Most non profits ( and investment funds) keep an eye on administrative and management overhead. A well run fund or NGO will keep their administrative overhead as low as possible, most donors/ investors look at this metric.
Legal Aid lawyers / social workers or any number of other professions do not / cannot expect a market competitive salary. why is open source development any different ?
if C-suite is only working at Mozilla because they are getting market competitive salary, perhaps they the wrong hire.
90% of Mozilla Corporation revenue comes from one deal, and this has been the case for 10+ years. All the fancy salaries has not prevented Firefox from losing market share, nothing management has been able to do change this, why should they be paid this much ?
If the management has failed to achieve success as is the case , should not also bear the cost ? or also get laid off/ replaced ?
It's one thing to pay market rate for execs who do an excellent job on a rising company for a for-profit, another for a non-profit in decline.
And it's a different thing entirely when it's in a global pandemic and recession. CEOs of FOR PROFIT companies with far more financial success have cut their pay if nothing else as good symbol for the rest of the company.
Another one would be an ex exec I know personally (who was also a founder). Worked two years straight w/o pay to keep the company afloat.
Oh and there are also worker cooperatives. They are usually very stable and have a much smaller income gap.
> dominate the competition
The people/companies who operate like this usually don't have this as a goal. Quite the opposite. They are typically collaborative and opt for stability and sustainability over everything else.
But ... "fair" pay does not mean the same thing as "whatever is financially best for the company to pay its employees". Take the other end of that bargain: is it fair for Mozilla to pay their janitors a reproduction level wage? Most of us (except the hard core right-wing libertarians) say no, that's why we have a minimum wage (which many of us also think is too low).
The elision of the distinction between "fair" and "whatever the market rewards you for doing" isn't an argument, it's just crass market-worship.
Edit: this post is pretty clearly argued, and downvoting without even a comment is exactly the kind of ideological nonsense that this site simultaneously prides itself on not doing (contra Reddit), and yet hilariously symbolizes.
It's a very frustrating thing about this site, because, ironically, most people here think of themselves as nearly perfectly rational and open to new ideas, but in fact the opposite is almost always the case. If I think of myself as perfectly rational, that ironically gives me a way to think that anyone who disagrees with me must be trolling or must be saying something obviously wrong, even if I don't take the time to work out what that might be.
I admittedly added that just to complain, expecting it to trigger another wave of downvotes - because frankly, I don't care about getting downvoted. What I care about is how often this site turns into an ideological echo chamber for one of two popular worldviews, and on some level I wanted to try to call attention to that.
That's not true, I downvoted the past because it complained at being downvoted.
On an individual level the thing to do would be to upvote downvoted posts if they make some sense, they don't have to be great to be upvoted.
This usually comes down to pay. People who get high compensation offers elsewhere are likely to be good at it, but that means you have to compete with other companies for them. Even if you somehow did manage to find somebody that accepts your below market compensation, what do you do if another company just offers them more? If you pay them near market rate then there's much less incentive for another company to poach them. You're also less likely to end up with somebody that can't do the job.
I’d net for most medium sized companies it’s not anywhere near that.