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Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs

I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.

Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.

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CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...

Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.

Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.

My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.

Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.

Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.

So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.

> Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs

Right, that explains why Tim Apple got 100 million dollars in 2022, he was just that good at channelling the spirit of Jobs.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places.

If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.

Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.

Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire.

Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.

It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.

It's not 100s of millions. The previous CEO made between 2.4 to 7 million (she was really good at giving herself raises) and wasn't there long enough for that to add up to even one hundred million. Still she was very overpaid with the marketshare ever declining and the new one gets even more.

Nobody else got that kind of raise at Mozilla and they probably were much better at their jobs.

But hundreds of millions it was not.

I think the GP comment is talking about Mozilla Corp under her leadership, not her personally. She also didn’t buy other companies for herself.

This is desktop market share, their "stronghold":

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...

That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.

So I see the logic, but at the same time, I'm wondering why it's important for Firefox to gain a lot of users on... any platform, really? Like it's broadly good for more people to use Firefox, but also, is that Mozilla's actual mission? Because I would personally say that Mozilla is not out to make "the most popular browser," they're out to make "the best browser." Ideally the best would be the most popular but there's a lot in the way of that that doesn't necessarily mean anything negative about Mozilla or Firefox.

You can have the best browser in the world, and it's not gonna help you if nobody tests for it because its market share is approximately 0%. We're already seeing people getting stuck in endless captchas because they're using a weird browser that behaves differently to 95% of other users, and shitty websites inadvertently relying on bugs in Chromium which results in stuff not working, or running slow as molasses, in FF.

I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.

Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?

It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.

Those things go hand in hand though. If they truly were the best people would line up to use it.

I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.

Without market share you are irrelevant to influence web standards. Part of the Firefox mission is to defend a open internet, not to lag behind Google implementing whatever APIs their services need to the detriment of every other player.

which is quite ironic as Firefox Mobile is better than Chrome as Android Chrome does not implement many features, the most important one being extensions.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.

Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.

I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.

People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.

CEO should exist, and it's normal that their compensation is the highest of the company.

However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.

I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.

Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.

> They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.

Guess who turned Sears and J.C. Penny into what they are today?

Jeff Bezos? The Internet?

A mix of bad CEOs at those companies and good CEOs at Target, Walmart, and Amazon. I don't believe the median worker held any blame at those companies.

From that, I’d conclude that CEO capability and effectiveness really matters and paying up for a good one is worth it.

That is a false binary. It's also plausible that those individuals had as much effect on important outcomes as the guy at the front of a marching band does on the music, with other factors making the difference.

Also possible is that the CEOs grossly overcentralized the companies such that they increased the apparent importance of CEO decisions and then just took some big gambles. Heads they get paid a lot of money; tails their bets pay off and they get hailed as geniuses who get paid even more money.

Jeff Bezos competed Sears to death.

At a very large company, I think some individual decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the company than the work output of 268 employees. I think some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money. People like Steve Jobs.

However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.

I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.

Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.

Yes indeed. There is no CEO in existence worth 30 of the employees that work under them. It's certainly true that good and bad CEOs exist, and that a good CEO can be a force multiplier that deserves higher compensation. But 30x (and often more!!) is an insane overinflated view of CEOs' worth to the company. The only reason they get away with it is that they are hired by the board of directors, which is.. other CEOs. So a good old boys' club is keeping salaries high completely divorced from any actual value provided.

Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of rocket scientist unicorn.

In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.

After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.

So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.

In theory, every one of the CEO's reports (other than their administrative staff) is capable of stepping into the CEO's job. If they aren't capable (albeit some with coaching and support) that calls into question the company's overall hiring and promotion practices.

In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?

Moreover study after study has shown little correlation between CEO pay and quality of decision-making. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo!_(2012%E2%...

And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?

> I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO

If you just do nothing, you'll be better than the last 10 years of Mozilla's CEOs.

Well just look at that one CEO instead of doing the same mistake you accuse others of.

I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement issue, where today's world makes people think that they deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism in the US.

How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.

How does that make them "worth it"?

> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company

Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.

There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.

Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.

If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.

This is a remarkably short sided and inexperienced sounding take on what that position does.

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