Exactly! Why are Mitchell Baker and other execs at Mozilla being rewarded for lack-luster performance with nearly $1 million a year in compensation, meanwhile the actual programmers that toil on Mozilla's products go underpaid or even unpaid?

I won't comment on whether I felt I was underpaid in my years at Mozilla (though I'll say I do make more now, at a for-profit company), but it is at least worth pointing out that Mozilla's bonus system extended to everyone. And until early 2015 it was based on company-wide performance, so even if you had a project that was languishing you could still get a good bonus if the company as a whole was doing well (in 2015 it switched to a significant chunk being based on individual performance and metrics, and I wasn't there long enough afterward to have a worthwhile opinion on how that change turned out).

> though I'll say I do make more now, at a for-profit company

That's what I meant by underpaid. It's well known that Mozilla pays below-market rate salaries. Instead it deceptively uses its supposed non-profit status (actually a for-profit owned by a non-profit shell) to motivate people to take a pay-cut by working there, meanwhile Baker and a handful of others at the top are getting rich (even by Bay Area standards) off their under-compensated, altruistically-minded labor.

Disgusting.

Why talk with a sense of moral indignation as opposed to the lens of leverage? People aren't paid by what they deserve; they're paid by leverage.

Do engineers in the US have a professional association or union?

Source or link to actual salaries?

Google for a long time has operated / operates in much the same way. Huge pile of adsense money, think of the best way to persuade others to waste it all on whatever insane idea you have.