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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

So I think we can all agree that Mozilla's path to success is not obvious and running it is strategically harder than running most companies. You have to find a way to make your free product compete with Google / Microsoft without compromising your core values and also paying your bills.

I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.

Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?

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> I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid?

Mozilla IS a not-for-profit foundation it's primary goal should not be profit.

What revolts people is how much she is paid and how much she increased executive pay _WHILE_ firing 250 people of one of their most successful teams.

Also lets be honest their 'strategy' has shifted from making software people want to use to let's do a UX extreme makeover because that's how Chrome does UX.

I know I should aim for constructive criticism but the UX on the Phoenix release for Android is so annoyingly counter-intuitive it made my blood boil.

Also dropping support for pretty much all addons on Phoenix is yet a major ball drop. The whole point of Firefox is customization and add-ons, if execs fail to see that then they don't understand the product that pays their 400% salary increase.

> It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.

> Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?

This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based. The idea that a desire to be compensated a specific amount always correlates with competence & that advertising a position with a higher salary will tend to attract people with a higher competency.

This thinking is likely to have some truth below a certain threshold, at which point people don't have sufficient income to live comfortably and as such have a need-based approach to raising their own salary. This rarely applies at CEO-level.

It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.

How?

Who?

Would you find someone who hasn't previously run a large, innovative tech org? How would you determine that they'd be good at this job? (Remember, switching costs for CEOs is high).

> It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.

The current CEO is well remunerated and seems by many popular accounts to lack competence, so this seems like a relatively low bar as bars go.

> How?

Hiring competent staff at any level is a challenge and depends on many things; there's no magic bullet. I at no point argued that hiring a competent CEO was easy, just that linking salary to competence as part of that hiring process is a faulty metric.

I'd say refining any hiring process by removing faulty metrics would be a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?

> The current CEO is well remunerated

Average tech CEO pay in 2018 was $6.6mm, probably not including stock appreciation: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/2/18522927/ceo-pay-ratio-t....

I've seen companies overpay for mediocre talent and assume that'll get them good work. Obviously doesn't work – you're right that high salary does not _cause_ high competence.

But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.

> > The current CEO is well remunerated

> Average tech CEO pay in 2018 was ...

"well" is not relative to average, it's relative to requirement.

> But if someone truly competent has an offer from the Google Chrome team and an offer from Mozilla, and Chrome can offer 10x more, well, you want to do the best you can.

"Competency" is a complex (& somewhat subjective) thing when it comes to leadership, but if that's your candidate's sole criteria for seeking the role, I wonder if that's who you want running Mozilla. You forget that this swings both directions: motivators are extremely important in leadership of any company, not least one with Mozilla's rights-based values.

Someone with a deep passion for building an amazing browser could reasonably be assumed to also be head-hunted by the Chrome team (and Edge, and Brave, etc...) as well as probably other, non-browser companies that just want their competence. They may also have a passion for supporting the open web, being nice to humans, etc, but they'll still have to justify to their spouse/family why they're turning down the other offers of much more money.

The perfect person could exist here but it's starting to look like very steep odds.

I'd be more for angling at someone with a deep passion for the differentiating factors between Firefox & Chrome (or more specifically, between Mozilla and Alphabet).

If someone has a deep passion for building an amazing browser but lacks any appreciation for why building Firefox might be more worthwhile than building Chrome, then I'd hope they would go work for the Chrome team, as I would not expect them to prioritise aspects of Mozilla's business strategy that differentiate their products.

Or in other words: is there any point in Mozilla existing if they ape Chrome/Google/Alphabet in their approach?

It depends very much on one’s view of CEOs’ skills and their actual importance to running a company.

I'd do it for median company salary (edit:cost-of-living adjusted) on a platform of making the best browser experience possible for as long as possible. I wouldn't change much initially, hopefully growing into the job, and hopefully an on-board board would be the check that removes me if it doesn't work. Just throwing my mostly entirely unqualified hat in the ring!

Actually I think Mozillas path to success is quite obvious, but they never bothered to follow it seriously because of their own hubris.

> how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company

$20k. And give him a bonus depending on the companies performance. Works in other countries and companies, no reason why it should not work there.

In the first place, that so called "extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company" should be highly paid is a myth and BS. After a certain point the scale of organisation does not change enough to be more worth. And most work is not done by the CEO anyway.

> $20k. And give him a bonus depending on the companies performance.

How do you define company performance?

For a non-public corporation like Mozilla, you'd have to use a metric like market share. Okay well in the first year, how can you earn enough to pay for your kids college or whatever? You'll have to really get those numbers up _fast_.

Things like this is where we get shitty growth tactics like spamming everyone in your contacts or auto installing and preventing uninstall.

Instead I'd much rather have bold investment in long term growth. Innovative initiatives that may take years to pan out.

Very hard stuff.

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