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Comment by BSDobelix | Hacker News Reader

>As engineers, it's our responsibility to keep the fox strong and help it reclaim the popularity it once enjoyed.

That's the problem: Mozilla makes ~590 million, but the vast majority is not for engineers, but for:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/women-in-ai-ethics-ex...

Not to mention firing a CEO with cancer, throwing a Party (Feminist, Decolonial, LGBTQIA+, Climate Justice using Al) in Zambia (no joke) after firing 1/3 of the staff and so on. Firefox/Mozilla is the best paid OSS project (apart from Linux), but spends most of the money on non-technical stuff (same with the Linux Foundation).

Mozilla.org/Mozilla is now a Ad-Company not a OSS-Project.

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According to Mozilla's financial filings, CEO Mitchell Baker's compensation increased from $5,591,406 in 2021 to $6,903,089 in 2022. During that period, Mozilla's revenues – long dominated by payments from Google to make it Firefox's default search – dipped from $527,585,000 to $510,389,000 [...] "Fully 30 percent of all expenditure goes on administration" [1]

In 2018, Baker received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, a 400% payrise since 2008. Over the same period, Firefox market share was down 85%. [..] In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary rose to in excess of $3 million. In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5 million, and again to nearly $7 million in 2022). In August 2020 the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January [2]

I'm of the opinion that there should exist mechanisms for nonprofits to reclaim ill gotten remuneration from ex CEOs

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/mozilla_ceo_mitchell_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

>I'm of the opinion that there should exist mechanisms for non-profits to reclaim ill gotten remuneration from ex CEOs

Absolutely on your side, also the foggy connection between Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla.org leaves a sour taste.

Unfortunately, many Ex-Mozilla people thought she deserved the money.

They loved Mitchell Baker's focus on culture: Mozilla's progressive social causes and performances. They loved their culture more than their business and their own browser.

Like other companies in the ZIRP era, the staff wanted a fun tech company culture that made them feel like they were good people. Even great people. They preferred a celebrity CEO with pleasant illusions over a business leader with hard truths.

please look at their financials. how much money they spend on salary, remuneration to managers, administrative and finally moonshots.

besides, how would YOU finance to pay around 1200-1800 employees (from my initial online search) salaries that are competitive to Facebook and google or microsoft? why would someone work at mozilla for less money when they could work in the same city at a bigger office for more cash?

now, if mozilla took to employing foreigners, like from asia, they could reduce their salary spend by 5-10 times which would make them less dependent on external funding or employ 5-8 times many people for same money.

point is, building a browser takes money so how will YOU finance the company/non profit if you were given the charge

edit: also, how much would you consider your remuneration be commensurate to the level of work you are putting in?

>point is, building a browser takes money so how will YOU finance the company/non profit if you were given the charge

My point is that they dont invest it into the browser but:

>managers, administrative and finally moonshots.

>how would YOU finance to pay around 1200-1800 employees

Get rid of most of the non-technical staff and work on the software you get your donations for. Out with the leeches, in with the makers, it's software, not a political campaign.

Google Chrome has/had ~23 paid developers, then we bring back the MDN team, let's say 8 people, administrative stuff 5 for a total of 36 people, let's double that because we have $590 million to spend and round it up to 80 people, okay?

But hey, look at that ("Firefox Maker Rebrands as 'Global Crew of Activists'"), this is where the money is going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCJ5emSxK7A

pretty much this. Firefox is the twitter of software projects. You can Elon the workforce and end up way better off releasing features people care about again if you get a decent elon knockoff to skillfully fire everybody.

Sorry you got voted down, it's not right.

I knew it was going to happen and said it anyway. This place doesn't like truth when that truth is they or someone they know should be unemployed. What's the point of getting upvoted if you don't spend those points getting downvoted where it matters?

Side note, one thing that is good about this place is the downvoting is never that crazy, maybe -5 worst case most of the time. Reddit is far more expensive to say true things that are uncomfortable and that's a big problem.

> Google Chrome has/had ~23 paid developers,

If you believe this, you maybe shouldn't be making claims about the economics of browser development. That's off by ludicrous amounts.

2019:

>Chrome, with an emphasis on making the web great for the next billion users. The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers, researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.)

https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success...

"MY" Mozilla has 46 engineers ;)

But if you think ludicrous big teams can make "much" product you should read "The Mythical Man-Month"..again ;)

The ~23 was from 2012, sorry about the outdated information

You've accidentally left off some pretty important context from that quote:

> Chrome Mobile teams in Seattle and Kirkland, spanning four sub-teams in Chrome, with an emphasis on ...

It's not the number of engineers working on Chrome. It's the number of engineers who worked in that guy's Chrome Mobile team in a specific location. (It's not clear whether there were other teams working in Chrome Mobile in other offices). That's a team making mobile-specific improvements to Chrome or adapting it to the mobile environment, not a team making a browser from scratch. So it's ignoring the people working on the layout engine, rendering engine, the javascript engine, security, the desktop UI, codecs, web APIs, developer tools, networking and protocols, extension APIs and store, etc.

There is also absolutely no way Chrome had 23 engineers in 2012, but since you didn't give the source, I have no idea of exactly what tiny subset that number was actually representing.

2012:

>Officially chrome has 23 members.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-on-Google-Chrome

2008:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240227122339/http://s.niallken...

Ok, so let's check that quora link. The answer is by some random web designer. Their source is this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120116201141/http://code.googl...

And what does that page say? Right at the top:

> Here are some members of the Developer Relations team

It's not the Chrome engineering team. It's some part of just the team doing developer outreach (not necessarily even the entirity of that team).

You keep finding these obviously incorrect references to support your arguments, and presenting them as facts. And by obvious I mean really obvious. There is no way you can read that page and mistakenly think it's the Chrome engineering team. At this point the best case is that you're not actually reading any of these sources, and just randomly pasting them here. The worst case is that you've noticed that your sources are bogus, and just don't care.

Neither of those is arguing in good faith.

> The ~23 was from 2012, sorry about the outdated information

In 2011, when asked "How many engineers work full-time on Chrome[...]?", a member of the Chrome team already said there were "enough to fill many buildings around the world". So even in 2012, ~23 seems way off.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gdyun/iama_we_are_thr...

Yes 40 engineers, 200 PM's and 300 "privacy/add's" advisors in typical google fashion.

Just look who wrote the second article i linked, i never said Google is slim and fast, but at least they have invite money.

And look at the second question from your "reddit" post:

>I don't understand. There are enough devs to fill many buildings for Chrome, that work on things exclusive to Chrome, not Chromium? In this post it sounds like Chrome is not much more than Chromium. What gives?

...no answer, WHAT a SOURCE

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