. Quite the opposite. They are typically collaborative and opt for stability and sustainability over everything else.
I’d net for most medium sized companies it’s not anywhere near that.
(Serious comment, not some challenge to test how quickly Godwin's law can be invoked)
I suspect adblocking and anti tracking features might have been higher on the list.
I think things would worked out better for everybody if he had stayed as the CTO, but that's the power of hindsight. That and it was under his watch that they didn't invest into mobile early enough (I'm thinking of Minimo here, which would have been for Windows CE — not helpful in itself, but it would have helped slim down Gecko, probably).
https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
s/people and their/me and my
There are lots of ceos of nonprofits or small companies being paid significantly less. I think the problem is who mozilla is comparing itself with.
>That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.
80% discount sounds like a lot... until you realize her salary is 2.5 million/year. I'm preeetttty sure most families will do just fine on 500k a year.
On a second read, I see you wrote, "I would be surprised if ...". I don't remember seeing that the first time, but maybe I read too quickly. In that case, I'll turn it around: I'd be surprised if you could find anyone who can supply comparable evidence of competence who'd accept substantially less compensation.
No, and to be honest I find it hard to believe anyone believes so; a lot of those positions are picked due being friends with the right people, or coming from the same universities as the people already in executive positions, and other hundreds subjective factors that have little to nothing to do with the actual capabilities needed for the role.
The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.
Brian Chesky, AirBNB ceo, is paid $0 right now, because at least he can recognize how tone deaf talking about your companies financial struggles is whole you're still taking full comp.
Brian Chesky is not merely the CEO of AirBnB, he is also the cofounder with a networth of 4.1 billion dollars.
It is one thing for a literal billionaire, who owns the company to undergo 'hardship' in order to save the company they built over the past 10+ years.
It is a whole other thing for a mere employee to sacrifice their salary during a company downturn. To do so is an act of pure charity---which while it may be inline with ethos of a non-profit worker, isn't something that we as total 3rd parties should expect.
Mitchell Baker is just an "employee", despite her long years of service. She was even fired from Netscape during a round of layoffs, and served as a mere volunteer for years.
Just because accepting the sacrifice might not make sense for the current ceo and family doesn't mean that asking for it doesn't make sense for mozilla.
I don’t really understand why we should do that... we aren’t stockholders in Mozilla, nor are we customers of them, or even employees. Why should we demand that anyone is fired?
If Mozilla is turning around to be a simple, ordinary business, that is quite the shark jump and will in turn lead to a large loss in advocacy. I have no interest in supporting a company just looking to make a quick buck if I'm not compensated.
Mozilla Corporation is a sub of Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Foundation controls Mozilla Corporation shares. Mozilla Foundation should based on the bylaws of Mozilla Corporation either have the board fire the C suite or replace the board of the Mozilla Corporation with those that will fire the C suite.
Mozilla Foundation is not doing that because it is not interested in changes. Running a large non-profit is a low effort, low risk, super lucrative job. The only way to affect Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation is for donors refuse to donate for Mozilla Foundation until it addresses the governance issues.
Un(?)fortunately, donations to the Mozilla Foundation are only a few million dollars a year--mostly because they don't do anything particularly interesting. (Seriously--look at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ )
Instead they fired a whole bunch of people to better their finances in the short-term while damning the company in the long-term.
CEO what's-her-face and the other C-level parasites most likely are only trying to press as much money as they can from the company before either the company is completely run into the ground or they're fired.
And fired they should be.
WITHOUT golden parachutes.
We are their revenue stream.
We are the users, and we are the ones that continue to evangelize Mozilla and Firefox, and we provide support to people looking to make the switch. without us as users of their software and services, where would they be?
I don't think many would complain about their salaries if what they did actually worked. But Mozilla is being run into the ground before our eyes.
If the availability of people with a non-profit ethos affects competitive pay for non-profits, then that should be taken into a account.
Maybe such a person exists to lead Mozilla. But the primary goal should be to find someone who can turn the organisation around. I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that current management can do it.
After all, as much as there are complaints about Brave, he managed to make a legitimately well known contender from scratch in a world that already has seen many other browser attempts go nowhere (and of course, he in some form created and grew Firefox).
Of course, "cancel culture" means you have to throw out someone from being CEO, even if that means the whole internet will suffer greatly, because he had a different opinion than whatever was woke.
Which is a shame, because the net loss to everyone is much much much greater than the $1000 dollars he gave as a donation, even if it is acceptable to destroy someone's life because they have a opinion that disagrees with yours.
I don’t think his life was destroyed. He remained a multimillionaire, and immediately founded another competing company. The people whose lives were destroyed were the millions who didn’t have basic marriage rights for decades, and who were systematically humiliated merely for openly being in love.
As far as we know Eich was never biased or prejudiced on on that topic as work, his co-workers in that minority never even realized that he held such political opinions, and there is no reason to think he thought lesser of them. He simply wished for the laws not to change.
My point is that there is no indication that hate and prejudice where ever part of Eich's views.
> your comment would fit right in with that era also.
I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.
Can you explain to me how donating in support of Prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage) isn't homophobic (and thus hateful, prejudicial, and discriminatory)? Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
> I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.
This isn't a good faith response. Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position. It was simply hateful and cruel. We cannot accept stances like this as civil discourse. Any debate over "well, does group of humans X get the same rights as group of humans Y" is done. The answer is always yes.
Based on the very little information we have this is a case of someone having wrong opinions but not being an actual danger to anyone.
> Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
no, because I disagree with him and I don't really know of a good reasoning for it. (The only non-contradictory one (a low bar) being that the federal government should not be allowed to decide who can and cannot marry)
Regarding slavery it was a good faith response, also it was tongue-in-cheek response.
> Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position.
It was, it also no longer is, with progress we improve what is a valid position and what is not. Once upon a time in many places abolishing slavery was not a valid political position.
Ultimately these are moral decision that each of us needs to take responsibility for.
You can go a little further with this into ascribed vs. achieved status [1][2]. I'm not saying achieved status discrimination is good or OK, nor am I saying it isn't. But it's not the same as ascribed status discrimination.
This stinks and the result is the Brandon Eich and Leni Riefenstahl who did not actually discriminate anyone are given same treatment as other people who were directly responsible for discrimination or genocide.
I know a few organizations that might fall under that abbreviation. Can you be more specific?
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
Being CEO of Mozilla could attract highly qualified, passionate people, who are not primarily driven by "competitive compensation". You know; the same impulse that underlies the whole open source movement.
These are non-profit execs. They exist to fleece the donors and live off the spoils. It just happened that the non-profit in question has a mission appealing to the technologists.
With a greater probability than the current management, yes.
That question is impossible to answer, but my instinct leans towards ‘yes, potentially’. Even if they do not, they’re still 2M/year better off.
> Would you find a person who doesn't fire the MDN team and still keeps Mozilla profitable?
I think there's such people among the engineers at Mozilla, but maybe not among the current execs
If mozilla want to be more like EFF and focus on the advocacy aspect then maybe they should be similar paid. Even better, merge the two organizations and replace the leadership with the one in EFF. No need to go and look for a CEO willing to be paid 1/10th of current wages as there is already one available doing that now.
I can guarantee that you’d find a perfectly willing CEO somewhere in the people laid off now if you told them you’d only pay them 500k.
It's. Just. A. Job.
I suspect this is yet another manifestation of the crippling, organizationally-irrational-but-individually-rational levels of risk avoidance we're operating under now.
We can see it right here how it’s killing a value generation vehicle. The CEO won’t accept a pay cut, but is willing to shut down entire product lines. A similar story has played out across America.
There are plenty of people who could do well in the CEO job at most companies—no worse than the average we're getting now, anyway. There are far fewer "CEO types".
I feel like the CEO is absolutely in the wrong here. If they're making 20x what a technical writer or tester is making, it absolute is a bad look not to take a paycut when you're sending 250 people into the street.
There would be a very long queue of people willing to do any of the C-suite jobs for $500k.
The $2.5m -> $500k is an easy soundbite, but it doesn't have to even be that drastic.
Granted, shaving 'only' $1m off might only allow you to 'save', say 8-12(?) jobs, but... that's 8-12 people, some with families
Why should their CEO get any money and not a pink slip? Their mismanagement and financial games caused the company to have to lay off 250 people.
This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.
Would that be a bad thing? How? I'm sure somebody would step up to make decisions, and you never know, they might actually be competent. The odds don't seem markedly worse.
Github was leaderless for a long time. And during that period it was chaos. The company had no direction, employees were doing random, incoherent things. And multiple factions fought for power.
And yes, there are other factors at play. Mitchell Baker brings it up: The kind of work you do matters not only to you but also to c-level people and will be priced into the pay.
Who around here (who is also actually qualified enough, that mozilla would want them) would switch over, taking a 50% pay cut over their current pay, right now? Don't tell me you couldn't. Of course you could. Would it mean changing your life style? I am sure it would. But then again, that's a apparently cool to randomly ask of people who (I am assuming) earn a lot more than you do.
There are two reasonable options: You either come to terms with reality, or you change reality. The later means, in this particular case, enticing someone qualified (which includes a) being capable b) willing and c) in a social position to actually "apply" for the job) and to do it for less. Good luck.
How do you measure how good a CEO is? Is having to let go 25% of your staff, axing the security team and stopping new developments indicative of good performance?
In context of mozillas goals, challenges that arise when leading a company, and limited influence on the movement of the world, maybe. I doubt that either of us is close enough to the ground to realistically be a judge of that.
Just look at the amount of CEOs who got international industry awards or recognition, who some years later tanked their companies or were found to be engaged in criminal practices.
I would say that's a very naive view that idealizes the process (and I say that as someone who is very pro market), especially as you rise up in ranks and especially in this instance where a non-profit is failing to execute on their core mission.
I've seen people go from board advisors in relatively large companies to IKEA store workers or long term unemployment. It's more about who you know and how you play politics than your ability to provide value to the entity, a lot of politics gets played the higher you climb. The market value for these people could very well be higher this still has nothing to do with the value they provide in their current role - it could very well be that a less qualified (in general market terms) person could be a better fit for this unique organisation.
Yes, I think so too.
The more money that gets involved, the more this'll attract people who care about money, not the mission.
I'd expect execs at bigger companies to be less good execs, but better at office politics and impressions.
Your vision of a better world is miopic.
I think among the engineers you'll find a bunch of qualified people for that job.
Speaking from some personal experience at another company (a small one, 20-30 people).
Execs good at giving a good impression, and making money for themselves.
Presidents good at winning the elections.
But that's a bit unrelated to being good for the company. Or the people in the country.
I think/guess that some altruistically motivated engineers could save Mozilla and Firefox if they got to replace the current execs.
And the tech people who are the ones who actually do the tech work, people expect of mozilla have to go.
I don't know any universe, where this sounds right.
If someone came along and offered me significantly more money than I make now I would take it, despite liking my current position well enough. My family would also want me to take it. And I believe that basically most of the people here complaining about her would do the same - move to a new job if they got offered more, not want to get a pay cut to stay in the job they are at.
I certainly wouldn't work most places for 5 times less than I make now, and if I did it would be because I expected to recoup that loss somehow.
She stated what is the normal way for most people - to try to maximize their gains - at a time when it is somewhat gauche to state that.
Sure, but then what happens if she leaves due to small compensation (or for any other reason)?
To me it looks like "not much". She doesn't exactly have some stellar track record in the past few years.
That's a bit of a harsh reading of her career. 26 years ago, she was one of the first legal hires at Netscape and reported to the Netscape CEO initially. Her reporting to the General Counsel was an artifact of scale after that - while reporting to the General Counsel, she also created and headed Netscape's tech-focused legal team. So it's not like she went from "mediocre legal position to Mozilla exec".
She's also been with Mozilla essentially since the beginning. When Netscape open sourced their software and formed Mozilla, she was put in charge as the general manager of it. After AOL bought Netscape and decided to stop their corporate stewardship of Mozilla, she's the one that formed the Foundation[1] to migrate all of the Mozilla assets to[2]. And she did that 17 years ago, when Firefox/Mozilla had very little market adoption and low single digit browser share.
A plausible alternate reality without her could have involved AOL cutting all support for Mozilla, the Mozilla projects going into a state of limbo (with no more corporate support and uncertainty of even legal usage of their existing names/logos), the dev community around those projects either fracturing or fizzling out as a result of the uncertainty, and Internet Explorer retaining 95+% of the browser market.
It's entirely possible someone else would have stepped up and performed the role she did. But in the end she's the one that did it, and her contributions in the early days of Mozilla certainly warrant her current executive position (and the associated salary that comes with it).
That's not to say she isn't overpaid - virtually all executives are overpaid. But she's at least contributed enough to Mozilla since the beginning to get to the point she's at now. That said, many companies are having their executives take pay haircuts to soften the blow of the current environment and mitigate the need or severity of layoffs. The fact that she chose not to do that for Mozilla is incredibly disappointing.
[1] The original Articles of Incorporation from 2003 lists her as the sole incorporator of the foundation: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-articles-...
[2] This may not sound like much, but those assets were things like the legal rights to the branding of Mozilla and Mozilla projects. Without this, Firefox (et al) would have either had to completely rebrand and reset consumer mindshare, or keep using the Firefox name/logo and hope AOL (or a rando AOL exec) never decides to exert their power and kick up a fuss.
Just because she contributed significantly in some ways years ago does not make her a particularly plausible choice as CEO, much less such a highly paid one. I can say Blake Ross was just as important in making Firefox a success...doesn't mean he would be a good CEO candidate, nor that he should be paid a "market competitive" salary.
It's anecdotal I know--but she is not particularly popular within the ranks of Mozilla, nor has she shown any particular business acumen outside of striking search deals with Yahoo/Google which arguably are only a function of Firefox's market share...which has continued to decline. And speaking for myself, I'm not impressed with her work at the Foundation either....it comes off a very superficial, and "we don't know what we should spend the money we get on, so let's hand it out to "Fellows", put together conferences, and write reports" nobody reads.
> A plausible alternate reality without her could have involved AOL cutting all support for Mozilla, the Mozilla projects going into a state of limbo (with no more corporate support and uncertainty of even legal usage of their existing names/logos), the dev community around those projects either fracturing or fizzling out as a result of the uncertainty, and Internet Explorer retaining 95+% of the browser market.
Ummm...webkit? Also,it's somewhat ironic you point to the non-profit foundation as her success story, while she makes "market rate" pay by virtue of her being CEO of the "for-profit" side of things.
Of course her work history prior to Mozilla wouldn't make her a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive position. But that's a bit of a false premise, as the Mitchell of today has nearly two decades of executive experience that she did not have prior to Mozilla. If you include the totality of her career (inclusive of Mozilla), she very much does have the work history to be a strong candidate for market rate executive positions.
That being said, it does seem like she's just coasting on her prior momentum and is no longer materially contributing anything of value to Mozilla. In which case, Mozilla would be better served with her stepping down and someone else taking the reins. But that'd be true irrespective of whether she was paid market rate or below.
> Ummm...webkit?
I said it was a plausible alternative, not that it was the only one. Both KHTML (itself spurred by Mozilla's release[1]) and Webkit after Apple forked KHTML, could have also destabilized Microsoft's browser dominance. But I'm not very confident either of them would have done so - KHTML may not have had the resources to achieve what Firefox did, while Apple had the resources but Webkit at the time was only targeting Apple's Mac platform.
> Also,it's somewhat ironic you point to the non-profit foundation as her success story, while she makes "market rate" pay by virtue of her being CEO of the "for-profit" side of things.
In the context of her success story, you can't look at each side in a vacuum. The for-profit side only exists because the non-profit side created it as a wholly owned subsidiary. And the non-profit would never have been able to grow Mozilla to where it's at today without having created the for-profit. The hybrid structure thus optimized Mozilla's potential and has generated billions more in income than Mozilla otherwise would have, while also protecting those billions from being syphoned off by private owners or public shareholders, allowing it to be re-invested into Mozilla's mission. Taken as a whole, it's a point of success that bolsters her case for being a strong recruiting choice for a $2.5m executive role.
[1] KHTML's development wasn't predicated on Mozilla, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0 gives the impression that Mozilla's existence nudged it out of a development lull
Imagine that c-suite types may just work for the salary, too, like many of the fellow engineers among the readership of this site. They care about the mission, but they also care about making enough money to support their other obligations (like family and kids) and tend to choose a well-paying place when they can. They try to sell their skills and knowledge not very much below the market rate.
Let's say: hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k? It's close to the US national average, it should be "enough". If you think $60k is too little, ask your colleagues from EU, from India, to say nothing of Africa.
I bet some very mission-driven engineers will remain. But a lot would eventually leave.
Same applies to a lot of values of x in CxO. And you do want highly qualified people there.
CEOs of much larger companies, with much larger salaries, have cut or take no salary. Here's a short list of some
Lyft, Fiat Chrysler, GE, Delta, Alaska Airlines, United, Southwest, Jetblue, AirBnB, GE, NBA
How is it not incredibly tone deaf to cut 25% of the company and not at least in a token gesture temporarily eliminate your salary when you're literally a multimillionaire.
---
Also,
>And you do want highly qualified people there.
That would be one thing if Mozilla was in a period of great growth. But it's not; it's in steady decline. Yet c-suite salary has grown in inverse proportion. Highly qualified? Are they?
That's fine, and if people decided that, I would respect that decision. In which case they could resign, and Mozilla get people willing to work for $500,000.
> hey engineers, how about cutting your salary to $60k?
The problem is you might severely limit your talent pool, to a much greater extent than a cap of $500k would do.
> If you think $60k is too little, ask your colleagues from EU, from India, to say nothing of Africa.
Maybe Mozilla should hire more people in those places, if they need to do so to save money.
They did hire from places with cheaper labor cost, such as Taiwan. They still got axed.
Exactly. Firing so many people means it's time to reconsider the structure and ambition of the company,and that includes considering whether to compensate the ceo at the level of charity ceos or at the level of successful tech ceos.
You can't make this comparison, as $60k are not even enough to survive in many areas of the US, while $500k would still be enough to live in luxury no matter where you live.
Why, do you know any?
Yes, as a regular developer I think 2.5 mil is pretty crazy for a salary. But even if the C-suite "tightened their belts", that wouldn't bring the company around.
Maybe the company _would_ fall apart, as they say, or close enough. I don't know. If you followed the news by Mozilla over the years, you could notice the trouble they had with finding the next CEO, multiple times.
In the meantime, if MDN is the "gold standard" and so on, where were all the donations to Mozilla from developers around the world to keep the site running?
It's extremely self-serving to ask the employees of an essentially public good company to reduce their salaries to be able to produce the said public good.
Personally, I worry about the death of Servo the most. But if a more niche concern, apparently.
Isn't it time for new leadership or at least cut the leadership salaries and provide a bonus once the org is growing again?
The 2million / year salary - but no results and getting rid of people who add real value - is like an insult to those people who support / donate and root for Mozilla.
Mozilla is a mission driven org and for the CEO not to take a paycut to save some of those job losses - just looks very bad from an outsider's perspective.
It's a for-profit company, that happens to be owned by a non-profit instead of shareholders, but that doesn't change the way they operate.
If it was like any other for profit company , investors would have fired the management for losing market share and failing to diversify the revenues they make .
Even if they were a legitimate software charity the money for those developers has to come from somewhere.
What if management wants to move away from web development and concentrate on satellite technologies like email and VPN?