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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?

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Not just in absolute terms, what could possibly justify a 600% increase in salary in 7 years?

I don't know, but really want to. I need this in my life.

good negotiation skills and friends in high places.

Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

> Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.

That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is.

I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground for this mismanagement.

It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO your productivity is how much better you're doing than someone else in that role would. In the modern world too often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable is this company" instead of "How much is this particular executive adding to the value of this company" - that's why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.

> The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation.

That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very unpersuasive.

Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?

Unfortunately yes - this view isn't so out there that it's not inconceivable that someone would genuinely express it.

You always have to /s here. I figure there are enough people reading HN who have different backgrounds in how they understand English that it's necessary.

Also important to label jokes.

also a tech startup incubator, where there is a non-trivial portion of the population is, or is trying very hard to be, something like that CEO.

in other words, for some people here it's not sarcasm.

Honestly yeah I had to read it a couple times, I didn't notice the joke right away, cause there are people out there who justify CEO salaries, I just can't remember the justification offhand.

Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.

on the internet, ALWAYS

Nope, sarcasm was pretty obvious from the "iceberg jumping at the boat" part.

that was the give-away

No you didn't. :P

Poe's Law[0] applies.

Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of people who already know your general opinions on things, it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on some issue that a nontrivial number of people would actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh, to keep the rest of us from getting poor."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Carry on. I for one laughed at the obviousness of the iceberg jumping out. We definitely should be encouraging more careful reading than hinting and reading everything as if they are words only. Your comment is about as obvious as it gets. Unless... the icebergs are alive. But then we have a bigger problem. Global warming is their revenge!

CEO salaries aren’t, and never have been, relative to the rank and file salaries.

The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.

> The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market.

No! The real question is what happens without an executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead?

I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well, at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.

Don’t know, as a shareholder I would be very happy with a capable CEO that is able to extract profits from a doomed product. As long as she’s bringing in more than she costs the ROI is positive.

the benchmark of what other CEOs make is a horrible metric. There is an entire industry of « Consultants » who will justify a higher CEO salary by claiming that other CEOs make the higher salary and then work with those other CEOs by point to your now higher salary.

Note, I didn’t say that it had to be relative to other CEO salaries. It has to be competitive to any other position that a candidate has available to them.

What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company? What could they make as a startup founder?

True, Hiring a CEO is basically buying into an old boys network. It's like legalised corruption. With them you buy the goodwill of all of their buddies in other CEO positions.

However in this case it doesn't actually seem to be paying off.

This is true at most tech companies though - the CEO making a multiple of a typical dev salary. The large increases year over year, however, while Firefox loses market share, is a bigger red flag IMHO.

It’s simple math: how much revenue does she bring in, versus the costs. And how likely is it for the organization to find someone else that brings in equal or more, for reduced salary.

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