8 ms·

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway. The big question is: Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway. The big question is: Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

geodel 5y ago
What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?
- 0xJRS 5y ago
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Maybe somewhere between the two extremes?
- cnasc 5y ago
  Does Mozilla pay their software developers an industry-standard TC?
  - pc86 5y ago
    It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes. The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general. I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
    - cnasc 5y ago
      I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare the take-home-pay of a Google engineer working on Chrome to that of a Mozilla engineer working on Firefox. That’s a good peer comparison to make. It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.
    - sendilkumarn 5y ago
      That definitely feels a bit low. Is this considering only US or worldwide?
      - flyingfences 5y ago
        Outside of SV/NYC, that's not low at all.
      - pc86 5y ago
        It's the US median salary. If you're outside of SV and NYC, as a new grad you're looking at $60-70k, with no bonus and no stock (because outside of tech 99% of companies don't give their employees stock until they're at the director/VP level).
    - justapassenger 5y ago
      > FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%. Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome. Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.
    - sciurus 5y ago
      > It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes. I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's much too low. The figures at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla. You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.
    - comp_throw7 5y ago
      > FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%. FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).
- ralmidani 5y ago
  Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?
- gruturo 5y ago
  OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down. So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
  - paxys 5y ago
    The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay market rates then you aren't going to get competent leadership to manage organizations at that scale.
    - silisili 5y ago
      Currently seems paying market rates and not getting competent leadership, so something seems amiss.
      - geodel 5y ago
        Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not guarantee projects' success at all.
    - lesuorac 5y ago
      Ah yes, FireFox's issue is they're paying Execs below market rate. If they want to get better market share they should start paying more! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Older_reports_(2000%E2%80%932019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol... --- Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  No they need to pocket 8 million dollars and fire developers, absolutely
danShumway 5y ago
Hopefully it goes to MDN. I do wish there was a way to fund Firefox directly, but I hope that MDN plus resources are for MDN, not Firefox.
- sirwitti 5y ago
  Same for me, I'd love to get a subscription for Firefox!
- ankit70 5y ago
  I pay for pocket subscription just for this.
- nialv7 5y ago
  Mozilla laid off most of the MDN team in 2020 [1], then shifted the responsibility of updating MDN from Mozilla to the community [2], then created the Open Web Docs organization to take over the job of funding MDN [3]. And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-has-a-new-platform/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to-the-mdn-family/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...
  - danShumway 5y ago
    I already replied to this kind of logic elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257), but I don't see the logic of looking at Mozilla cutting support for a program then introducing a way to fund that program, and responding to that by saying, "why should I fund something that's seeing cuts?" Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.
_jal 5y ago
> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries? Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  If they were nonprofits working for the good of humanity, and yet had exponentially increased their executive salaries over the last five years while market share went down, then yes.
- hk__2 5y ago
  > Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them? It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.
  - dijonman2 5y ago
    Mozilla Foundation is non profit. Mozilla corporation is for profit. Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the corporation according to public records. Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp leases it, funneling money around. Statements are public.
    - Nitramp 5y ago
      Mozilla corporation is fully owned by the foundation though.
    - stingraycharles 5y ago
      While what you’re saying is factually correct, my biggest pet peeve is that Firefox is entirely owned and developed by the corporation. If I donate money to Mozilla, it ends up with the silly projects instead of the browser. To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading. As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.
yunohn 5y ago
> but I am tempted to pay anyway > Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries? Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.
ygjb 5y ago
I always wonder at the thought process behind these questions. Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane. Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up contributing to just the feature or service you like as opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that the organization supports?
- dsr_ 5y ago
  It's idealism. We still hope, despite the evidence, that Mozilla can be unadulteratedly good, as long as we only look at the open source side of it. We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      But we have a lot of control over the software we use on a daily basis, and there are several capable browsers. I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy, is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for many. If it doesn't, they want to know so they can change it. Food is a little more complicated in that regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.
      - Vinnl 5y ago
        Like I anwered to a sibling comment of yours, I'm not making a point about whether Firefox fits the bill; I'm trying to say that focusing on exec pay, rather than on whether it does fit the bill, is probably focusing on the wrong things.
shkkmo 5y ago
From: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-working-together-on-mdn/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-... > Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla. Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these additional funds into open source projects contributing to MDN but it is still in early stages. > A subscription to MDN Plus gives paying subscribers extra MDN features provided by Mozilla while a donation to Open Web Docs goes to funding writers creating content on MDN Web Docs, and potentially elsewhere. It's not totally clear to me after a little research, but I think MDN is part of the corporation, not the foundation? (It's isn't listed as on the foundation website as one of their projects.
dudus 5y ago
The money goes to wherever the foundation think it's going to be more valuable. It may be engineer salaries, C-Level compensation or just sit at a bank as a reserve. You don't get a saying how money is spent by any non-profit if you donate it. If you don't agree with how the non-profit spends their money don't donate.

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway. The big question is: Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

geodel 5y ago

What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?

0xJRS 5y ago
rzzzt 5y ago
Maybe somewhere between the two extremes?
cnasc 5y ago
Does Mozilla pay their software developers an industry-standard TC?
- pc86 5y ago
  It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes. The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general. I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
  - cnasc 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s unreasonable to compare the take-home-pay of a Google engineer working on Chrome to that of a Mozilla engineer working on Firefox. That’s a good peer comparison to make. It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.
  - sendilkumarn 5y ago
    That definitely feels a bit low. Is this considering only US or worldwide?
    - flyingfences 5y ago
      Outside of SV/NYC, that's not low at all.
    - pc86 5y ago
      It's the US median salary. If you're outside of SV and NYC, as a new grad you're looking at $60-70k, with no bonus and no stock (because outside of tech 99% of companies don't give their employees stock until they're at the director/VP level).
  - justapassenger 5y ago
    > FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%. Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome. Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.
  - sciurus 5y ago
    > It looks like Mozilla's average SDE salary is about $120k, so yes. I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's much too low. The figures at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla. You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.
  - comp_throw7 5y ago
    > FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%. FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).
ralmidani 5y ago
Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?
gruturo 5y ago
OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down. So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
- paxys 5y ago
  The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay market rates then you aren't going to get competent leadership to manage organizations at that scale.
  - silisili 5y ago
    Currently seems paying market rates and not getting competent leadership, so something seems amiss.
    - geodel 5y ago
      Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not guarantee projects' success at all.
  - lesuorac 5y ago
    Ah yes, FireFox's issue is they're paying Execs below market rate. If they want to get better market share they should start paying more! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Older_reports_(2000%E2%80%932019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol... --- Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?
lnxg33k1 5y ago
No they need to pocket 8 million dollars and fire developers, absolutely

danShumway 5y ago

Hopefully it goes to MDN. I do wish there was a way to fund Firefox directly, but I hope that MDN plus resources are for MDN, not Firefox.

sirwitti 5y ago
Same for me, I'd love to get a subscription for Firefox!
ankit70 5y ago
I pay for pocket subscription just for this.
nialv7 5y ago
Mozilla laid off most of the MDN team in 2020 [1], then shifted the responsibility of updating MDN from Mozilla to the community [2], then created the Open Web Docs organization to take over the job of funding MDN [3]. And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-has-a-new-platform/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to-the-mdn-family/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...
- danShumway 5y ago
  I already replied to this kind of logic elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30793257), but I don't see the logic of looking at Mozilla cutting support for a program then introducing a way to fund that program, and responding to that by saying, "why should I fund something that's seeing cuts?" Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.

_jal 5y ago

> Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries? Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?

gjsman-1000 5y ago
If they were nonprofits working for the good of humanity, and yet had exponentially increased their executive salaries over the last five years while market share went down, then yes.
hk__2 5y ago
> Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them? It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.
- dijonman2 5y ago
  Mozilla Foundation is non profit. Mozilla corporation is for profit. Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the corporation according to public records. Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp leases it, funneling money around. Statements are public.
  - Nitramp 5y ago
    Mozilla corporation is fully owned by the foundation though.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    While what you’re saying is factually correct, my biggest pet peeve is that Firefox is entirely owned and developed by the corporation. If I donate money to Mozilla, it ends up with the silly projects instead of the browser. To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading. As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.

yunohn 5y ago

> but I am tempted to pay anyway > Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries? Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.

ygjb 5y ago

I always wonder at the thought process behind these questions. Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane. Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up contributing to just the feature or service you like as opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that the organization supports?

dsr_ 5y ago
It's idealism. We still hope, despite the evidence, that Mozilla can be unadulteratedly good, as long as we only look at the open source side of it. We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    But we have a lot of control over the software we use on a daily basis, and there are several capable browsers. I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy, is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for many. If it doesn't, they want to know so they can change it. Food is a little more complicated in that regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      Like I anwered to a sibling comment of yours, I'm not making a point about whether Firefox fits the bill; I'm trying to say that focusing on exec pay, rather than on whether it does fit the bill, is probably focusing on the wrong things.

shkkmo 5y ago

From: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-working-together-on-mdn/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/mozilla-and-open-web-docs-... > Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla. Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these additional funds into open source projects contributing to MDN but it is still in early stages. > A subscription to MDN Plus gives paying subscribers extra MDN features provided by Mozilla while a donation to Open Web Docs goes to funding writers creating content on MDN Web Docs, and potentially elsewhere. It's not totally clear to me after a little research, but I think MDN is part of the corporation, not the foundation? (It's isn't listed as on the foundation website as one of their projects.

dudus 5y ago

The money goes to wherever the foundation think it's going to be more valuable. It may be engineer salaries, C-Level compensation or just sit at a bank as a reserve. You don't get a saying how money is spent by any non-profit if you donate it. If you don't agree with how the non-profit spends their money don't donate.