Keep in mind that employee expense != employee salary since there are also taxes, insurances, pension contributions etc to be paid. Plus you need IT, office space, infrastructure.
Mozilla employs some of the world's best talent who could walk away any minute and double their salary. I'd even wager that it is a great service some of them do to stay where they are and not be lured by the big money they could be making literally anywhere else. The salaries they earn are more than fair, in my eyes.
I'm terribly disappointed that Mozilla lost so much talent not to attrition but to layoffs. Hopefully, they find newer sources of income and become financially strong again.
There are lots of companies I would take an employee from in a heartbeat. Taking a recent grad is a gamble in most cases.
That being said, I have to admit that I was very impressed with the work done by the two interns that were on my team (at $BigTech) who are leaving next week. But they had their own projects and weren’t on critical paths.
The manager who puts an intern on the critical path is a very bad manager.
Because of this 90% rule, the company never set any salaries. After you passed the interview and they wanted to hire you, they sent your resume and job description to an outside consulting firm, which would then calculate what your salary would be. The consulting firm contacted you directly and let you know what your compensation would be if you accepted the job, and why.
It might be common, but it was very new for me.
Mozilla doesn't just build CRUD apps. The problems its engineers have to solve are really hard ones, often completely novel.
Even though I am a developer and work for Big Tech, I got in through the backdoor via cloud consultancy. I looked at what it would take to even be competitive to not embarrass myself during the interview process and decided I wasn’t interested. I’m assuming that Netscape has similar standards . I can’t imagine that anyone who is good enough and disciplined enough to get through the process can’t get a job.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about this, but the logic is kind of telling. If you're right, the only possible conclusion to draw is that non-profits shouldn't, and effectively don't exist in a modern capitalist economy. Why? Because a non-profit still has to compete on both the labor market and the commodities market, which means salaries about as high as their for-profit competitors, and making something they can sell (ideally to ad tech companies, since they have the real $, not ordinary people). Even if profiting off the business isn't supposed to be the motive, most people are going to be profiting. And perhaps it's no surprise that the people in charge of making these decisions are the ones who profit the most. Decisions are going to be made in almost exactly the same way as they would be made at a for-profit company. But this process of decision making is the thing we're trying to escape when we talk about something like Mozilla.
Maybe the problem is that we think of Mozilla as a typical case of non-profit organizational structure. Would an alternative structure be possible, for example Mozilla existing only to organize teams of volunteers, not to produce something that could be sold (i.e. to advertizers) but to make something good that people want? (Obviously, the people who run Mozilla have a strong material interest against ever finding this out.) I think we're imaginatively limited when we talk only about "businesses" as the fundamental actor in the modern world. Maybe being non-profit (even "anti-profit") should be about more than that.
Which is why Mozilla exec leadership is still in place after a decade of losing market share to Chrome and flailing about trying to find a business model that works. Firing 25% of your company is a huge sign you fucked up. No shareholders, and only vague accountability to stakeholders. Moz Foundation board should fire her, though since she's chairman she has absolutely zero oversight.
In the 2+ years I've been at Mozilla, I think there's been almost complete turnover at the C-level.
For example, Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla from 2014 through late 2019.
There's a frequent sentiment in these comment threads that Mozilla leadership is failing and facing no professional consequences, but I think that sentiment is misplaced.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_abou...
And here is an article about the same thing for those who want to skim through it.
https://www.idealist.org/en/careers/rethinking-salaries-and-...
Say you have thirty six developers. You need one manager for each six, and another for those managers. You need an office administrator, and at some point that person gets an assistant. You need a few IT people and other forms of maintenance.
I never really understood how they called developers overhead, when there’s all this that actually is overhead. Not a one of those people has billable hours, for any definition of the term.
Two bedroom rents in the cities nearby Mozilla Corporation's HQ are about 4.5k a month. That's about 54k a year just in rent. But you still need to feed yourself and family, pay taxes, send your kids to school, buy health insurance and save for retirement. In that context, 200k a person is frankly cheap; their competitors pay 2x that.
The means, according to the standards set by the federal government, the employee should make at least $162,000 in take-home pay.
The fed (Department of Housing, maybe?) guideline is that you should pay no more than ⅓ of your salary in rent.
That value is absolutely absurd. It seems clearly intended to apply to those making under 100k a year in rent. Take the extreme case. If the highest paid employee of Mozilla makes $3M a year, does that mean their rent should cost "less than" $1M a year? What does that even mean?
Money has a decreasing marginal utility for individuals. When you talk about 54k a year in rent on a $162k salary, that's over $100k left over after you pay for rent. In other words, more than twice what I and my partner made together last year, before we had to pay rent. And we have the same expenses as anyone making that $100k after the rent is paid. Food, utilities, childcare, and so on.
One person having over a hundred thousand dollars to spend after rent has quite a lot of money and should become relatively wealthy relatively quickly. The 1/3 figure just serves to hide this basic fact.
At one point I joked that I could buy an entire block of houses in Detroit. It doesn't matter if there is nothing for me to do there, no schools for my family, or preferred entertainment options/venues.
Pretty much everyone employed today is “in it for the money.” Whether for-profit or non-profit, we all want to maximize our income.