14 ms·

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from s

• ekianjo 3y ago
  > Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.
  • munk-a 3y ago
    I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?
      • munk-a 3y ago
        Unfortunately yes - this view isn't so out there that it's not inconceivable that someone would genuinely express it.
        • debo_ 3y ago
          You always have to /s here. I figure there are enough people reading HN who have different backgrounds in how they understand English that it's necessary. Also important to label jokes.
          • red-iron-pine 3y ago
            also a tech startup incubator, where there is a non-trivial portion of the population is, or is trying very hard to be, something like that CEO. in other words, for some people here it's not sarcasm.
      • ReactiveJelly 3y ago
        Honestly yeah I had to read it a couple times, I didn't notice the joke right away, cause there are people out there who justify CEO salaries, I just can't remember the justification offhand. Maybe if you'd referenced Chernobyl I would have picked it up sooner. Or THERAC, that's a classic.
      • me_me_me 3y ago
        on the internet, ALWAYS
      • chombier 3y ago
        Nope, sarcasm was pretty obvious from the "iceberg jumping at the boat" part.
        • ekianjo 3y ago
          that was the give-away
      • wkat4242 3y ago
        No you didn't. :P
      • danaris 3y ago
        Poe's Law[0] applies. Unfortunately, nowadays, unless you're among a group of people who already know your general opinions on things, it's nearly impossible to state an absurd position on some issue that a nontrivial number of people would actually, unironically, advocate for, until you get into the absolutely batshit stuff like "we should literally sacrifice poor people to the devil, then eat their flesh, to keep the rest of us from getting poor." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
      • godelski 3y ago
        Carry on. I for one laughed at the obviousness of the iceberg jumping out. We definitely should be encouraging more careful reading than hinting and reading everything as if they are words only. Your comment is about as obvious as it gets. Unless... the icebergs are alive. But then we have a bigger problem. Global warming is their revenge!
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • knute 3y ago
      Not just in absolute terms, what could possibly justify a 600% increase in salary in 7 years?
      • BigJ1211 3y ago
        I don't know, but really want to. I need this in my life.
      • chii 3y ago
        good negotiation skills and friends in high places. Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org.
        • oliwarner 3y ago
          > Salary has nothing to do with productivity at this level of an org. That's nonsense. The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. Except Mozilla doesn't. They've seen flailing commercial performance and have rewarded the CEO and laid off developers. It feels like madness because it is. I love Firefox but Mozilla deserves to burn to the ground for this mismanagement.
          • munk-a 3y ago
            It should always be personal productivity but as a CEO your productivity is how much better you're doing than someone else in that role would. In the modern world too often executive compensation is viewed as "How valuable is this company" instead of "How much is this particular executive adding to the value of this company" - that's why we're seeing it spiral into simply ludicrous numbers.
          • JohnFen 3y ago
            > The difference at this level is you're not looking at personal productivity, you should be looking at a much broader interpretation. That's one of the arguments made by CEOs who are trying to justify their insane salaries, yes. But it's very unpersuasive.
    • mikeryan 3y ago
      CEO salaries aren’t, and never have been, relative to the rank and file salaries. The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market. You can argue whether they’re getting what they’re paying for but this doesn’t seem to be out of line relative to the leaders of other, similarly sized organizations. Also a non profit has to have higher salaries as there’s not a lot of room to offload that to bonuses or equity.
      • Buttons840 3y ago
        > The question is how much you need to be to get a competent executive relative to the open market. No! The real question is what happens without an executive, but some cheaper leadership structure instead? I mean, maybe a cheaper leadership structure (whatever it may be) would run the company into the ground, but, well, at least they would achieve the same outcome for cheaper.
        • ako 3y ago
          Don’t know, as a shareholder I would be very happy with a capable CEO that is able to extract profits from a doomed product. As long as she’s bringing in more than she costs the ROI is positive.
      • eldaisfish 3y ago
        the benchmark of what other CEOs make is a horrible metric. There is an entire industry of « Consultants » who will justify a higher CEO salary by claiming that other CEOs make the higher salary and then work with those other CEOs by point to your now higher salary.
        • mikeryan 3y ago
          Note, I didn’t say that it had to be relative to other CEO salaries. It has to be competitive to any other position that a candidate has available to them. What would Mitchell make as an SVP at a FAANG company? What could they make as a startup founder?
      • 3y ago
    • ghostpepper 3y ago
      This is true at most tech companies though - the CEO making a multiple of a typical dev salary. The large increases year over year, however, while Firefox loses market share, is a bigger red flag IMHO.
    • ako 3y ago
      It’s simple math: how much revenue does she bring in, versus the costs. And how likely is it for the organization to find someone else that brings in equal or more, for reduced salary.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • prng2021 3y ago
    What a ridiculous analogy. What’s the iceberg here? Google Chrome? The originally underdog competitor they’ve known and battled for well over a decade?
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • DenisM 3y ago
    Snark is against the rules on HN. > Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dig1 3y ago
    Maybe this is sarcasm, but the chief captain of the Titanic (Edward Smith) was not responsible for the iceberg jumping at the boat but was responsible for steering the ship at high speed through water known to have icebergs. He even said in an interview that he could not "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that". I can imagine a similar analogy with M. Baker.
  • hospitalJail 3y ago
    I used to think this in my 20s. No, the CEO(and board) are completely responsible. That is the point of leadership, to move the boat before it hits the iceburg or at least have a way of dealing with it. Firefox is buggy but heavily advertised(or astroturfed, I dont know) on social media. Everyone knows about firefox, we don't need the ad. We need firefox not to suck.
    • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Firefox being “heavily advertised (or astroturfed)” on social media isn’t something I personally have ever seen in the last decade. (Unless one includes Mastodon as social media, even though its userbase is nowhere near representative of the general public.) And today a substantial number of internet users are mainly using smartphones, and the default browser on that smartphone, and the very idea that one can use a different browser has faded from the culture compared to the early millennium.
• tiahura 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    The board of any startupy tech company focused on "innovation and changing the world" seem to be carbon copies of the fictional boards on the Silicon Valley satire show.
  • sgift 3y ago
    What is so bad about the board? Besides not reigning in the CEO compensation.
  • rafram 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • mardifoufs 3y ago
      It's either that or they are referring to the board being useless against the CEO. Usually the board is the only group keeping a CEO in check. Honestly don't know from the tone of the comment though
      • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        That's just recursive as the main problem with the CEO seems to be that she's a woman.
        • concordDance 3y ago
          Surely the declining numbers and increasing compensation are the main problem?
  • DeIlliad 3y ago
    I know nothing about these people on the board but you clearly do since you think they are a joke so please go on.
• oldpersonintx 3y ago
  Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project free from Mozilla.org. Let Mozilla.org die.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive. Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.
      • freedomben 3y ago
        that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what would have happened had they not done it? Would it have accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to get services not to use DRM? I'm not sure, but I think FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they not done it.
  • anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    I doubt this. Maintaining and developing a competitive browser is serious work, and needs skilled professionals working on it full time, as well as getting stuck in to the web standards process. That requires a level of funding that most community projects only dream of. I can't see any incentive for industry to put money behind it in the way that they do with Linux. I have very few complaints about Firefox as software. I only wish more people would use it. (That includes you, dear reader!) It is actually great, and if you've ever complained about AMP, WEI or anything like that, using a non-Google derived browser is one of the few things you can actually do to reduce Google's power here. Firefox are up against the power of OS defaults and dirty tricks in an age where most people don't really know what a web browser is. But if you have any awareness or concern about the health of the open web, you are absolutely educated enough to use Firefox. Of course there will be the odd minor workflow thing to get used to. But Firefox is great. All you really need is the motivation to choose something other than the default.
• aaomidi 3y ago
  If Mozilla is looking for a new CEO I’ll sign myself up.
  • moron4hire 3y ago
    I'll even give them a deal. I'll run the company into the ground at twice the speed for half the money.
    • slig 3y ago
      How? I feel that anything different than what's been done will improve their presence. edit: username checks out.
• devit 3y ago
  Presumably they have captured the Mozilla foundation board?
• dheera 3y ago
  I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable. If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.
  • _dark_matter_ 3y ago
    Routinely??? I don't know of one staff level that gets paid that much
    • dheera 3y ago
      https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e7 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer/levels/senior-principal-sde https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l7 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-engineer/levels/distinguished-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...
      • tehbeard 3y ago
        Strange how none of those listed are Mozilla... https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/mozilla/salaries/software-e... Looks arround the $170-200k level....
      • mattl 3y ago
        Distinguished engineers aren't really 'staff-level'
        • dheera 3y ago
          Oh bleh, distinguished members of "the staff" that works there, one of those things, either way, these are all far below the CEO and 1M+
• LegitShady 3y ago
  damn I wish I'd get x7 increase in salary in 7 years. This guy must know where some bodies are buried.
  • tristan957 3y ago
    She is a woman.
    • wkat4242 3y ago
      Doesn't make the bodies any less dead :D
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • IntelMiner 3y ago
      This is a sickeningly misogynistic post Be better
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing.
  • lolc 3y ago
    Their friends make more!
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  > Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? This question is why I don't expect Mozilla to last at its current course. I like their work, but the endless increases in CEO salary while their most important money maker is fledgling is not justifiable.
  • api 3y ago
    Sounds like our entire civilization in microcosm.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    The increases look reasonable to me, but not when you consider their declining market share. I guess she only returned to the role of CEO in 2020, but she's been in leadership for a long time, and the org's performance has been poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary-achievements_correlation_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
    • Longhanks 3y ago
      In what world is DOUBLING one's salary within two years while the company overall and, most importantly, the company's absolute flagship product are in continuous decline "reasonable"?
    • SilasX 3y ago
      From the link: >>On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "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." So I bet it's something like: Baker: "If you don't pay me market rates for comparable work, I'll leave and go mess up a different organization." Google: "No, wait, stop, we'll get you the money!" Considering all the unforced errors on Mozilla's part, I'm only half joking there (i.e. that Google is influencing the decision, via their search placement deals, to keep Firefox bad).
    • jampekka 3y ago
• e2le 3y ago
  >Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. Its decline is also visible in Mozilla's own data [1], 252M users in January 2019 down to 188M in November 2023. MAU has remained at around 188M since October, I would like to believe this is because of MV3 and the YouTube drama, but that would be naive. Going forward I think there should be a position on the foundation [2] and corporation board [3] held by a community representative. At least then the community would have some say in the direction Mozilla is taking. [1]: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity [2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board https://wiki.mozilla.org/Board [3]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
• deadmanbloopers 3y ago
  [flagged]
• agumonkey 3y ago
  imagine what would happen if all the upper layers were removed and all them millions would fall into contributors :)
• Vvector 3y ago
  Raise your hand if you also got a 7x raise over the last seven years.
  • Buttons840 3y ago
    Okay, now keep them raised if you were also performing worse on every metric each year.
    • culi 3y ago
      I actually don't think you'd see that many raised hands go down
      • fouc 3y ago
        The implied joke is they're talking about regular employees. Seems like you're thinking of CEOs?
    • plugin-baby 3y ago
      Now keep them raised if you didn’t change company...
  • timthelion 3y ago
    I did, went from working for a small non profit in the sustainable transport/urbanism sector to management in the telco industry. Sallary jumped almost 10x.
    • timthelion 3y ago
      Now I'm making bank. My anual sallary is around what mozilla CEO makes in two workdays.
• nine_k 3y ago
  I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me." Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s. But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version. [1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
  • ink_13 3y ago
    > When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox
    • lucideer 3y ago
      > Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,16466,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....
      • stonogo 3y ago
• cozzyd 3y ago
  While I have no idea about any of the aspects of Mitchell Baker's salary, I don't see this questioning of corporate CEO's. A generous reading might be that this is the salary required to avoid losing the CEO to some random VC selling useless widgets.
  • oldpersonintx 3y ago
    [dead]
  • toyg 3y ago
    Looking at results since she got the job, maybe they should pay the money to such useless-widget company to poach her. I'm all for social enterprises but FF lost the plot.
• taosx 3y ago
  I hope mozilla the corporation dies faster so we could then focus on the browser. As someone said, the board is a joke.
• Certhas 3y ago
  Am I reading the documents you link right? Mozilla is wildly profitable. They made a profit of roughly 150 Million dollars last year. They have 1.2 Billion dollars in assets. They have increased revenue from non-search deals significantly (56M -> 75M, up one third). Despite all the gnashing of teeth in this comment section about woke Mozilla, they spent only 5 Million on grants last year. The vast majority goes towards developing Firefox and building up assets. I had always just taken the statements that she is absurdly overpaid at face value and never looked into this myself. But Baker has overseen the rise of revenue and net income from almost zero to current numbers. If that doesn't look like a successfully run NGO, what does? Not a big fan of CEO compensation in general, but I feel the one-sided focus on market share, which I feel is somewhat out of Mozillas control (can't even compete on the dominant mobile computing platform, anti-competitive Google leveraging its search monopoloy and advertising Chrome extremely aggresively, etc... ), while ignoring the actual financial health of the organisation is really biased.
  • RyanHamilton 3y ago
    If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. Their mission statement is: "Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.". You could argue the importance of market share at some percentages but below ~5% has to be considered a priority one emergency, if your goal is to keep the internet accessible for all. If their market share fell below 1% they would have effectively almost zero ability to steer standards.
    • TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      > If this was a for profit company I could agree with your focus on profit. There are two parts to Mozilla: a for-profit company and a non-profit company. They are separate. You are reading the mission statement of mozilla.org, not mozilla.com. Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the for-profit company, not the non-profit.
      • wodenokoto 3y ago
• jampekka 3y ago
  > What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? The same thing that is justifying obscene salaries in general. A circle of greed where obscenely paid people decide what obscenely paid people should be paid.
  • digging 3y ago
    I will say in their defense, they have a legitimate argument. Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs. The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs. This element of competition does exist. However, this ignores a few factors. 1. Mozilla don't seem to have a great CEO despite the pay. 2. Self-interest and CEO skills are not necessarily tightly coupled. They could be orthogonal. So a great CEO might be willing to take lower pay, especially a CEO that might be great for a company that is itself forgoing disgusting amounts of (ad) revenue in the interest of ethics. 3. (Not Mozilla specific but it's important to mention when this comes up) Decent regulations capping CEO pay would in fact remove this entire element of competition, freeing up companies from having to decide how much profit to sacrifice on the altar of business gods.
    • triceratops 3y ago
      > Offering a low-paying CEO role means you'll attract lower quality CEOs Maybe in the private sector. > The best CEOs have personal incentive to take the highest paying jobs It has to be said again: in the private sector. Non-profit CEOs shouldn't expect to be compensated as well as their private sector counterparts. The feeling of doing good is part of the reward.
• gafage 3y ago
  [flagged]
• OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  About Baker's salary, turns out there's a section about it on her Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Communications_Corporation_and_mozilla.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun... . The relevant quote is "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." In other words, there's an assumption every corporation is required to have a CEO/Lawyer from the Technorati class who acts as a drain on the finances of the corporation, why should Mozilla be any different? Since the Mozilla Foundation is not a widely held corporation (and is a 501c3) there are only a few institutional directors ( from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/#boards ): Baker (AOL), Chambers (McKinsey), Cooper (Walmart), Lakhani (MIT/Harvard), Lisbonne (Stanford GSB), Molotsi (Intuit) and Lund. If you think Baker's pay should be cut, Lakhani is probably the person to talk to, he's chair of the compensation committee. After watching VCs from the 70s to the current time (yes, I'm that old) I have a theory about tech startups. Their primary concern is to pump money from old school monied interests to old school monied interests' children. So if you have cash you want to give to your kids more or less tax free (or tax reduced), you send them to Stanford or MIT, then you arrange a meeting for them w/ your old school chum who's now a VC in San Jose or Palo Alto. You give the VC cash which is treated as an investment by the IRS, and then the VC gives the money to whatever bizarre tech startup is being run by their old school chum's kids. If you're lucky, you get a return on your investment and you pay whatever capital gains tax you need to pay (which is most often taxed at a rate considerably below that for earned income.) Your kids get a decent salary for a few years, and if they're lucky and smart, they git bought out by a big firm that makes them a VP or something. The VC should be lucky enough over time to make enough money on the 10% of deals that make it to acquisition to pay for the 90% that fail completely or get acquired on bad terms. Mozilla always seemed to me to demonstrate this also works for non-profits. Also... the story of "using money to transfer generational wealth in the upper class" is clearly not a universal. There are clearly startups that are innovative. They may be helmed by a handsome 20-something from Stanford, but that's just an historical accident. I am sure YOUR startup is in this category. But the "using VC investment as a money laundering scheme to evade generational tax" happens often enough my inner marxian shouts every time I drive down El Camino in Palo Alto. And this part is purely opinion. I appreciate you probably have a different opinion and absolutely do not think less of you for having a unique perspective: And besides, the goal of tech money is now just to keep the party going. The web is shit, intended to distribute content from major content producers or to be festooned with ads (twitch and youtube). iProducts are there to look sleek and provide just enough functionality to convince you to buy another iProduct. Though you're probably not in the target demographic anymore since China and India are at the beginning of the growth curve. Protocols and programs we used to use: SMTP/IMAP/eMail, (S)FTP/File Transfer, Veronica/Archie/WAIS/Search, etc. are pretty much dead or owned by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo's corpse. I think the reason olds are nostalgic for Commodore 64's, Atari 800's and even TI 99/4A's (and that there are a few kids who like leenucks and BSD) is they're systems that could operate without being attached to the dystopian cyberspace Carmen Hermosillo described in Pandora's Vox. The only "infrastructure" I needed for my 99/4 was a power outlet and a factory somewhere cranking out cassette tapes, 5.25" floppies and ribbons for my MX-80. </opinion> But I have digressed. If the resolution is that Mozilla has lost it's way, I would argue for the affirmative. Or rather argue it was sort of set up to fail. And heck, I didn't even once mention the management fiasco that was Boot to Gecko.
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