Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by 57844743385 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

57844743385

What’s wrong with paying market rates for a CEO?

Do you think they should find a CEO below market rates?

Have you donated money to Mozilla or Wikipedia?

View on HN

> What’s wrong with paying market rates for a CEO?

The rates have bubbled, and do not reflect the value CEO's provides for their organisations.

> Do you think they should find a CEO below market rates?

Yes. A dedicated person, at home - in a bathrobe, approving code merges would do.

Right. So a company with 750 employees should be run at discount rates by someone sitting in a bathrobe in their kitchen .

And I'm sure that person will do an excellent job negotiating the next default search contract worth several hundred million dollars.

Considering that contract was originally negotiated when exec salaries were much lower... likely yes, s/he would do a better job. It's very plain that Baker and her friends have lost the ideological hunger and now are just in it for the money they can make before it all goes bust.

What are you talking about? The contract is constantly renegotiated, and the only recent one that Baker was in charge for saw the same terms after the previous contract dropped over a hundred million dollars a year.

The point is that the whole system was thought out and initiated before exec salaries spiralled. There is no visible correlation between exec compensation and this type of negotiation.

The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary, the last year we have the CEO salary was shortly after they negotiated a new deal with Yahoo worth over a hundred million dollars more per year seeing them get a raise. I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary given she negotiated it right before the layoffs.

> The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary

No it isn't - salary is salary, and these deals existed when the Mozilla CEO was not paid as much. By her own admission, at one point Baker just went "fuck it, other CEOs get paid multiples, why not me?", so now she brings home $3m per year, with the whole exec structure likely benefiting in similar fashion (because why only the CEO?). See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.

That's $3m that could pay for a dozen engineers at Bay-Area salaries, or 30-60 in cheaper locations - maybe enough to match (or surpass) Google's continuous push for new specifications that forces everyone else to play catch-up all the time, as well as stacking the standard committees where Mozilla is systematically overpowered.

> I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary

You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary. Even with 7 years of inflation, that's a lot more.

Mitchell Baker has given a lot to Mozilla, but she's now very clearly decided it's her time to cash in.

>See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.

See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m.

Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when the CEO pay spiked, I doubt it's stayed that high and they arguably deserved that pay for earning enough extra money to prevent needing these ads for an additional five years.

>You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary.

Just to drill this home, Baker's CEO salary is not currently public.

Somebody didn't read the actual text. "Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [...]" He goes on to mention how he scavenged the figures from reports. Wikipedia links an article that states she was paid over $3m in 2019. And before then, she's been on the various boards since forever, so she approved the salary rises for her, Beard, and friends.

So let's drill this home: Baker or Beard, the whole Foundation board is complicit in enabling skyrocketing compensation rates for executives, whose only merit seems to be that they can maintain long-running commercial agreements more or less intact - while dropping the ball everywhere else.

I've read the texts, and further I've actually read the Mozilla financial reports. Yes, Baker had a high salary in 2017/2018 after the Yahoo deal where they improved revenue by over a hundred million dollars a year, though she wasn't "Mozilla's top executive." Her 2019 salary is not public yet, just a sum total paid to "management and administration."

They had an extremely competent CEO who was more than happy to work for a price below market rates, but he was a conservative, so they sacked him. Now Mozilla has what it deserves.

It wasn't "because he was a conservative". It was because he was funding a campaign to limit peoples rights and and everyone / every website was running a campaign to tell users to get off Firefox if they want to stop funding this. It would have destroyed Mozilla if they did nothing.

No it wouldn't have. The outraged were a minority and have a short attention span. I'm sure Firefox would be doing better today with him at the helm. But we'll never know.

Being a Conservative is one thing, but he was/is (he hasn't publicly gone back on his stance AFAIK) homophobic. Eich had to go.

Inflexible people are less likely to compromise. The article and thread is all about how Firefox continues to be compromised.

One day people might start to see being inflexible and principled and not giving in might be a better characteristic than being easily compromised and selling out at every turn. Even when some principles are problematic. It's a cost benefit analysis ultimately and there are objectivly bad principles would could make this swing the other way of course.

I'm thinking of RMS as the model for this mainly too. Many here said he should go, but the FSF actually got the most members when they did, because some saw RMSs inflexibility as a strength.

Many people misunderstand the meaning of the word "conservative", which is proof of how much the overton window has moved. If you want to progress on social issues, you are not a conservative, but a progressive. Those two things are completely incompatible. If you support gay marriage, you cannot be a conservative. You want to "progress" on social issues, which makes you a progressive. He did not support gay marriage, which makes him a conservative and nothing else.

There also is a big difference between not wanting gays to marry and being homophobic. I don't want people to be able to marry tables, and that does not make me a tablephobic. I'm not disgusted or afraid of tables, but I don't think they should be able to be part of the sacrament of marriage.

>he hasn't publicly gone back on his stance AFAIK

If, as a tech worker, you told me to publicly declarate my stance on a political issue, I would rightly tell you to sod off.

>If you want to progress on social issues, you are not a conservative.

What a ridiculous statement. What point of history are you wishing to conserve? Do black people have rights? Do women have rights? Is public education OK? By your logic, the following argument is valid: “I don’t think blacks nor tables should the right to vote. Including the table proves it’s not a race issue for me. There’s a big difference between not wanting blacks to vote and being racist.”

Judging by your past comments, it looks as if politics are an emotional topic with you. It’s best to up/down-vote and move on than clutter the boards with this dribble.

What salary does the CEO of Wikipedia get and would increasing their salary to "market rates" improve Wikipedia or make it more viable?

In 2019 the salary for Wikimedia Foundation's CEO was $387,770.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...

Sounds too low. They should pay more.

Wikimedia doesn't have a CEO, but the executive director is paid $387,770, the CFO is paid $289,356, and there are nine other people paid over $150,000:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

Hey, maybe if they paid them more, they could start running ads too!

>What’s wrong with paying market rates for a CEO?

More expensive doesn't mean better, it most likely just means putting someone in charge whose primary metric is short-term profit.

Many don't donate to either Mozilla or Wikimedia for the same reason.

Both companies are known for their big products, Firefox and Wikipedia, and both suffer from a chronic insistence on funding projects their userbases don't support.

I would expect more transparency on the objectives of C-levels and how their compensation is impacted when they don't meet these objectives.

I'm not saying they are doing a bad job, but I really can't say if they've been doing a good job either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com