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There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd

by Jonnax 6y ago

There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themselves mansions etc. Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship?

m0zg 6y ago
Does there exist a "market" for CEOs of failing browser companies? I'm not aware of it. Her position would roughly map to that of a junior VP in Google or Microsoft nomenclature. I strongly doubt those people make anywhere near $2.4M/yr.
- manigandham 6y ago
  How did you come up with that comparison? Running a standalone company from the top is very different than the responsibilities of a junior VP in a trillion-dollar organization.
  - stepbeek 6y ago
    Especially in terms of potential liability.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      What "liability"? She's running it into the ground so far.
  - throwaway_7869 6y ago
    And, not to mention, a VP of engineering at Google probably does make something like that amount of money (possibly more). Directors make ~800k-1m, and VP is two levels higher.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      How long do they get to "make money" if they nuke their product's market share by 85%?
enriquto 6y ago
> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. This kind of bullshit infuriates me to no end.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Especially since the leadership is just plain bad. Mozilla did develop in the complete wrong direction in my opinion.
- mihaaly 6y ago
  I can cite much much more people there if they want to discuss fairness, they better forget and act this line of argument never existed! I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level. There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
- martin_a 6y ago
  How can you even spend around 2.5 million A YEAR (okay, before taxes, whatever) if you're not BURNING the cash? I don't get it.
  - scoutt 6y ago
    Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.
    - martin_a 6y ago
      Breaking it down on daily expenses really helps me understand how bad their situation is. Thanks for that! (I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).
      - saiya-jin 6y ago
kwanbix 6y ago
The problem is not that they get most of their revenue from Google. The problem is that they have 5% share of the web now.
- twblalock 6y ago
  The Google money is what enabled them to let their core product wither and nearly die without any short-term consequences. They spent a pretty long time with it in that state while pursuing things like a phone OS. Without the Google money they would have had more incentive to keep Firefox competitive.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Funnily enough, the web OS turned out to be a success — only after it was sold and rebranded.
  - kwanbix 6y ago
    That does not mean that they problem is the google money. The problem is that they had (have) lots of money that they did not spend smartly.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  5% of a few billion users is not nothing. Mostly the decline of Mozilla has little to do with the browser functionality or marketing but with the fact that there are several competing browsers out there that have caught up. E.g. MS ditched IE in favor of Edge. Apple has continued investing in Safari which they also force the usage of exclusively on IOS. And of course Google has similar control point in the form of Chrome. I am a happy Firefox user BTW. But I can see lack of incentive for other people to switch. Any of those browsers gets the job done for any user. IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project. Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions. Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan. That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed. The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that. And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.
bobmaxup 6y ago
Are they the ones sinking the ship though?
- Raed667 6y ago
  I doesn't matter, literally the the buck stops with them.
  - baud147258 6y ago
    The bucks aren't trickling down from the execs to the workers
Aeolun 6y ago
The solution to being underpaid is to find a new job. Not to suck the organization dry...
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Sucking the organization dry is a perfectly valid solution for those who have the power to do so. It's bad for the organization, but the leadership doesn't really care about that.
  - jononor 6y ago
    If leadership does not care about the well being of the organization, that is a fireable offense. I mean, it's the entire purpose of the role.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    How are you using the word "valid" there?
testerhn 6y ago
being unfair to other’s family members didn’t stop the layoffs.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  OTOH, the people laid off are notoriously competent and will easily find new well paying jobs. The CEO's yacht won't pay itself.
  - demarq 6y ago
    sad but true
twblalock 6y ago
The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less. The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit. So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Nothing will kill morale as much as executive pay going up while your colleagues are being given their pink slips. That is an executive decision making problem but it directly impacts morale.
- rwmj 6y ago
  > The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla? > Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper. It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    It’s that many executives do? Leave on a golden parachute to go destroy another company?
  - jdashg 6y ago
    Fortunately, Mozilla has been doing #1 for years, as they mention in their public financial statements. #2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution. Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.
jameslk 6y ago
While I understand the frustration, it's unclear to me what the expected solution is for Mozilla. Pay the CEO less until the company does better? Ok but the CEO will presumably just find a higher paying job elsewhere. Then what? Find a cheaper CEO? How does that help fix the slipping market share for Firefox?
- adamt 6y ago
  Better align executive pay with business performance from the beginning. If the business is failing then parting company with the CEO is working as intended.
- ponker 6y ago
  What’s so great about this CEO? Would a cheaper CEO do worse?
  - therealx 6y ago
    I agree, I dont think this CEO is special. His argument is flawed on that premise alone. I think they should pull an MS and promote the CIO or a lead engineer.
    - krick 6y ago
      They fired everyone who would've been worth promoting already.
- byset 6y ago
  With her doubtful record of success, it is questionable that the CEO really could find a higher paying job elsewhere. And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to. I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
- gwd 6y ago
  > Find a cheaper CEO? Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.
zgiber 6y ago
I agree to me it seems like they're admitting that the ship is sinking. The CEO is over 60yo, unlikely to take on another gig after this. The simplest explanation is often the correct one, she's lost her way and needs a nice cushion before retirement. Greed is s very human thing.
- indymike 6y ago
  Mozilla, the ship, does not need to sink. That is the heart of the problem. It appears the ship is being scuttled.
rvz 6y ago
> Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship? Yes. They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead. Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.
- sk2020 6y ago
  Firefox isn't a direct competitor to Chrome. It's Google's hedge against an anti-trust lawsuit. When you see Mozilla as a Big Tech trust-fund baby struggling with cognitive dissonance, then their behavior makes sense.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    If you look at the history of Mozilla's revenue, this conspiracy is ridiculous. Why would Yahoo compete over the Firefox contract if they serve as a hedge against a lawsuit?
    - sk2020 6y ago
      Why would you (Google) not prefer for someone else (yahoo!) to pay for something that benefits you? That Yahoo! leadership didn't renew the contract should tell you how much being a default search engine is actually worth. Why would you (actual you) believe that Google would provide nearly all of a "competitor's" revenue? that somehow makes more sense? The pontificating about privacy Mozilla does is total nonsense. They serve their users up to Google's surveillance enterprise without hesitation. They're a puppet to fool gullible hipsters with fashionable social statements.
      - boomboomsubban 6y ago
        Yahoo was bought out during the term of the contact. And I don't know the details, but I believe Google pays Apple for the same thing, paying Mozilla isn't surprising.
ekianjo 6y ago
Did they look at the market of piss poor at their jobs execs before judging they were underpaid?
- alxlaz 6y ago
  Unfortunately, it's very likely that they did!
roenxi 6y ago
That chart shows a pretty beautiful 10 year trend. Yep, they are on a sinking ship. 'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness. What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.
- rvba 6y ago
  > Charities aren't innovation engines The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions. Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize). The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone. Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit. Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems? Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years. We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.
qdiencdxqd 6y ago
Without knowing the details, it's hard to say the execs are failures. They could be doing a good job, given the rough hand they've been dealt.
- luckylion 6y ago
  The rough hand of leading a company with a very successful product and having to find ways to run it into the ground?
- tingol 6y ago
  What is this nonsense over and over again on HN? Let's say I'm hired as a coach of a team that's second best in the world (Being the second used browser in the world is NOT a rough hand, other browsers are clawing for >1% for ever and are not coming close). I'm not saying it's easy at all but after 5 years I manage to do NOTHING to stop the bleeding, lose 250 highly skilled people and RAISE MY OWN SALARY 5x... I'm pretty sure people would throw rocks at me on the street at that point. The cult of the CEO needs to die.
jka 6y ago
The quote in context is available here: https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive. That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly. A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles? I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified? In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate. If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive. I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  > Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive. The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane. Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
  - jka 6y ago
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
> but their ideas haven't worked. What ideas though?
- fsflover 6y ago
  For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515063
  - DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
    That's not a new idea whatsoever. I'm not gonna use a browser because the team behind it built a cheap mega clone.
krick 6y ago
> it'd be unfair on their families WTF of an excuse that is?!
akerro 6y ago
> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. afair AMD CEO is paid 4x less than Mozilla CEO.
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  including stock compensation?
- lordgrenville 6y ago
  That is shocking if true, but doesn't seem to be? AMD's Lisa Su was the highest-paid CEO of a company in the S&P 500 last year. Su earned a total of $58.5 million in 2019 [0] Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018 [1] [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-paid-ceo/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-... [1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    From your first article: "In 2019, she earned $1 million in base salary and a $1.2 million performance-based bonus.". So not 4x, but 2x based on base salary.
    - lordgrenville 6y ago
      Good point. It is misleading to compare base pay rather than overall comp, though.
      - ric2b 6y ago
        overall comp is heavily biased towards stock performance. Given AMD's exceptional performance in recent years it's natural to expect her overall comp to also be quite good.
  - doc_gunthrop 6y ago
    Can you even compare Mitchell Baker to Lisa Su in terms of achievement? Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market. It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company. Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.
deleted 6y ago
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noobermin 6y ago
You should read your comment back to yourself. Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.
coldtea 6y ago
>There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem. Yes. The exec team and CEO. They should be ousted. "Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?
eloisant 6y ago
> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it. She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley. Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year. I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.
sambe 6y ago
The claim was not that they can't reduce but that an 80% discount was too much to ask of people (and thus also their families). I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. Perhaps the problem was putting people in these roles in the first place that would accept 20% of market rate. Raising their pay subsequently doesn't make them better at their job! The quote is not really crazy: "Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comment=7603 https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comme...
- TheOperator 6y ago
  Problem is that the CEO isn't worth the discount rate never mind being worth the raise.
- dingaling 6y ago
  > . I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. First, an 80% discount would still leave the CEO on a very comfortable salary. They're not going to have to dumpster-dive for dinner. Second, what about doing the job on principle? Plenty of people volunteer their time to good causes for no money whatsoever.
  - sieabahlpark 6y ago
    Not everyone wants to do volunteer work in the first place. They want to be compensated, perhaps so they could support a family instead of living with their parents. Can't do that if you're working for free or minimum wage
golergka 6y ago
Isn't the CEO pay here a classic example of principal-agent problem? In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?
- hayd 6y ago
  In an NGO they need to secure funding, too much bloat (including director-level pay) could make fundraising more difficult. ...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance. Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
- athms 6y ago
  The for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation) is wholly owned by the non-profit entity (Mozilla Foundation) and Mitchell Baker leads both organizations. That is a conflict of interest. She should resign from one entity, but there is a compelling argument that she is a failure at leading both organizations. FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.
jrochkind1 6y ago
If it's unfair on your families to be making only a million dollars a year instead of two and a half, what does that say about the ~99% of America who makes less than a million dollars a year?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Also it's just a weird point. Is the point of CEO pay to keep their family in the highest order of lavishness? How is their financial irresponsibility anyone else's concern when it comes to discussing the adequate salary of the position?
- edoceo 6y ago
  When low paid workers ask for a raise we tell them it's not about your need, it's about your contribution. But for execs it's about their need. Once again, it's down to rich vs poor. Rules for thee but not for me.
- zobzu 6y ago
  The families of the workers who made 200k however.. well they can f* right off and find a new job. Their family doesn't matter.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
I'm using Edge since it saves on battery life, maybe I should just stop with Firefox for a while till they get a new CEO and get their crap together. I never stopped using Firefox, I wasn't somebody who started using it again after Quantum, I just never liked Chrome much, but only ever used it for development purposes.
tjpnz 6y ago
>And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That's downright appalling.
eitland 6y ago
You'll find me criticizing them a lot but in their defense: I would probably not have been able to renegotiate that Google deal earlier this year given how Google basically does whatever they want in the browser space for now, so it seems they do something. That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except: - the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox. - initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run. Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation. (I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)
ascagnel_ 6y ago
> Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's. Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Google may want to do with Mozilla the same thing Microsoft did with Apple during their antitrust case: keep it alive to keep the regulators off their back.
mlvljr 6y ago
Elop ("Need more money after a painful divorce") style! Respectable.
srpinto 6y ago
I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm curious. Mozilla's CEO is a woman. Why are you referring to her as they? I know about the gender pronouns debacle... But isn't it OK to call her a woman?
- mjow 6y ago
  I think he's just bypassing the need to specify one way or another. It's a person holding the CEO office - the gender of the person is not relevant to the point being made or the discussion.
- fcantournet 6y ago
  because they are talking about exec and they're are more than one exec
johnnycerberus 6y ago
It is strange that corporations like Mozilla give me some communism flashbacks. In the communist times of Romania, the earnings were privatized (meaning that the party took all the profits and stored them abroad in fiscal paradises) while the losses were socialized and the party imposed austerity measures on the proletariat[1] because of their management failures. I draw a parallel between what happens with the raise of their executives salaries and the layoffs that affected the engineering department. Nassim Taleb wrote a good article about Corporate Socialism[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Romania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma... [2] https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-government-is-bailing-out-investors-managers-not-you-3b31a67bff4a https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
> they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. I also suspect Firefox engineers are underpaid relative to Google SWEs working on Chrome.
bryan0 6y ago
I was looking for the source of this quote and it's from an interview in June 2020: "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z
onlyfa1r00 6y ago
It would be immoral to to place figurative death on a living persons social status due to actual acts But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day Welcome to America’s emotional prison Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future And Americans sit here like coddled children Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country? No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality? There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.
deleted 6y ago
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burtonator 6y ago
Firefox is already dead... which I'm happy about because they're doing a horrible job. BUT... key point here, I totally agree with them regarding their compensation. Even non-profits have to be competitive. Imagine it's YOU... everyone you know is making 350-400k at Google and you're stuck making 180 or whatever at FF. Would you stay? And sure, say YOU would, what % of your colleagues do you think would stay?
sadfev 6y ago
Ooo boo hoo, oh poor multimillionaire execs how can they live on 500k per year!! Oh heaves their family! Exec Compensation should be linked to performance not to garbage like market value. Fuck Mozilla and its execs
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Should be tied to the other salaries in the company. For example capped at 10x the lowest paid employee.
  - sadfev 6y ago
    Meh. Have a floor of 3x average employee and let the pay be proportional to performance. There are natural limits to growth anyway. HN crowd is a sucker when it comes to Mozilla. These bleeding hearts don’t bleed for furloughed and fired Mozilla drones. They only care about their political agenda not business or technological value.
GuB-42 6y ago
The reason CEOs are paid well is because they have an important and risky job. And if they bring success by their actions, they totally deserve their millions. But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.
intherdfield 6y ago
This narrative ignores the fact that many of the executives have been replaced whether voluntarily or involuntarily.
- sciurus 6y ago
  This. Compare Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil... Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil... Specifically for criticism of the CEO, I wish people would keep in mind that Chris Beard was CEO from 2014 through 2019. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name... (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
Mozilla has been sinking for a long time and they have been scrambling to hold on.
zobzu 6y ago
reducing their 2.5M a year salary would definitely be unfair for their family. Think of the children!!
doc_gunthrop 6y ago
> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. > And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. To give context, Baker's annual salary is $2.5 million.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Source? The documents listing her pay come from before she was CEO, and most of the pay was from a bonus.
libeclipse 6y ago
> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That's fucking bullshit. They make millions.
dorfsmay 6y ago
I wish Mozilla created a fundation so people can give to Firefox specifically, as opposed to Mozilla, the same way they did with Thunderbird. I for sure won't be giving to Mozilla until they change to reasonable leadership with reasonable compensation.

by Jonnax 6y ago

m0zg 6y ago

Does there exist a "market" for CEOs of failing browser companies? I'm not aware of it. Her position would roughly map to that of a junior VP in Google or Microsoft nomenclature. I strongly doubt those people make anywhere near $2.4M/yr.

manigandham 6y ago
How did you come up with that comparison? Running a standalone company from the top is very different than the responsibilities of a junior VP in a trillion-dollar organization.
- stepbeek 6y ago
  Especially in terms of potential liability.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    What "liability"? She's running it into the ground so far.
- throwaway_7869 6y ago
  And, not to mention, a VP of engineering at Google probably does make something like that amount of money (possibly more). Directors make ~800k-1m, and VP is two levels higher.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    How long do they get to "make money" if they nuke their product's market share by 85%?

enriquto 6y ago

> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. This kind of bullshit infuriates me to no end.

raxxorrax 6y ago
Especially since the leadership is just plain bad. Mozilla did develop in the complete wrong direction in my opinion.
mihaaly 6y ago
I can cite much much more people there if they want to discuss fairness, they better forget and act this line of argument never existed! I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level. There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).
martin_a 6y ago
How can you even spend around 2.5 million A YEAR (okay, before taxes, whatever) if you're not BURNING the cash? I don't get it.
- scoutt 6y ago
  Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Breaking it down on daily expenses really helps me understand how bad their situation is. Thanks for that! (I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).
    - saiya-jin 6y ago

kwanbix 6y ago

The problem is not that they get most of their revenue from Google. The problem is that they have 5% share of the web now.

twblalock 6y ago
The Google money is what enabled them to let their core product wither and nearly die without any short-term consequences. They spent a pretty long time with it in that state while pursuing things like a phone OS. Without the Google money they would have had more incentive to keep Firefox competitive.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Funnily enough, the web OS turned out to be a success — only after it was sold and rebranded.
- kwanbix 6y ago
  That does not mean that they problem is the google money. The problem is that they had (have) lots of money that they did not spend smartly.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
5% of a few billion users is not nothing. Mostly the decline of Mozilla has little to do with the browser functionality or marketing but with the fact that there are several competing browsers out there that have caught up. E.g. MS ditched IE in favor of Edge. Apple has continued investing in Safari which they also force the usage of exclusively on IOS. And of course Google has similar control point in the form of Chrome. I am a happy Firefox user BTW. But I can see lack of incentive for other people to switch. Any of those browsers gets the job done for any user. IMHO, 5% is actually fine. That's a robust user base of a few tens to hundreds of million users. Nothing to sneeze at and a good basis for long term existence of the project. Where Mozilla went the wrong direction is with their commercial activities. Their core problem is that their product is a commodity. It's just not going to bring in a lot of revenue. Apple and Google use their respective browser as a control point for the app store and ads. It's an expense worth making because they both exploit the large number of users using their browsers via other channels. Most of what Google does is motivated by this. Likewise, Apple is selling hardware, apps, and subscriptions. Mozilla does not have a similarly viable way of generating revenue from their user base. It's an OSS product that users install and use for free. Their core value is actually protecting users against that kind of thing which is a noble thing to do but not a business plan. That's why Mozilla was initially styled as a foundation. The commercial branch came later and its the commercial branch that is failing; not the foundation. They have no money maker of note other than their search traffic deals. Everything else, including (I'll just call this right now), their recent VPN offering is never going to come close to bankrolling their operation. This follows a long line of failed investments in a mobile strategy that never panned out, various "experiments' that never got off the ground, misc services that they launched and that people promptly forgot about, etc. None of it engaged more than a fraction of their user base. None of it wowed anyone. None of it was more than a me too effort of replicating things that already existed and already were commodities. Mozilla as an investment vehicle for new products only loosely connected to Firefox has failed. The way out is back to basics. Pull the plug on the Mozilla corporation as soon as convenient for investors and setup the foundation for success and untangle it from the VCs. It will need donations, the search engine revenue looks good as well and ought to be allocated 100% to keeping the browser going. There should be enough to keep an engineering team going. It doesn't need a marketing department, offices in London, Paris, San Francisco, Mountain View, etc. Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time. Much bigger things have been built with far less. That shit only ever made sense when Mozilla was styling itself as an incubation vehicle for turning VC money into products. Now that that has definitely failed, time to walk away from that. And then there's the Rust part of the company. IMHO that's a valid asset where Mozilla has a lot of influence in a rapidly growing community. There's an opportunity there to grow some healthy business around that supporting the many companies looking to leverage that. So far, they run it like a charity. That's a mistake. Aside from Firefox, that's actually the single most valuable IP they ever created. And like Firefox, it lacks a plan for revenue. Rust almost happened by accident. But MS and Apple are now looking to use it and it seems people are doing Rust things in the Linux kernel as well.

bobmaxup 6y ago

Are they the ones sinking the ship though?

Raed667 6y ago
I doesn't matter, literally the the buck stops with them.
- baud147258 6y ago
  The bucks aren't trickling down from the execs to the workers

Aeolun 6y ago

The solution to being underpaid is to find a new job. Not to suck the organization dry...

rbanffy 6y ago
Sucking the organization dry is a perfectly valid solution for those who have the power to do so. It's bad for the organization, but the leadership doesn't really care about that.
- jononor 6y ago
  If leadership does not care about the well being of the organization, that is a fireable offense. I mean, it's the entire purpose of the role.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  How are you using the word "valid" there?

testerhn 6y ago

being unfair to other’s family members didn’t stop the layoffs.

rbanffy 6y ago
OTOH, the people laid off are notoriously competent and will easily find new well paying jobs. The CEO's yacht won't pay itself.
- demarq 6y ago
  sad but true

twblalock 6y ago

The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. If they left, it would probably be pretty hard to replace them with anyone capable of saving Firefox who would settle for less. The same is true for most of the engineers at Mozilla. They could go to FAANGs and increase their compensation quite a bit. So while I agree that the leadership has been bad, executive pay was not the problem. Executive decision-making was the problem. Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper.

jacquesm 6y ago
Nothing will kill morale as much as executive pay going up while your colleagues are being given their pink slips. That is an executive decision making problem but it directly impacts morale.
rwmj 6y ago
> The Mozilla execs could all make more money at FAANG companies just down the road from Mozilla HQ. I mean, really? After their record of poor performance at Mozilla? > Hiring leaders who could make better decisions certainly won't be any cheaper. It's been blindly obvious for years what they should do, but let's state it again: (1) Build up a fund instead of throwing away the money, so they can be financially independent. (2) Concentrate on the browser and users.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It’s that many executives do? Leave on a golden parachute to go destroy another company?
- jdashg 6y ago
  Fortunately, Mozilla has been doing #1 for years, as they mention in their public financial statements. #2 is a matter of opinion in a couple ways. Work on the browser for the betterment of users has never stopped. Intent has always been there, but we can debate quality of plan and execution. Worth mentioning is how hard it is to rate performance given lack of counterfactuals. Is there even any golden path of success in all of the solution space? All we know is that what was tried hasn't worked.

jameslk 6y ago

While I understand the frustration, it's unclear to me what the expected solution is for Mozilla. Pay the CEO less until the company does better? Ok but the CEO will presumably just find a higher paying job elsewhere. Then what? Find a cheaper CEO? How does that help fix the slipping market share for Firefox?

adamt 6y ago
Better align executive pay with business performance from the beginning. If the business is failing then parting company with the CEO is working as intended.
ponker 6y ago
What’s so great about this CEO? Would a cheaper CEO do worse?
- therealx 6y ago
  I agree, I dont think this CEO is special. His argument is flawed on that premise alone. I think they should pull an MS and promote the CIO or a lead engineer.
  - krick 6y ago
    They fired everyone who would've been worth promoting already.
byset 6y ago
With her doubtful record of success, it is questionable that the CEO really could find a higher paying job elsewhere. And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to. I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.
gwd 6y ago
> Find a cheaper CEO? Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.

zgiber 6y ago

I agree to me it seems like they're admitting that the ship is sinking. The CEO is over 60yo, unlikely to take on another gig after this. The simplest explanation is often the correct one, she's lost her way and needs a nice cushion before retirement. Greed is s very human thing.

indymike 6y ago
Mozilla, the ship, does not need to sink. That is the heart of the problem. It appears the ship is being scuttled.

rvz 6y ago

> Isn't that pretty much admitting that they're on a sinking ship? Yes. They are admitting they are solely reliant on Google's money. Given that Google Chrome is a direct competitor to Firefox and has gained more market share, Google can justify to either reduce spend or stop paying for being the default search engine in Firefox due to its shrinking market share and instead pay more for Apple Safari as the default in iOS, macOS, etc instead. Mozilla and Firefox will be another geek's relic in this decade if it doesn't find another revenue source apart from relying on Google - A direct competitor in all areas.

sk2020 6y ago
Firefox isn't a direct competitor to Chrome. It's Google's hedge against an anti-trust lawsuit. When you see Mozilla as a Big Tech trust-fund baby struggling with cognitive dissonance, then their behavior makes sense.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  If you look at the history of Mozilla's revenue, this conspiracy is ridiculous. Why would Yahoo compete over the Firefox contract if they serve as a hedge against a lawsuit?
  - sk2020 6y ago
    Why would you (Google) not prefer for someone else (yahoo!) to pay for something that benefits you? That Yahoo! leadership didn't renew the contract should tell you how much being a default search engine is actually worth. Why would you (actual you) believe that Google would provide nearly all of a "competitor's" revenue? that somehow makes more sense? The pontificating about privacy Mozilla does is total nonsense. They serve their users up to Google's surveillance enterprise without hesitation. They're a puppet to fool gullible hipsters with fashionable social statements.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Yahoo was bought out during the term of the contact. And I don't know the details, but I believe Google pays Apple for the same thing, paying Mozilla isn't surprising.

ekianjo 6y ago

Did they look at the market of piss poor at their jobs execs before judging they were underpaid?

alxlaz 6y ago
Unfortunately, it's very likely that they did!

roenxi 6y ago

That chart shows a pretty beautiful 10 year trend. Yep, they are on a sinking ship. 'Failures' on the other hand - that is a loaded word. They are failures, they have failed at making Firefox popular. But what needed to happen to build an alternative world where they succeeded? The browsers that succeeded were Chrome and Safari - browsers sponsored by the owners of the two major platforms for accessing the internet, backed by billions of dollars of corporatyness. What is Firefox meant to do? Charities aren't innovation engines. Back in the day when they were making progress on market share, the options were Firefox or IE6. The strategy of the Chrome web team is slightly different than the IE6 web team. I'm sour about Firefox wiping out their value proposition when they canned the good extensions - but that happened circa 2017 so it isn't the problem for adoption. They need something radical to be relevant and that isn't a fair ask of a nonprofit.

rvba 6y ago
> Charities aren't innovation engines The unique selling point of Firefox (and especially: mobile Firefox) was ability to heavily customize it and use third party extensions. Those extensions were the ones bringing in the innovation -> most ideas came from third parties (on a side note: usually for free, since extensions are hard to monetize). The system just worked and gave many popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus, Ad-Block, Noscript... through basic customization extensions like Classic Theme Restorer (have you ever setup new browser for a grandmother who does not need 50 options everywhere when you right click? can you even do this now in new Firefox? or the new extension model does not allow it) through countless small extensions that changed users' workflows how they wanted. This ecosystem is all gone. Developers inside of Firefox completely ignored it - they killed the old extension system because they didn't like it, while they did not provide anything that is even 25% as good. I understand that creating a new, better system is hard, but that is their job and core product. Firefox could have been providing the framework on which extensions would sit. Also, they earned 500 million dollars per year, for years; had over 1000 employees. They couldnt find people who could solve hard problems? Or maybe it is a failure of project management: developers ignored hard problems, they preferred to work on new, shiny green-field projects. Those new toys are great: they boost the CV, allow to play with new technologies, often are left in half baked state so you dont care about bugs. They also have no users, so nobody will complain, basically no accountability for a project that is never finished and killed after 1-2 years. We saw many of such side projects in Firefox - all shifting away resources from the core product that is neglected.

qdiencdxqd 6y ago

Without knowing the details, it's hard to say the execs are failures. They could be doing a good job, given the rough hand they've been dealt.

luckylion 6y ago
The rough hand of leading a company with a very successful product and having to find ways to run it into the ground?
tingol 6y ago
What is this nonsense over and over again on HN? Let's say I'm hired as a coach of a team that's second best in the world (Being the second used browser in the world is NOT a rough hand, other browsers are clawing for >1% for ever and are not coming close). I'm not saying it's easy at all but after 5 years I manage to do NOTHING to stop the bleeding, lose 250 highly skilled people and RAISE MY OWN SALARY 5x... I'm pretty sure people would throw rocks at me on the street at that point. The cult of the CEO needs to die.

jka 6y ago

The quote in context is available here: https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive. That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly. A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles? I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified? In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate. If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive. I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.

kybernetikos 6y ago
> Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive. The problem is that this is a very subjective claim. If you think of mozilla as belonging to the same category as tech giants or successful tech startups, and believe it needs to compete with them to attract talent then it's not unreasonable. If you think of firefox as a charity then it's completely insane. Compensation for charity CEOs, even tech focussed ones (like the EFF, TOR, wikimedia, khan academy) are lower, usually much lower. A number of charities have managed to attract impressive CEOs despite not paying 'market' rates.
- jka 6y ago

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

> but their ideas haven't worked. What ideas though?

fsflover 6y ago
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515063
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
  That's not a new idea whatsoever. I'm not gonna use a browser because the team behind it built a cheap mega clone.

krick 6y ago

> it'd be unfair on their families WTF of an excuse that is?!

akerro 6y ago

> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. afair AMD CEO is paid 4x less than Mozilla CEO.

cycrutchfield 6y ago
including stock compensation?
lordgrenville 6y ago
That is shocking if true, but doesn't seem to be? AMD's Lisa Su was the highest-paid CEO of a company in the S&P 500 last year. Su earned a total of $58.5 million in 2019 [0] Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018 [1] [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-paid-ceo/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-... [1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  From your first article: "In 2019, she earned $1 million in base salary and a $1.2 million performance-based bonus.". So not 4x, but 2x based on base salary.
  - lordgrenville 6y ago
    Good point. It is misleading to compare base pay rather than overall comp, though.
    - ric2b 6y ago
      overall comp is heavily biased towards stock performance. Given AMD's exceptional performance in recent years it's natural to expect her overall comp to also be quite good.
- doc_gunthrop 6y ago
  Can you even compare Mitchell Baker to Lisa Su in terms of achievement? Su revived a company on the verge of bankruptcy. Since she was appointed CEO, AMD's stock has soared and they've made themselves a viable competitor against Intel. This has been a massive boon to the market. It's worth noting that Su has a deep understanding of the underlying technology that the company works on (she's an electrical engineer), which was essential to her success at the company. Su is an example of merit-based compensation. Baker is not.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

noobermin 6y ago

You should read your comment back to yourself. Imagine saying, "well, I know he gunned 20 kids in a school down, but he had such a bad day, he's just couldn't take it." Sure it's probably true, but it's definitely not right.

coldtea 6y ago

>There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem. Yes. The exec team and CEO. They should be ousted. "Unfair to their families"? What BS, what about the families of the laid-off?

eloisant 6y ago

> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Yes I read that too, I couldn't believe it. She can decide to work for a non-profit, work for the good of the Internet and its users. Accept to earn 500k, which put her well in the top 5% earners and let her and her family live a comfortable life even in Silicon Valley. Or she can go work as an exec for Google/Apple/Facebook, accept that she's just working for a group of people against others, and be aware she'll be actively doing harm to people's privacy and freedom, but rake in a multi-million dollar salary every year. I'm sure there are plenty of skilled and talented people who would be happy to work as an exec for Mozilla for the meager salary of 500k.

sambe 6y ago

The claim was not that they can't reduce but that an 80% discount was too much to ask of people (and thus also their families). I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. Perhaps the problem was putting people in these roles in the first place that would accept 20% of market rate. Raising their pay subsequently doesn't make them better at their job! The quote is not really crazy: "Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comment=7603 https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z?comme...

TheOperator 6y ago
Problem is that the CEO isn't worth the discount rate never mind being worth the raise.
dingaling 6y ago
> . I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. First, an 80% discount would still leave the CEO on a very comfortable salary. They're not going to have to dumpster-dive for dinner. Second, what about doing the job on principle? Plenty of people volunteer their time to good causes for no money whatsoever.
- sieabahlpark 6y ago
  Not everyone wants to do volunteer work in the first place. They want to be compensated, perhaps so they could support a family instead of living with their parents. Can't do that if you're working for free or minimum wage

golergka 6y ago

Isn't the CEO pay here a classic example of principal-agent problem? In a commercial company, there would be activist investors pushing to cut manager's pay and change management. But I'm not familiar with this type of NGOs so well; who is supposed play the role of principal here? And are they not playing it properly?

hayd 6y ago
In an NGO they need to secure funding, too much bloat (including director-level pay) could make fundraising more difficult. ...I guess if you get your money from a disinterested Google rather than fundraising there really isn't anyone to push back against inefficiency/poor performance. Really the board should have been pushing back/course correcting, but sadly even in private companies boards are usually weak af (simply doing the ceos bidding).
athms 6y ago
The for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation) is wholly owned by the non-profit entity (Mozilla Foundation) and Mitchell Baker leads both organizations. That is a conflict of interest. She should resign from one entity, but there is a compelling argument that she is a failure at leading both organizations. FYI -- The foundation owns the IP, while the corporation manages software engineering and the Google search deal.

jrochkind1 6y ago

If it's unfair on your families to be making only a million dollars a year instead of two and a half, what does that say about the ~99% of America who makes less than a million dollars a year?

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Also it's just a weird point. Is the point of CEO pay to keep their family in the highest order of lavishness? How is their financial irresponsibility anyone else's concern when it comes to discussing the adequate salary of the position?
edoceo 6y ago
When low paid workers ask for a raise we tell them it's not about your need, it's about your contribution. But for execs it's about their need. Once again, it's down to rich vs poor. Rules for thee but not for me.
zobzu 6y ago
The families of the workers who made 200k however.. well they can f* right off and find a new job. Their family doesn't matter.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

I'm using Edge since it saves on battery life, maybe I should just stop with Firefox for a while till they get a new CEO and get their crap together. I never stopped using Firefox, I wasn't somebody who started using it again after Quantum, I just never liked Chrome much, but only ever used it for development purposes.

tjpnz 6y ago

>And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That's downright appalling.

eitland 6y ago

You'll find me criticizing them a lot but in their defense: I would probably not have been able to renegotiate that Google deal earlier this year given how Google basically does whatever they want in the browser space for now, so it seems they do something. That said: to me it comes off as a bit done deaf to raise salaries for top execs in a non profit while firing the people who does the work and also I cannot see how anything should be prioritized if the situation is critical except: - the main revenue driver and simultaneously their biggest contribution to fulfilling their mission, Firefox. - initiatives to add more reliable sources of income for the long run. Deprioritizing Firefox seems crazy in such a situation. (I know nothing about their actual plans but I could come up with is if they are cutting spending to save up money for an endowment fund, but I guess that is just wishful thinking.)

ascagnel_ 6y ago

> Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. It's not just that they get most of their revenue from Google -- it's that they're getting most of their revenue from a company that also runs their biggest competitor and has every incentive to push their own product over someone else's. Apple and Mozilla both have uncomfortable dependencies on Google nowadays, so I wonder if one of them (if not both) are looking to buy DuckDuckGo.

stingraycharles 6y ago
Google may want to do with Mozilla the same thing Microsoft did with Apple during their antitrust case: keep it alive to keep the regulators off their back.

mlvljr 6y ago

Elop ("Need more money after a painful divorce") style! Respectable.

srpinto 6y ago

I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm curious. Mozilla's CEO is a woman. Why are you referring to her as they? I know about the gender pronouns debacle... But isn't it OK to call her a woman?

mjow 6y ago
I think he's just bypassing the need to specify one way or another. It's a person holding the CEO office - the gender of the person is not relevant to the point being made or the discussion.
fcantournet 6y ago
because they are talking about exec and they're are more than one exec

johnnycerberus 6y ago

It is strange that corporations like Mozilla give me some communism flashbacks. In the communist times of Romania, the earnings were privatized (meaning that the party took all the profits and stored them abroad in fiscal paradises) while the losses were socialized and the party imposed austerity measures on the proletariat[1] because of their management failures. I draw a parallel between what happens with the raise of their executives salaries and the layoffs that affected the engineering department. Nassim Taleb wrote a good article about Corporate Socialism[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Romania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma... [2] https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-government-is-bailing-out-investors-managers-not-you-3b31a67bff4a https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

> they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. I also suspect Firefox engineers are underpaid relative to Google SWEs working on Chrome.

bryan0 6y ago

I was looking for the source of this quote and it's from an interview in June 2020: "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z

onlyfa1r00 6y ago

It would be immoral to to place figurative death on a living persons social status due to actual acts But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day Welcome to America’s emotional prison Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future And Americans sit here like coddled children Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country? No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality? There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

burtonator 6y ago

Firefox is already dead... which I'm happy about because they're doing a horrible job. BUT... key point here, I totally agree with them regarding their compensation. Even non-profits have to be competitive. Imagine it's YOU... everyone you know is making 350-400k at Google and you're stuck making 180 or whatever at FF. Would you stay? And sure, say YOU would, what % of your colleagues do you think would stay?

sadfev 6y ago

Ooo boo hoo, oh poor multimillionaire execs how can they live on 500k per year!! Oh heaves their family! Exec Compensation should be linked to performance not to garbage like market value. Fuck Mozilla and its execs

kzrdude 6y ago
Should be tied to the other salaries in the company. For example capped at 10x the lowest paid employee.
- sadfev 6y ago
  Meh. Have a floor of 3x average employee and let the pay be proportional to performance. There are natural limits to growth anyway. HN crowd is a sucker when it comes to Mozilla. These bleeding hearts don’t bleed for furloughed and fired Mozilla drones. They only care about their political agenda not business or technological value.

GuB-42 6y ago

The reason CEOs are paid well is because they have an important and risky job. And if they bring success by their actions, they totally deserve their millions. But if the company/organization is doing poorly, the CEO doesn't deserve the high pay. And having the pay reduced, or even not being paid at all for a time if it can help the company is one of the risks CEO should be able to take. It is not unfair for their families if they planned for it in advance instead of taking their high pay for granted. You can save a lot when you are being paid millions.

intherdfield 6y ago

This narrative ignores the fact that many of the executives have been replaced whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

sciurus 6y ago
This. Compare Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil... Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil... Specifically for criticism of the CEO, I wish people would keep in mind that Chris Beard was CEO from 2014 through 2019. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/29/thank-you-chris/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-name... (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)

t0mmyb0y 6y ago

Mozilla has been sinking for a long time and they have been scrambling to hold on.

zobzu 6y ago

reducing their 2.5M a year salary would definitely be unfair for their family. Think of the children!!

doc_gunthrop 6y ago

> There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. > And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. To give context, Baker's annual salary is $2.5 million.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
Source? The documents listing her pay come from before she was CEO, and most of the pay was from a bonus.

libeclipse 6y ago

> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That's fucking bullshit. They make millions.

dorfsmay 6y ago

I wish Mozilla created a fundation so people can give to Firefox specifically, as opposed to Mozilla, the same way they did with Thunderbird. I for sure won't be giving to Mozilla until they change to reasonable leadership with reasonable compensation.