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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.

The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.

So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.

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> If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.

Its an open source project people believe in. Reduce the pay and you are probably actually more likely to cut out the worst execs and focus only on smart people who want to contribute.

Open source projects are full of smart people who want to contribute and are still often organisational clusterfucks. Unfortunately being smart and passionate alone doesn’t necessarily make you an effective leader.

True, but why is leadership at such an economic premium to development? It's not like the CEO writes a pile of code for 40 hours a week and then puts in another 30 hours on top doing all the corporate administration. It's an necessary but distinct job that complements the technical one but isn't so superior to it.

Yes, indeed a good CEO has offers from elsewhere. But...why isn't the business and governance open-sourced like the codebase?

At the most basic level leadership is at a premium because there are fewer truly good leaders than there are developers.

Now, is every well paid CEO a truly good leader? No. But I’d argue it’s a lot more difficult to assess a good leader than a good developer. There’s a lot more people management, marketing and other soft skills involved. Not to mention the time scales for success are much larger.

I'd say it's actually easy to evaluate a leader, at least one with experience under their belt. You look at the performance of their organization. If they're a CEO, it's especially trivial: you look at the performance of the entire company. If they're a VP or Director of a smaller section of the org, you can still measure that section's performance, though it does get a little muddier.

At a decent-sized org it is nearly impossible to measure an individual developer's impact with any granularity.

I think this should also illustrate that evaluating a leader and evaluating a developer are two entirely different things that can't be directly compared anyway.

> You look at the performance of their organization.

But over what timescale? For startups especially it is not easy to evaluate a job that involves long term planning in the short term.

The thing is, it benefits the people in professional management roles to promote this point of view and institutionalize practices like outside hires in order to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't need to conspire about this (in the Adam Smith sense), just echo the notion of corporate management as such a distinct skillset that it needs to be sought out rather than grown and that will eventually come to have its own moat effect.

Eventually you get CEOs making statements that amount to 'I deliver 10x or 20x more value to this company than you, all my CEO peers say so.'

> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ.

I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla?

> Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.

It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.

It’s that many executives do? Leave on a golden parachute to go destroy another company?

Fortunately, Mozilla has been doing #1 for years, as they mention in their public financial statements.

#2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution.

Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.

Nothing will kill morale as much as executive pay going up while your colleagues are being given their pink slips. That is an executive decision making problem but it directly impacts morale.

> it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less.

That's just baseless assumptions. And considering that this "saving" did not work out so far, it seems they are not even worth the money at all.

On another side, for the money of one of this managers, you could probably get a dozen or more semi-competent people who are more eager to make money and save the project.

> it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox

If this counts as "saving Firefox" I'm not sure I want to know the alternative.

I think you highlighted another problem. Why Mozilla HQ is located in such an expensive place? There are plenty of cheaper places in the world (even US...).

> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ.

So let them.

> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.

So let them.

To both your assertions, I highly doubt it. Maybe 1 or 2, but for the vast majority, no.

Firefox engineers do literally the same jobs as their counterparts at Google. Indeed, most of my ex-colleagues and ex-execs have gone to Google, Facebook, and Apple. (in roughly that order) It's no secret that they appreciate the increased compensation, too!

> The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit.

What % of engineers at Mozilla are in SV and other places where Mozilla competes with FAANG? I thought quite a lot of the employees were remote all over the world.

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