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Mozilla wants young techies to consider ethics in their jobs? Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themse

Mozilla wants young techies to consider ethics in their jobs? Rich words indeed from the corporation that more than doubled executive pay and then found themselves needing to lay off 70 people to save costs on a restructuring. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/16/mozilla_job_cuts/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/16/mozilla_job_cuts/ https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 https://mobile.twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/12175120497160...

saas_sam 7y ago
Honest question: If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? Or do we think they should work for less than market rates? If so, wouldn't Mozilla be at risk of having their executives poached by higher paying companies, which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs? If someone's gonna downvote me I'd appreciate some color on your choice too, thanks. ;-)
- gpm 7y ago
  This assumes that executives being poached would lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs. If executive pay was rationally based, that might be true. But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. More likely it would result in someone being promoted to executive and business continuing as usual. The poaching companies are going to run out of places to put executives long before Mozilla runs out of competent employees who could run the company. In the meantime Mozilla gains a great reputation as a place to work if you want to get poached to a million dollar salary job, so it gains access to lots more competent engineers. Or at least I think that's the sane argument for why Mozilla executives (and most companies executives) should be payed less. I'm not totally convinced that all the premises are true.
  - saas_sam 7y ago
    Hmm perhaps. If my experience is any indication, companies tend to pay everyone as little as they can get away with, execs or no. Execs leave for more money all the time, just as the rest of us do. Their pay is set by their board of directors who tend to have big plans for the equity they're sitting on (not to mention their reputation should stories start circulating that they're in cahoots w/ exec teams to pump their pay!).
    - sciurus 7y ago
      FWIW, the Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Employees don't have any equity. Salary and bonus are thus the bulk of your compensation at Mozilla no matter what level you're at.
      - saas_sam 7y ago
        I didn't know that! Thank you.
        sciurus 7y ago
        No worries! It's something that makes Mozilla different from many other high-profile tech companies, where as you advance most of your comp increase comes from stock grants.
      - dv_dt 7y ago
        Are there any notable examples of worker cooperatives in the open source space? It would seem to be an interesting model, at least as an alternative to a non-profit foundation model of organization.
        fabrice_d 7y ago
        There is Igalia (https://www.igalia.com/ https://www.igalia.com/)
        deleted 7y ago
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. Why does it appear to you that way? Research suggests that CEOs are overwhelmingly important and have significant impact on the valuation of a company on a scale significantly larger compared their compensation.[1] "For example, open-minded and curious CEOs create an entrepreneurial culture, driven and intense CEOs create a culture of results and achievement, and altruistic CEOs create a culture of empathy and cooperation. Second, as a 20-year review from 1993 to 2012 showed, CEOs’ judgment affects key strategic and managerial processes, such as staffing, financing, and marketing decisions. Third, CEOs’ reputations — their public personas — affect company valuations and stock prices. It has been estimated that 22% of the variability in firm performance can be attributed directly to the CEO. In fact, even when researchers use transcripts of interviews and meeting conversations to infer a CEO’s psychological profile, their ability, strategic thinking skills, and communication skills predict a substantial amount of variability in company performance." I'd suggest you evaluate whether you base your opinion around CEO pay on data evaluating CEO performance or whether it's just an emotional response because 70 workers being laid off just elicits more sympathy than a CEO receiving higher compensation. [1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/are-ceos-overhyped-and-overpaid https://hbr.org/2016/11/are-ceos-overhyped-and-overpaid
    - gpm 7y ago
      There are several things you need to be true to make that statement false. - CEOs having a large impact - we agree here - It is hard to replace the current CEO with a new one who will be, on average, equal (or better) than the existing one. It's the second statement which I question. In a few rare cases (e.g. Elon Musk) there is good evidence to support it, but in the case of Mozilla I don't see it. The research you cite goes both ways. If we can predict who will be a good CEO through an interview CEOs are easier to replace.
      - Barrin92 7y ago
        you not only need to identify them but you also need to pay them market rates or something close if you want to retain them. Mozilla is a company with 500 million in revenue. If they pay their CEO 2 million bucks and that CEO has even a moderately positive impact, then that's a completely rational decision.
- gibbonsrcool 7y ago
  If there was a maximum wage law then there would be no danger of poaching.
  - saas_sam 7y ago
    Hehe, maybe! Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business.
    - wolco 7y ago
      If places like China allow higher pay we may see some people leave. Lucky we have more people than CEO jobs and we will fill them. I would be more concerned if people who picked fruit were being poached with higher pay. We have no one willing to do those jobs.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
      If the maximum wage affected few enough people, then the effect on where people live their lives would be small. Set it at the 99.9th percentile or 99.99th percentile income or something to that effect. (per-household, those seem to be $1.5M and $7m per year). One in ten thousand people leaving the country might have a tiny effect, especially since the top paid one in ten thousand doesn't have as much correlation as you'd hope with the top most group social good providing one in ten thousand.
    - magduf 7y ago
      >Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business. I have no problem with that. Let them leave. Suppose we set a maximum compensation cap of $10M/year in the US. So executives can no longer earn more than $10M/year in total compensation (salary, bonus, golden parachute, etc.). So a bunch of overpaid execs leave the US. Where exactly are they going to go where they'll 1) be paid more than $10M/year, and 2) actually be able to do these super-high-paying executive jobs effectively (i.e., they need to know the local language, etc.)?
  - 7y ago
- metajack 7y ago
  I think people are more bothered by the fact that compesation drastically increased during a period of poor performance with respect to market share. Also, please provide some evidence that the board chair of a non-profit with an annual budget of $20M has a market rate salary of $2M/yr. Note that Mozilla Foundation also has an executive director (more like $250k/yr) and the Mozilla Corporation had a separate CEO and executive team (whose salaries aren't reported in the Mozilla Foundation form 990).
  - saas_sam 7y ago
    Usually the highest paid executives (w/ cash) are the ones at low performing companies because executives don't want to work at low performing companies. From the outside it looks like they're being rewarded for the company performing poorly, but from the inside it's more like "this is what we have to do to keep everyone from jumping ship to Salesforce/Twilio/Tesla/sexier company." But hey, someone with more knowledge of Mozilla than you or I should really be the ones defending this. Maybe some are reading this thread and don't mind chiming in?
    - refurb 7y ago
      This is very true. If you're a company in desperate need of a turn around, you're not going to have a lot of luck in finding a great CEO unless you offer a competitive compensation package and a guaranteed payout. That's why you see failing companies' CEOs walk away with big packages. They won't get a good CEO unless they offer comp comparable to other companies they could work for.
  - wolco 7y ago
    10% of their budget? I would reconsider donating, they don't need the money.
    - adev_ 7y ago
      And in my case I would consider double my donation this year. Because we need them and alternative browsers more than ever, because current Tech landscape dramatically need more ethics and less golden boys.
- peeters 7y ago
  I'm not sure I accept the premise that we've established anything close to an efficient market for executives.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Executives (in general, not at Mozilla in particular) rig the market in their own favor. Everyone knows this. They're not fundamentally better or more competent 99% of the time, just members of a more exclusive club who can easily do deals outside the market.
- hartator 7y ago
  The thing is their executives are probably not worth their salaries. A lawyer that drove down Firefox market share, image, and the org is still highly depend on Google to survive. Despite all this marketing BS.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? This feels like a misleading question to ask. There are plenty of disputes about "market rates" for both groups, so the premise isn't one I'd agree to. Market rates are decided by these decisions, not the other way around. If Mozilla was able to get adequate leadership at the rates that didnt grow faster than rank-and-file wages, that would have been a more ethical decision overall. If more companies did the same, market rates would reflect that. Unless you think there was no such leadership available at that rate, in which case we simply disagree.
- xhkkffbf 7y ago
  Look up the salaries given to Mozilla executives. (Really, just the top.) It's scandalous to hear someone preaching about people giving up paying salaries.
- HappyDreamer 7y ago
  When there's this `donate.mozilla.org` website, then, no I don't think the execs should have market rates. Either remove the donation website, or find execs who are driven not by money and market rates, but by changing and improving society. I think the latter types of execs, would work better, for making FF popular and increasing revenue. The idea that only execs that need lots of money (market rate) or they'd jump to another company, can do a good job, seems weird to me. I've understood that in theory the Donate-to-Mozilla thing doesn't donate to the execs — but in practice, I'd say yes it does (to some extent at least). > which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs? I think (guess) the opposite. That they could all have kept their job and Mozilla could have hired more.
bt4u 7y ago
That's just business, it's not unethical
devwastaken 7y ago
Restructuring is necessary in any business large or small. Without that you would be working on products that will never be released. A 'digging holes to fill them again' problem. We can certainly disagree on what should and shouldn't be restructured itself.
dentemple 7y ago
Thanks for posting this, I was really re-considering joining Google's new Ads-For-Children-And-Fighting-Against-Democracy Engineering Team here in NYC, but knowing that Mozilla is a typical corporation with typical corporation practices, I now know that my own hands will be clean regardless of how many killbot scripts that I write.
- qeqeqeqe 7y ago
  Based on your the silly name you used to describe the NYC team, I doubt you are serious. Anyway, you first need to pass the interview before you can really consider joining.
stanferder 7y ago
It's kind of admirable that Mozilla would promote an idea that can so obviously be used to judge them poorly with respect to recent news. That last bit of news about them isn't necessarily the only thing they should be judged on though.
- codingmess 7y ago
  It's just PR and populism, aimed at gullible students.
craftyguy 7y ago
This is a red herring. The bigger issue is Mozilla preaching ethics in 'tech' while continuing to draw substantial profits from one of the most unethical 'tech' companies (Google)
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  And Mozilla has also been trying for years to make its revenue less dependent on Google.
citilife 7y ago
If I recall correctly, that twitter post is not entirely accurate. The CEO was exercising their stock options. Also, arguably it's not mutually exclusive to suggest people to consider where to work, at the same time executives make larger income. On the outside, clearly the board of directors thought the increased income was worth it. As we have limited insight, I don't think we should assume an unethical intent. Finally, I don't know which 70 jobs were cut, but presumably it was that their skills were determined to no longer necessary to the business. Tough luck, but to the remaining employees, it's ethical to lay them off.
- metajack 7y ago
  > If I recall correctly, that twitter post is not entirely accurate. The CEO was exercising their stock options. Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, and Mozilla Corp is private held wholly by Mozilla Foundation. No one is getting compensated in forms of equity. All compensation plans are salary and cash bonuses. The data from the tweet matches the numbers from public IRS filings of Mozilla Foundation. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ for the most recent report.
jordigh 7y ago
I really hate this kind of response. Just because Mozilla isn't a saint doesn't mean that their words don't ring true. Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.png?1569958066 https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.p... Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo. We should be taking ethical jobs and who cares if it's Mozilla who said it. They're right about this, even if they're wrong about other things.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  I can't speak for the original commenter, but my concern is that Mozilla might be pushing for a vision of ethics in tech which excludes some ethics they'd prefer not to follow.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly. People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves. Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.
  - bashinator 7y ago
    Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.
boomboomsubban 7y ago
Baker stepped down as CEO in 2008, and over the period linked Baker rose back up to Executive Chair and now acting CEO. Kind of makes sense that she made more money.
jacquesm 7y ago
And one who was more than once found to be somewhat wanting in the ethics department.
grandridge 7y ago
Such a stupid comment. No one is owed a job and employment is voluntary. Just because you don't like something and are jealous doesn't make it unethical. You fail to grasp that 10, 20, 100 years ago those jobs didn't even exist, but they are somehow sacred? This community really needs to grow up
guessmyname 7y ago
Do as I say, not as I do.
natalyarostova 7y ago
This is only clearly unethical if you have a 4th grade understanding of how businesses need to structure themselves and allocate finite resources.
imgabe 7y ago
Pay is determined by market forces, not ethics.
thiagomgd 7y ago
Agree. It's easy to talk, but hard to do. Also: in the end, people need money and at least some stability. Even if you consider working at Mozilla to be ethical, if you consider what they just did, it's not necessarily a safe choice...
geoelectric 7y ago
Mozilla has their issues, but please don't undermine the good they are managing to squeeze out between the head-scratchers. Whatever else I might say about Mozilla as an organization, the people who are part of it have their hearts in the right place. The ethical messaging is sincere. I actually passed on an offer from Palantir when I went to work for Mozilla in 2010 (I left in 2015) and I never once doubted I made the right choice. With those two options I'd absolutely do it again, Mozilla management issues notwithstanding.
3xblah 7y ago
"Tech companies, despite their public stances to the contrary, are far from apolitical actors. Google, for example, sought to forbid political discussion^14 at work until the National Labor Relations Board forced them to allow such discussions.^15 Earlier this year, Wayfair staff walked out in protest of the company's contract to sell furniture to immigrant detention centers and, in response, its CEO, said he'd like staff that join the company to be non-political.^16" Above is a quote from the guide released by Mozilla. Some readers might be confused by the Mozilla organization when trying to reconcile its public statements with its own corporate behaviour. Given the concerns some folks apparently have about Google, e.g., privacy, AI, harassment, etc., according to the Mozilla guide, consider this hypothetical. What if a company's staff were concerned about their employer having a major contract with Google. What should they do? Should they walk out? What if their salaries are paid indirectly by Google, i.e., almost all of their employer's revenue comes from the Google contract? Mozilla Corporation derives almost all of its revenue from a contract with Google. Executive salaries are funded from Google payments, with lesser payments from Baidu and Yandex for the Chinese and Russian markets, respectively. According to one report, without the deals it makes with search engines, Mozilla could not survive for very long. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pays-to-put-search-engine-back-on-firefox-browser-in-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pa... https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-firefox-survive/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-firefox-survive/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea... Mozilla Foundation purports to be fighting for user choice and privacy. At the same time Mozilla is automatically sending web search queries to Google, by default, without requesting user consent, in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Google, for example, sought to forbid political discussion at work until the National Labor Relations Board forced them to allow such discussions. Why is this the NLRB's business? As I recall, the controversy at Google was because some guy published a manifesto on the company's internal communications systems, and this caused a lot of arguments on those internal chat boards. I don't really see why Google doesn't have a right to police their internal employee communication systems and keep them from devolving into political arguments. Their systems, their rules. This wasn't about a few employees having a conversation at the water cooler; this was about internally-used social media systems that everyone in the company could see. What employees say in small-group or private conversation is one thing, but I don't see how Google is obligated to give employees a platform to spout their political views in front of the entire company. Most other companies don't do any such thing.
yingw787 7y ago
As a SWE based out of D.C., I would be grateful if executive compensation is the biggest ethical issue for a company I worked for.
_bxg1 7y ago
Everything is relative. What you describe doesn't come anywhere close to some of the stuff Amazon does, or Palantir's main line of business.

saas_sam 7y ago

Honest question: If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? Or do we think they should work for less than market rates? If so, wouldn't Mozilla be at risk of having their executives poached by higher paying companies, which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs? If someone's gonna downvote me I'd appreciate some color on your choice too, thanks. ;-)

gpm 7y ago
This assumes that executives being poached would lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs. If executive pay was rationally based, that might be true. But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. More likely it would result in someone being promoted to executive and business continuing as usual. The poaching companies are going to run out of places to put executives long before Mozilla runs out of competent employees who could run the company. In the meantime Mozilla gains a great reputation as a place to work if you want to get poached to a million dollar salary job, so it gains access to lots more competent engineers. Or at least I think that's the sane argument for why Mozilla executives (and most companies executives) should be payed less. I'm not totally convinced that all the premises are true.
- saas_sam 7y ago
  Hmm perhaps. If my experience is any indication, companies tend to pay everyone as little as they can get away with, execs or no. Execs leave for more money all the time, just as the rest of us do. Their pay is set by their board of directors who tend to have big plans for the equity they're sitting on (not to mention their reputation should stories start circulating that they're in cahoots w/ exec teams to pump their pay!).
  - sciurus 7y ago
    FWIW, the Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Employees don't have any equity. Salary and bonus are thus the bulk of your compensation at Mozilla no matter what level you're at.
    - saas_sam 7y ago
      I didn't know that! Thank you.
      - sciurus 7y ago
        No worries! It's something that makes Mozilla different from many other high-profile tech companies, where as you advance most of your comp increase comes from stock grants.
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      Are there any notable examples of worker cooperatives in the open source space? It would seem to be an interesting model, at least as an alternative to a non-profit foundation model of organization.
      - fabrice_d 7y ago
        There is Igalia (https://www.igalia.com/ https://www.igalia.com/)
        deleted 7y ago
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. Why does it appear to you that way? Research suggests that CEOs are overwhelmingly important and have significant impact on the valuation of a company on a scale significantly larger compared their compensation.[1] "For example, open-minded and curious CEOs create an entrepreneurial culture, driven and intense CEOs create a culture of results and achievement, and altruistic CEOs create a culture of empathy and cooperation. Second, as a 20-year review from 1993 to 2012 showed, CEOs’ judgment affects key strategic and managerial processes, such as staffing, financing, and marketing decisions. Third, CEOs’ reputations — their public personas — affect company valuations and stock prices. It has been estimated that 22% of the variability in firm performance can be attributed directly to the CEO. In fact, even when researchers use transcripts of interviews and meeting conversations to infer a CEO’s psychological profile, their ability, strategic thinking skills, and communication skills predict a substantial amount of variability in company performance." I'd suggest you evaluate whether you base your opinion around CEO pay on data evaluating CEO performance or whether it's just an emotional response because 70 workers being laid off just elicits more sympathy than a CEO receiving higher compensation. [1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/are-ceos-overhyped-and-overpaid https://hbr.org/2016/11/are-ceos-overhyped-and-overpaid
  - gpm 7y ago
    There are several things you need to be true to make that statement false. - CEOs having a large impact - we agree here - It is hard to replace the current CEO with a new one who will be, on average, equal (or better) than the existing one. It's the second statement which I question. In a few rare cases (e.g. Elon Musk) there is good evidence to support it, but in the case of Mozilla I don't see it. The research you cite goes both ways. If we can predict who will be a good CEO through an interview CEOs are easier to replace.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      you not only need to identify them but you also need to pay them market rates or something close if you want to retain them. Mozilla is a company with 500 million in revenue. If they pay their CEO 2 million bucks and that CEO has even a moderately positive impact, then that's a completely rational decision.
gibbonsrcool 7y ago
If there was a maximum wage law then there would be no danger of poaching.
- saas_sam 7y ago
  Hehe, maybe! Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business.
  - wolco 7y ago
    If places like China allow higher pay we may see some people leave. Lucky we have more people than CEO jobs and we will fill them. I would be more concerned if people who picked fruit were being poached with higher pay. We have no one willing to do those jobs.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    If the maximum wage affected few enough people, then the effect on where people live their lives would be small. Set it at the 99.9th percentile or 99.99th percentile income or something to that effect. (per-household, those seem to be $1.5M and $7m per year). One in ten thousand people leaving the country might have a tiny effect, especially since the top paid one in ten thousand doesn't have as much correlation as you'd hope with the top most group social good providing one in ten thousand.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >Or perhaps people would avoid working at places with such laws, as they tend to do currently with other economies that have strict laws that make it hard to do business. I have no problem with that. Let them leave. Suppose we set a maximum compensation cap of $10M/year in the US. So executives can no longer earn more than $10M/year in total compensation (salary, bonus, golden parachute, etc.). So a bunch of overpaid execs leave the US. Where exactly are they going to go where they'll 1) be paid more than $10M/year, and 2) actually be able to do these super-high-paying executive jobs effectively (i.e., they need to know the local language, etc.)?
- 7y ago
metajack 7y ago
I think people are more bothered by the fact that compesation drastically increased during a period of poor performance with respect to market share. Also, please provide some evidence that the board chair of a non-profit with an annual budget of $20M has a market rate salary of $2M/yr. Note that Mozilla Foundation also has an executive director (more like $250k/yr) and the Mozilla Corporation had a separate CEO and executive team (whose salaries aren't reported in the Mozilla Foundation form 990).
- saas_sam 7y ago
  Usually the highest paid executives (w/ cash) are the ones at low performing companies because executives don't want to work at low performing companies. From the outside it looks like they're being rewarded for the company performing poorly, but from the inside it's more like "this is what we have to do to keep everyone from jumping ship to Salesforce/Twilio/Tesla/sexier company." But hey, someone with more knowledge of Mozilla than you or I should really be the ones defending this. Maybe some are reading this thread and don't mind chiming in?
  - refurb 7y ago
    This is very true. If you're a company in desperate need of a turn around, you're not going to have a lot of luck in finding a great CEO unless you offer a competitive compensation package and a guaranteed payout. That's why you see failing companies' CEOs walk away with big packages. They won't get a good CEO unless they offer comp comparable to other companies they could work for.
- wolco 7y ago
  10% of their budget? I would reconsider donating, they don't need the money.
  - adev_ 7y ago
    And in my case I would consider double my donation this year. Because we need them and alternative browsers more than ever, because current Tech landscape dramatically need more ethics and less golden boys.
peeters 7y ago
I'm not sure I accept the premise that we've established anything close to an efficient market for executives.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Executives (in general, not at Mozilla in particular) rig the market in their own favor. Everyone knows this. They're not fundamentally better or more competent 99% of the time, just members of a more exclusive club who can easily do deals outside the market.
hartator 7y ago
The thing is their executives are probably not worth their salaries. A lawyer that drove down Firefox market share, image, and the org is still highly depend on Google to survive. Despite all this marketing BS.
ergothus 7y ago
> If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? This feels like a misleading question to ask. There are plenty of disputes about "market rates" for both groups, so the premise isn't one I'd agree to. Market rates are decided by these decisions, not the other way around. If Mozilla was able to get adequate leadership at the rates that didnt grow faster than rank-and-file wages, that would have been a more ethical decision overall. If more companies did the same, market rates would reflect that. Unless you think there was no such leadership available at that rate, in which case we simply disagree.
xhkkffbf 7y ago
Look up the salaries given to Mozilla executives. (Really, just the top.) It's scandalous to hear someone preaching about people giving up paying salaries.
HappyDreamer 7y ago
When there's this `donate.mozilla.org` website, then, no I don't think the execs should have market rates. Either remove the donation website, or find execs who are driven not by money and market rates, but by changing and improving society. I think the latter types of execs, would work better, for making FF popular and increasing revenue. The idea that only execs that need lots of money (market rate) or they'd jump to another company, can do a good job, seems weird to me. I've understood that in theory the Donate-to-Mozilla thing doesn't donate to the execs — but in practice, I'd say yes it does (to some extent at least). > which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs? I think (guess) the opposite. That they could all have kept their job and Mozilla could have hired more.

bt4u 7y ago

That's just business, it's not unethical

devwastaken 7y ago

Restructuring is necessary in any business large or small. Without that you would be working on products that will never be released. A 'digging holes to fill them again' problem. We can certainly disagree on what should and shouldn't be restructured itself.

dentemple 7y ago

Thanks for posting this, I was really re-considering joining Google's new Ads-For-Children-And-Fighting-Against-Democracy Engineering Team here in NYC, but knowing that Mozilla is a typical corporation with typical corporation practices, I now know that my own hands will be clean regardless of how many killbot scripts that I write.

qeqeqeqe 7y ago
Based on your the silly name you used to describe the NYC team, I doubt you are serious. Anyway, you first need to pass the interview before you can really consider joining.

stanferder 7y ago

It's kind of admirable that Mozilla would promote an idea that can so obviously be used to judge them poorly with respect to recent news. That last bit of news about them isn't necessarily the only thing they should be judged on though.

codingmess 7y ago
It's just PR and populism, aimed at gullible students.

craftyguy 7y ago

This is a red herring. The bigger issue is Mozilla preaching ethics in 'tech' while continuing to draw substantial profits from one of the most unethical 'tech' companies (Google)

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
And Mozilla has also been trying for years to make its revenue less dependent on Google.

citilife 7y ago

If I recall correctly, that twitter post is not entirely accurate. The CEO was exercising their stock options. Also, arguably it's not mutually exclusive to suggest people to consider where to work, at the same time executives make larger income. On the outside, clearly the board of directors thought the increased income was worth it. As we have limited insight, I don't think we should assume an unethical intent. Finally, I don't know which 70 jobs were cut, but presumably it was that their skills were determined to no longer necessary to the business. Tough luck, but to the remaining employees, it's ethical to lay them off.

metajack 7y ago
> If I recall correctly, that twitter post is not entirely accurate. The CEO was exercising their stock options. Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, and Mozilla Corp is private held wholly by Mozilla Foundation. No one is getting compensated in forms of equity. All compensation plans are salary and cash bonuses. The data from the tweet matches the numbers from public IRS filings of Mozilla Foundation. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ for the most recent report.

jordigh 7y ago

I really hate this kind of response. Just because Mozilla isn't a saint doesn't mean that their words don't ring true. Mr Gotcha is a boring person. Don't be Mr Gotcha. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha-vs-the-green-new-deal/ https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.png?1569958066 https://images.dailykos.com/images/723537/story_image/1406.p... Just because we're all living in the status quo doesn't mean we can't change because we're all hypocrites for living with the status quo. Aspire to something better. Even if you're currently benefitting from or struggling against the status quo. We should be taking ethical jobs and who cares if it's Mozilla who said it. They're right about this, even if they're wrong about other things.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I can't speak for the original commenter, but my concern is that Mozilla might be pushing for a vision of ethics in tech which excludes some ethics they'd prefer not to follow.
jacquesm 7y ago
That's all fine and true but it is a fact that you're better off taking your advice about ethics from a party that is ethical and Mozilla's record is less than spotless, to put it mildly. People far better placed than Mozilla the company have been saying this for years so they are late to that particular party anyway and plenty of the damage done they did themselves. Personally, my take is the opposite: if you are an ethical person find the very worst company that you are still willing to work for and try to change them from the inside. After all if only non-ethical people want to work at certain companies that will make things worse, not better.
- bashinator 7y ago
  Don't let the desire for perfection prevent improvement. And while I take your last point, trying to make e.g. an advertising company with tens of thousands of employees more ethical is going to be less productive than going somewhere that's trying to do some societal good in the first place.

boomboomsubban 7y ago

Baker stepped down as CEO in 2008, and over the period linked Baker rose back up to Executive Chair and now acting CEO. Kind of makes sense that she made more money.

jacquesm 7y ago

And one who was more than once found to be somewhat wanting in the ethics department.

grandridge 7y ago

Such a stupid comment. No one is owed a job and employment is voluntary. Just because you don't like something and are jealous doesn't make it unethical. You fail to grasp that 10, 20, 100 years ago those jobs didn't even exist, but they are somehow sacred? This community really needs to grow up

guessmyname 7y ago

Do as I say, not as I do.

natalyarostova 7y ago

This is only clearly unethical if you have a 4th grade understanding of how businesses need to structure themselves and allocate finite resources.

imgabe 7y ago

Pay is determined by market forces, not ethics.

thiagomgd 7y ago

Agree. It's easy to talk, but hard to do. Also: in the end, people need money and at least some stability. Even if you consider working at Mozilla to be ethical, if you consider what they just did, it's not necessarily a safe choice...

geoelectric 7y ago

Mozilla has their issues, but please don't undermine the good they are managing to squeeze out between the head-scratchers. Whatever else I might say about Mozilla as an organization, the people who are part of it have their hearts in the right place. The ethical messaging is sincere. I actually passed on an offer from Palantir when I went to work for Mozilla in 2010 (I left in 2015) and I never once doubted I made the right choice. With those two options I'd absolutely do it again, Mozilla management issues notwithstanding.

3xblah 7y ago

"Tech companies, despite their public stances to the contrary, are far from apolitical actors. Google, for example, sought to forbid political discussion^14 at work until the National Labor Relations Board forced them to allow such discussions.^15 Earlier this year, Wayfair staff walked out in protest of the company's contract to sell furniture to immigrant detention centers and, in response, its CEO, said he'd like staff that join the company to be non-political.^16" Above is a quote from the guide released by Mozilla. Some readers might be confused by the Mozilla organization when trying to reconcile its public statements with its own corporate behaviour. Given the concerns some folks apparently have about Google, e.g., privacy, AI, harassment, etc., according to the Mozilla guide, consider this hypothetical. What if a company's staff were concerned about their employer having a major contract with Google. What should they do? Should they walk out? What if their salaries are paid indirectly by Google, i.e., almost all of their employer's revenue comes from the Google contract? Mozilla Corporation derives almost all of its revenue from a contract with Google. Executive salaries are funded from Google payments, with lesser payments from Baidu and Yandex for the Chinese and Russian markets, respectively. According to one report, without the deals it makes with search engines, Mozilla could not survive for very long. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pays-to-put-search-engine-back-on-firefox-browser-in-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-14/google-pa... https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-firefox-survive/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-firefox-survive/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-deal-with-yahoo-and-makes-google-the-default-in-firefox-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea... Mozilla Foundation purports to be fighting for user choice and privacy. At the same time Mozilla is automatically sending web search queries to Google, by default, without requesting user consent, in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.

magduf 7y ago
>Google, for example, sought to forbid political discussion at work until the National Labor Relations Board forced them to allow such discussions. Why is this the NLRB's business? As I recall, the controversy at Google was because some guy published a manifesto on the company's internal communications systems, and this caused a lot of arguments on those internal chat boards. I don't really see why Google doesn't have a right to police their internal employee communication systems and keep them from devolving into political arguments. Their systems, their rules. This wasn't about a few employees having a conversation at the water cooler; this was about internally-used social media systems that everyone in the company could see. What employees say in small-group or private conversation is one thing, but I don't see how Google is obligated to give employees a platform to spout their political views in front of the entire company. Most other companies don't do any such thing.

yingw787 7y ago

As a SWE based out of D.C., I would be grateful if executive compensation is the biggest ethical issue for a company I worked for.

_bxg1 7y ago

Everything is relative. What you describe doesn't come anywhere close to some of the stuff Amazon does, or Palantir's main line of business.