Is the CEO of Mozilla "worth" $3M/year? I don't know. But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard from every other shmuck in this industry.
I linked her personal justification below, but to summarize: relative to her professional cohort, Baker is substantially underpaid. Not doing layoffs would have meant offering pay cuts to a significant number of highly qualified engineers, causing attrition. Instead of doing things the slow and painful way, she did them the fast and painful way. If I was in her position and had the knowledge I currently do (i.e., that just about anyone working at Mozilla can find employment elsewhere easily), I would probably have done the same thing.
None of this, however, means that I think CEOs should be paid as much as they are.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/bylaws/
Might you try sharing that again? :)
And from there it's very easy to ask why Mozilla's CEO keeps getting raises (hell, and hasn't been fired yet) while their main product keeps doing worse and worse by really the only metric that matters for this type of product.
Certainly that is the metric you seem to be focusing on, but maybe the board rewarded her for something else, like reducing debt or improving cash flow or some other metric that might be also very important to Mozilla's long term survival.
Specifically which project are you referring to and why do you think their success would transfer to Mozilla?
Does this mean that she's actually undercompensated? No. $3M/year is an obscene amount of money to pay anyone. But her public position is factually correct[1]: she could go somewhere else and make significantly more money, and it's up to the Mozilla board to determine whether that's a bluff or not.
With all due respect, that statement elicits a massive DOUBT reaction. It's the sort of thing that the C class spouts to justify their backscratching, but it's hardly a fact for most of them - and for Baker in particular, at this point.
I wonder how much they'll need to pay her replacement.
The whole system of boards and execs is broken, generally speaking, but at MozCorp it looks more broken than average.
Not because she is a woman, because she is doing a terrible job.
Mozilla will stay afloat so Google can tell their “we have no browser monopoly” story.
Mozilla gets 1.2 BILLION$ for 3 years. Mind blowing ... and they handle a product as a side project. Unbelievable.
Are you aware that she became CEO in December 2019? The previous walked away presumably as he knew that layoffs were coming and people would be after his job, making it one of Baker's first acts as CEO.
I get why people are unhappy with her, but most of the problems predate her becoming CEO and the executive budget overall has shrunk as nobody has replaced her ole position to my knowledge.
Because they’re not a real company. The same rules don’t apply to Mozilla.
Google's paying them, but it's not for Firefox to be successful—Google is paying for antitrust cover. To them, Firefox should ideally lumber along with enough market share for them to be considered a "competitor" but not enough to take too much away from Chrome.
Considering Baker's reducing expenses while keeping the status quo: I'd say she deserves that raise from Google's perspective.
Neither of these is the definition of a company in any country on our planet.
You can dislike her executive compensation (I don't think anybody should be paid that much), but there's nothing illegitimate or particularly unusual about it.
And they even want me to donate money to them.
If any other schmuck in the industry does as much as a poor job as Baker has done, we'll be in the right by kvetching about them.
1. Your average software developer employee just simply doesn’t have that much control over their own salary. I believe I may have greater than average control over my own salary, and that doesn’t even compare to the kind of control that high level executives of a company have over their own salaries. Because of this, developers lack the conflict of interest that a CEO has.
2. Though developers may be “overpaid,” especially in the more extreme ends, and other employees may be underpaid, the difference between developers and CEOs is not even in the same wheelhouse. It’s not just a mere discrepancy that can be explained with market rates alone. Data I’ve heard repeated paints a picture that shows CEOs pulling far away of basically everybody, even considering other executive wages being quite high too:
> In 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 351-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989.
(Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/)
I don’t think the question is whether the CEO is 351 times more important than the average employee below them. I think the question is, how is it even possible that it’s worth it, in terms of outcomes, to have a CEO make this much more than the average employee? Do you actually think that, if accountability were at least as tied to salary as it was for other employees, it would have been possible for things to get this disparate?
Even if it was actually leading to better outcomes for companies, this kind of income inequality is definitely leading to worse outcomes for society.
No disagreement here. I think CEOs should be paid no more than 10 times their lowest paid employee, and that should be made enforceable by law.
Using 150k as a random number[1], Baker is overpaid by roughly a factor of two based on my "ideal" scheme. But I have the sneaking suspicion that HN would gripe even if she took a 50% pay cut.
[1]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm
I don’t know the answer to this question, but i know that Mozilla is a bleeding company, that does not need 10 different nice to have projects, but a strong core product.
I have the feeling that these men and women just milking Mozilla dry. Firefox lost nearly ALL of their market share and I think the salary should be tied to goals. Real goals.
Isn't it? Mozilla is pretty widely regarded as the last defense against complete browser monopoly.
The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from Federal income taxation under IRC 501(c)(3).
Whether or not Mozilla is the "last defense" is immaterial to how much she's paid, as is our Peeping Tom evaluations. If the Mozilla board thinks she's worth that much, then she's worth that much. If you have reasons to doubt their stewardship in ways that would run afoul of the IRS, you should report them.
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...