14 ms·

Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing els

Yes, that's a lot of money. But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. If nothing else, you'd get stock, which would correlate with your performance.

Dylan16807 3y ago
> But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.
- confidantlake 3y ago
  The most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Imagine running a company. That's hard enough. Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory. Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do. Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity. Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization. And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    That sounds really hard! But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills. And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > don't see why it needs particularly rare skills I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. > lots of people do really hard jobs Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        > I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think? When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think? I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.) > got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        > Look at the state of the company they took over. Yes, I'm specifically thinking of companies that were doing fine when they took over.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman of the non profit. Damn! Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen. Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost. But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for. I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
      - fabrice_d 3y ago
        FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board. KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape. All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
  - RHSman2 3y ago
    Those constraints can be turned into positives depending on your point of view. Imagine what you could do?
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    I don't have any insider knowledge but: > your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees. It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo. Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      The fact that they switched from Yahoo after the Yahoo sale to Verizon was announced, and got Yahoo to keep paying them was a great move. I talked to one of the corporate lawyers that worked that deal, and told him it was a genius move.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - palata 3y ago
    I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much. When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
    - Denzel 3y ago
      So what solution are you proposing? Right now, you’re simply complaining about a perceived problem without offering any logical argument for an alternative. I do not mean to sound flippant, I’d like to hear what your alternative ideas are.
      - palata 3y ago
        > So what solution are you proposing? To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job? Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people. Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
        gottorf 3y ago
        > there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    And the whole point is that paying someone 6M means you should be able to figure out how to solve for these problems The idea that nobody possibly could reconcile these issues and yet should still be paid egregiously is absurd
- pyrale 3y ago
  > Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Because it basically requires to beat a monopoly power that has repeatedly used its unrelated lines of business to crush competition in the past? Growing Mozilla is probably as hard as growing diapers.com as an independent company.
  - a1o 3y ago
    I forgot diapers.com had closed. :/
x0x0 3y ago
I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?
- gkoberger 3y ago
  Based on this thread, I think... everyone would question such an arrangement.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    They've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
  - x0x0 3y ago
    I think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric. At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear. Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.
lexicality 3y ago
yeah but she ran it into the ground
wkat4242 3y ago
For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO. Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...
- bawolff 3y ago
  I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
  - lolinder 3y ago
    Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      What more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
      - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
        We just want to not be gaslit into believing that she did a great job, which she clearly didn’t I’m not sure why all the excuses made for her
      - b112 3y ago
        I wonder if they'll work on the little things. Like text reflow for their mobile browser. We have a massive aging population, and text reflow helps immensely, and only Opera does jt well.
      - 3y ago
brnt 3y ago
On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla. I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)
mardifoufs 3y ago
Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  Mozilla corp is not a nonprofit. Mozilla org is, but we'retalking about the ceo of the corp here.
p1necone 3y ago
I honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  What if someone is mean to you on an internet site and you want to buy the whole site to silence them?
bbor 3y ago
I’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year” That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.
- confidantlake 3y ago
  It is about as plausible as only the pharaoh can rule us since he is a god.

Dylan16807 3y ago

> But if you're a CEO good enough to turn Mozilla around given the constraints... you could make a lot more elsewhere. Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Or is this because we're only looking at existing CEOs for hiring? If the rareness is about having the right industry knowledge and vision in a CEO, I bet you can get better results by hiring a company aimer and separate managerial co-CEO and using the money you save for 20 more devs and 5 more marketers.

confidantlake 3y ago
The most important skill is being in the right social class. The rest is just justification.
gkoberger 3y ago
Imagine running a company. That's hard enough. Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory. Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do. Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity. Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization. And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  That sounds really hard! But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills. And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > don't see why it needs particularly rare skills I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. > lots of people do really hard jobs Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      > I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting. Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think? When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think? I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.) > got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        > Look at the state of the company they took over. Yes, I'm specifically thinking of companies that were doing fine when they took over.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Imagine being both the CEO of the corp and the chairwoman of the non profit. Damn! Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen. Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Technically FirefoxOS is still around: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/ . It's now an OS for feature phones. It's no longer owned by Mozilla but they did have a lasting impact, that's what I mean. And many of their throwaway projects have gone that way. For example Firefox VR browser is now Wolvic. https://wolvic.com/en/ https://wolvic.com/en/ . It's the great thing about open source, the work is not lost. But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for. I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      FxOS failed commercially because it tried to be a "me too" product, with the same distribution strategy as Android that relies a lot on carriers. For that to work you need to get support from key apps in the carriers markets, and FxOS never managed to get Whatsapp on board. KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape. All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
- RHSman2 3y ago
  Those constraints can be turned into positives depending on your point of view. Imagine what you could do?
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  I don't have any insider knowledge but: > your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees. It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo. Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    The fact that they switched from Yahoo after the Yahoo sale to Verizon was announced, and got Yahoo to keep paying them was a great move. I talked to one of the corporate lawyers that worked that deal, and told him it was a genius move.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- palata 3y ago
  I think that the "it's paid a lot because it's super hard" is generally a bad excuse. Many things are super hard, many people make a lot of sacrifices to be among the bests at what they do. Yet they don't earn that much. When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
  - Denzel 3y ago
    So what solution are you proposing? Right now, you’re simply complaining about a perceived problem without offering any logical argument for an alternative. I do not mean to sound flippant, I’d like to hear what your alternative ideas are.
    - palata 3y ago
      > So what solution are you proposing? To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job? Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people. Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
      - gottorf 3y ago
        > there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  And the whole point is that paying someone 6M means you should be able to figure out how to solve for these problems The idea that nobody possibly could reconcile these issues and yet should still be paid egregiously is absurd
pyrale 3y ago
> Why? Why does pointing mozilla in the right direction require such rare skills? Because it basically requires to beat a monopoly power that has repeatedly used its unrelated lines of business to crush competition in the past? Growing Mozilla is probably as hard as growing diapers.com as an independent company.
- a1o 3y ago
  I forgot diapers.com had closed. :/

x0x0 3y ago

I suspect a ceo could have asked for a pay package of massive bonuses correlated with marketshare. My understanding is the board has pretty wide discretion to set pay, and following years of steep marketshare losses, who would question such an arrangement?

gkoberger 3y ago
Based on this thread, I think... everyone would question such an arrangement.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  They've been dropping long enough that a pay package almost entirely based on increasing market share would have gotten a lot less objection from me at least.
- x0x0 3y ago
  I think people are mostly questioning her quite large pay packages when measured against the abject failure on every metric except for the cash-paid-by-google-to-disguise-their-monopoly metric. At the last company I started, a b2b saas, as of 5 years in, there were under 10 logged-in pageviews from Firefox. Ever. It's dead; the coyote is 50 feet past the cliff; and we're just waiting for gravity to appear. Mozilla has also clearly given up on Firefox, though people get mad on here when you point that out. I just don't know why they're operating under the delusion that anyone will listen to Mozilla about privacy when everyone realizes they no longer build a browser that matters.

lexicality 3y ago

yeah but she ran it into the ground

wkat4242 3y ago

For a company that has a declining marketshare like Mozilla it's really way too high IMO. Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down...

bawolff 3y ago
I mean, being a succesful ceo at a declining company is much harder than being one at a growing company. At a growing company you just have to not screw up, and a declining company you have to actually turn things around. It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to get higher pay doing a harder job (presuming she is actually good at her job)
- lolinder 3y ago
  Given that nothing has turned around, it's hard to point to any evidence that she's doing a good job. The best she can claim is that had anyone else been CEO things would have declined even faster, and that's not something anyone can prove.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    What more do people want at this time? She’s quitting. Now we can see how the next CEO somehow manages to defeat the multiple massive anti-competitive behemoths Mozilla is up against.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      We just want to not be gaslit into believing that she did a great job, which she clearly didn’t I’m not sure why all the excuses made for her
    - b112 3y ago
      I wonder if they'll work on the little things. Like text reflow for their mobile browser. We have a massive aging population, and text reflow helps immensely, and only Opera does jt well.
    - 3y ago

brnt 3y ago

On the other hand, if you work elsewhere, your not turning around Mozilla. I worked in academia, now government, in HPC/data-sciency positions, so the overlap/competition with finance and big tech is large (and a lot of people move there and back again). Let's just say, we have far more interesting problems ;)

mardifoufs 3y ago

Not really. A Non profit ceo will always take a pay cut. You can't expect big tech salaries in a non profit, and if they can truly get a better salary elsewhere that's probably what they should do if they want that type of revenue. The thing is, they usually can't. A non profit ceo is not typically very well suited to be a big corp executive, and vice versa.

fzzzy 3y ago
Mozilla corp is not a nonprofit. Mozilla org is, but we'retalking about the ceo of the corp here.

p1necone 3y ago

I honestly can't fathom caring about the difference between 6.2m a year and anything higher than that. Once my salary gets that high all I'm caring about is whether or not I'm doing interesting things.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
What if someone is mean to you on an internet site and you want to buy the whole site to silence them?

bbor 3y ago

I’ll do it! At this point I’d like to see some actual data to back up this so-often-repeated claim of “being a CEO is super hard, there’s only a few people in the country smart enough to do it well, so they need to be paid millions of dollars a year” That sounds… plausible, at this point. I wouldn’t say probable. Especially with tech making everything so interconnected. I loved the kind note at the root of this thread, but the idea that the CEO is some market visionary who is carefully keeping the whole company afloat seems rotten.

confidantlake 3y ago
It is about as plausible as only the pharaoh can rule us since he is a god.