Comment by Osmose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmose | Hacker News Reader

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Worrying about Mozilla CEO compensation when

1. Mitchell Baker is also chairwoman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation and is a founding member of Mozilla, and receives no stock compensation because there is none to give,

2. Google can definitionally outspend Mozilla on browser development and has used that to cement their market position for over a decade now, and

3. as long as Google is the primary source of Mozilla funding, they can (effectively) kill Firefox at any time, and diversifying revenue / building up a war chest of funds is the only defense against that,

just seems silly to me.

As a former Mozillian I don't like the choices Mitchell Baker has made (AI and services are poor plays IMO) but the obsession with CEO compensation at Mozilla has always smelled less like a genuine concern for alternatives to Chrome and more like holding a smaller player to an unreasonable standard.

A more interesting comparison would compare these numbers to the head of Chrome's compensation, and more specifically Chrome's spending and revenue vs Firefox's.

I think the general critique is: the performance of a CEO should be tied somehow to the performance of the company, yet year after year, the company performs worse while CEO compensation goes up.

An additional critique is that surely one of the many true-believers in old-school Internet ideals of freedom and openneess could lead for 1/10th the compensation

Then put the money saved towards allocating tens more top, full-time, aligned engineers to projects.

When I see leaders of a non-profit personally drawing more than is necessary to lead a comfortable life, I see a conflict between the mission and personal enrichment.

(There's the argument that non-profits need money, and supposedly you can't get good people to generate money except by hiring people who are personally money-motivated. But the evidence I see is that it looks like money and power potential attracts self-interested careerists, and you get people building fiefdoms, and incestuous relationships among them. Get an honest, smart, true-believer board, and anyone who tried to draw millions of dollars in compensation, or assemble an org chart of careerist execs, would get a regretful, "Sorry, this isn't that kind of 'non-profit' vehicle for wealthy executive lifestyles and careerists, and we don't seem to have alignment", as they gently dropkick the misaligned people out the door.)

> An additional critique is that surely one of the many true-believers in old-school Internet ideals of freedom and openneess could lead for 1/10th the compensation

That doesn't translate. A believer in freedom and openness should be compensated more than a counterpart in the private sector so they can work even harder for the causes. They may not be in it for the money, but they shouldn't be punished financially because of their belief, as surely there are no lack of lucrative opportunities in for-profit organizations for them.

I disagree. $500K (and some degree less) is a perfectly comfortable living in even an expensive US city.

Not paying them millions is only "punished financially" if being rich well beyond comfortable is more important to them than the mission of the non-profit.

This "doesn't translate" only to people who have zero business leading non-profits. (Incidentally, capping compensation is an awesome cut filter, to eliminate people who are poorly aligned with the mission.)

Sure, there are classes of people who see something like non-profit CEO as their angle for wealth and status to which they feel entitled, when they can't get the for-profit CEO job they'd prefer. Not only are they innately misaligned with the mission, but they are also completely out of touch with the vast bulk of the people who non-profits typically are supposed serve. Keep them away from non-profits.

The director of Saint Jude's Children Research Hospital makes less than two million a year. How do you figure Baker is worth more than 3x that?

The list of major charities with much larger and more complex interests that Mozilla, yet lower executive pay, is quite long. Here is a sample: https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages...

She's massively overpaid, not only when you consider her performance but particularly so.

Right, but part of my point with #2 and #3 there is that "browser share" is a really poor choice for the performance metric in question to tie compensation to.

Browsers just duking it out on features and ease of use is not how the browser market works—Google can and does leverage their dominance in non-browser markets to boost their browser, and Mozilla is not going to raise their browser share against tactics like that if they simply focus really hard on making a better browser.

Tying it to a more functional goal like successful diversification of revenue makes much more sense (even if you disagree with how they did it in this particular case).

This. People act like funding is some magical bullet that would make Firefox profitable.

Firefox is by many metrics a better browser than Chrome. I don't like everything about it, I think some parts of it are mismanaged, there are some parts that are underdeveloped and some parts that are straight-up frustrating. And do I get upset when teams get cut or features slashed? Yeah, of course.

But it's not lack of engineering that is making Firefox lose. It's antitrust. It genuinely is that simple.

You could replace the CEO with pretty much anyone on the planet and the situation would remain the same. The reason why Firefox is losing has nothing to do with features or engineering at this point, Firefox is already arguably better engineered than Chrome is.

Meanwhile, diversifying revenue is addressing one of the biggest criticisms people have of Firefox, that it is getting too much of its funding from Google. But does that help? No, because people have an axe to grind.

I think you've more or less hit the nail on the head. Computer/FOSS nerds (like myself) want to see Mozilla do good engineering and also gain browser market share; that's "good performance" to us. Investors want more revenue and better and more diversified revenue streams; that's "good performance" to them.

To be clear, Mozilla has no investors, the corporation is wholly-owned by the non-profit foundation. The value of a diversified revenue stream here is the ability to sustain the Foundation/Corporation and all of its projects, including Firefox, for the foreseeable future without the risk of Google just deciding to not renew their search deal and cripple the corporation any time it wants.

I currently pay for Pocket but will be moving away from it because I can't stand that the Mozilla CEO is running the place like her own private fiefdom/piggy bank. A 23% pay rise is absolutely nuts considering the performance.

I genuinely think that Mozilla will have to go out of business before she will step down.

I am going to guess, and I may be wrong, it would be hard to find a single corporation that pays 1% of their revenue to its CEO as total compensation.

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