The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.
Brian Chesky, AirBNB ceo, is paid $0 right now, because at least he can recognize how tone deaf talking about your companies financial struggles is whole you're still taking full comp.
Brian Chesky is not merely the CEO of AirBnB, he is also the cofounder with a networth of 4.1 billion dollars.
It is one thing for a literal billionaire, who owns the company to undergo 'hardship' in order to save the company they built over the past 10+ years.
It is a whole other thing for a mere employee to sacrifice their salary during a company downturn. To do so is an act of pure charity---which while it may be inline with ethos of a non-profit worker, isn't something that we as total 3rd parties should expect.
Mitchell Baker is just an "employee", despite her long years of service. She was even fired from Netscape during a round of layoffs, and served as a mere volunteer for years.
I don't think many would complain about their salaries if what they did actually worked. But Mozilla is being run into the ground before our eyes.
If the availability of people with a non-profit ethos affects competitive pay for non-profits, then that should be taken into a account.
Maybe such a person exists to lead Mozilla. But the primary goal should be to find someone who can turn the organisation around. I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that current management can do it.
After all, as much as there are complaints about Brave, he managed to make a legitimately well known contender from scratch in a world that already has seen many other browser attempts go nowhere (and of course, he in some form created and grew Firefox).
Of course, "cancel culture" means you have to throw out someone from being CEO, even if that means the whole internet will suffer greatly, because he had a different opinion than whatever was woke.
Which is a shame, because the net loss to everyone is much much much greater than the $1000 dollars he gave as a donation, even if it is acceptable to destroy someone's life because they have a opinion that disagrees with yours.
I don’t think his life was destroyed. He remained a multimillionaire, and immediately founded another competing company. The people whose lives were destroyed were the millions who didn’t have basic marriage rights for decades, and who were systematically humiliated merely for openly being in love.
As far as we know Eich was never biased or prejudiced on on that topic as work, his co-workers in that minority never even realized that he held such political opinions, and there is no reason to think he thought lesser of them. He simply wished for the laws not to change.
My point is that there is no indication that hate and prejudice where ever part of Eich's views.
> your comment would fit right in with that era also.
I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.
Can you explain to me how donating in support of Prop 8 (which would have banned gay marriage) isn't homophobic (and thus hateful, prejudicial, and discriminatory)? Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
> I agree, in that era my comment would have supported people campaigning against slavery in racist states.
This isn't a good faith response. Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position. It was simply hateful and cruel. We cannot accept stances like this as civil discourse. Any debate over "well, does group of humans X get the same rights as group of humans Y" is done. The answer is always yes.
Based on the very little information we have this is a case of someone having wrong opinions but not being an actual danger to anyone.
> Can you explain it in such a way as it would make sense for LGBTQ people but not, say, people of color?
no, because I disagree with him and I don't really know of a good reasoning for it. (The only non-contradictory one (a low bar) being that the federal government should not be allowed to decide who can and cannot marry)
Regarding slavery it was a good faith response, also it was tongue-in-cheek response.
> Being pro-slavery was never a valid political position.
It was, it also no longer is, with progress we improve what is a valid position and what is not. Once upon a time in many places abolishing slavery was not a valid political position.
Ultimately these are moral decision that each of us needs to take responsibility for.
You can go a little further with this into ascribed vs. achieved status [1][2]. I'm not saying achieved status discrimination is good or OK, nor am I saying it isn't. But it's not the same as ascribed status discrimination.
This stinks and the result is the Brandon Eich and Leni Riefenstahl who did not actually discriminate anyone are given same treatment as other people who were directly responsible for discrimination or genocide.
Just because accepting the sacrifice might not make sense for the current ceo and family doesn't mean that asking for it doesn't make sense for mozilla.
I don’t really understand why we should do that... we aren’t stockholders in Mozilla, nor are we customers of them, or even employees. Why should we demand that anyone is fired?
If Mozilla is turning around to be a simple, ordinary business, that is quite the shark jump and will in turn lead to a large loss in advocacy. I have no interest in supporting a company just looking to make a quick buck if I'm not compensated.
Mozilla Corporation is a sub of Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Foundation controls Mozilla Corporation shares. Mozilla Foundation should based on the bylaws of Mozilla Corporation either have the board fire the C suite or replace the board of the Mozilla Corporation with those that will fire the C suite.
Mozilla Foundation is not doing that because it is not interested in changes. Running a large non-profit is a low effort, low risk, super lucrative job. The only way to affect Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation is for donors refuse to donate for Mozilla Foundation until it addresses the governance issues.
Un(?)fortunately, donations to the Mozilla Foundation are only a few million dollars a year--mostly because they don't do anything particularly interesting. (Seriously--look at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ )
Instead they fired a whole bunch of people to better their finances in the short-term while damning the company in the long-term.
CEO what's-her-face and the other C-level parasites most likely are only trying to press as much money as they can from the company before either the company is completely run into the ground or they're fired.
And fired they should be.
WITHOUT golden parachutes.
We are their revenue stream.
We are the users, and we are the ones that continue to evangelize Mozilla and Firefox, and we provide support to people looking to make the switch. without us as users of their software and services, where would they be?
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
I know a few organizations that might fall under that abbreviation. Can you be more specific?
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
I feel like the CEO is absolutely in the wrong here. If they're making 20x what a technical writer or tester is making, it absolute is a bad look not to take a paycut when you're sending 250 people into the street.
I can guarantee that you’d find a perfectly willing CEO somewhere in the people laid off now if you told them you’d only pay them 500k.
It's. Just. A. Job.
I suspect this is yet another manifestation of the crippling, organizationally-irrational-but-individually-rational levels of risk avoidance we're operating under now.
We can see it right here how it’s killing a value generation vehicle. The CEO won’t accept a pay cut, but is willing to shut down entire product lines. A similar story has played out across America.
There are plenty of people who could do well in the CEO job at most companies—no worse than the average we're getting now, anyway. There are far fewer "CEO types".
Being CEO of Mozilla could attract highly qualified, passionate people, who are not primarily driven by "competitive compensation". You know; the same impulse that underlies the whole open source movement.
These are non-profit execs. They exist to fleece the donors and live off the spoils. It just happened that the non-profit in question has a mission appealing to the technologists.
Why should their CEO get any money and not a pink slip? Their mismanagement and financial games caused the company to have to lay off 250 people.
If mozilla want to be more like EFF and focus on the advocacy aspect then maybe they should be similar paid. Even better, merge the two organizations and replace the leadership with the one in EFF. No need to go and look for a CEO willing to be paid 1/10th of current wages as there is already one available doing that now.
> Would you find a person who doesn't fire the MDN team and still keeps Mozilla profitable?
I think there's such people among the engineers at Mozilla, but maybe not among the current execs
With a greater probability than the current management, yes.
That question is impossible to answer, but my instinct leans towards ‘yes, potentially’. Even if they do not, they’re still 2M/year better off.
This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.
There would be a very long queue of people willing to do any of the C-suite jobs for $500k.
The $2.5m -> $500k is an easy soundbite, but it doesn't have to even be that drastic.
Granted, shaving 'only' $1m off might only allow you to 'save', say 8-12(?) jobs, but... that's 8-12 people, some with families
Would that be a bad thing? How? I'm sure somebody would step up to make decisions, and you never know, they might actually be competent. The odds don't seem markedly worse.
Github was leaderless for a long time. And during that period it was chaos. The company had no direction, employees were doing random, incoherent things. And multiple factions fought for power.
And yes, there are other factors at play. Mitchell Baker brings it up: The kind of work you do matters not only to you but also to c-level people and will be priced into the pay.
Who around here (who is also actually qualified enough, that mozilla would want them) would switch over, taking a 50% pay cut over their current pay, right now? Don't tell me you couldn't. Of course you could. Would it mean changing your life style? I am sure it would. But then again, that's a apparently cool to randomly ask of people who (I am assuming) earn a lot more than you do.
There are two reasonable options: You either come to terms with reality, or you change reality. The later means, in this particular case, enticing someone qualified (which includes a) being capable b) willing and c) in a social position to actually "apply" for the job) and to do it for less. Good luck.
How do you measure how good a CEO is? Is having to let go 25% of your staff, axing the security team and stopping new developments indicative of good performance?
Just look at the amount of CEOs who got international industry awards or recognition, who some years later tanked their companies or were found to be engaged in criminal practices.
In context of mozillas goals, challenges that arise when leading a company, and limited influence on the movement of the world, maybe. I doubt that either of us is close enough to the ground to realistically be a judge of that.
I would say that's a very naive view that idealizes the process (and I say that as someone who is very pro market), especially as you rise up in ranks and especially in this instance where a non-profit is failing to execute on their core mission.
I've seen people go from board advisors in relatively large companies to IKEA store workers or long term unemployment. It's more about who you know and how you play politics than your ability to provide value to the entity, a lot of politics gets played the higher you climb. The market value for these people could very well be higher this still has nothing to do with the value they provide in their current role - it could very well be that a less qualified (in general market terms) person could be a better fit for this unique organisation.
Yes, I think so too.
The more money that gets involved, the more this'll attract people who care about money, not the mission.
I'd expect execs at bigger companies to be less good execs, but better at office politics and impressions.
And the tech people who are the ones who actually do the tech work, people expect of mozilla have to go.
I don't know any universe, where this sounds right.
I think among the engineers you'll find a bunch of qualified people for that job.
Speaking from some personal experience at another company (a small one, 20-30 people).
Execs good at giving a good impression, and making money for themselves.
Presidents good at winning the elections.
But that's a bit unrelated to being good for the company. Or the people in the country.
I think/guess that some altruistically motivated engineers could save Mozilla and Firefox if they got to replace the current execs.
Your vision of a better world is miopic.
No, and to be honest I find it hard to believe anyone believes so; a lot of those positions are picked due being friends with the right people, or coming from the same universities as the people already in executive positions, and other hundreds subjective factors that have little to nothing to do with the actual capabilities needed for the role.
On a second read, I see you wrote, "I would be surprised if ...". I don't remember seeing that the first time, but maybe I read too quickly. In that case, I'll turn it around: I'd be surprised if you could find anyone who can supply comparable evidence of competence who'd accept substantially less compensation.
>That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.
80% discount sounds like a lot... until you realize her salary is 2.5 million/year. I'm preeetttty sure most families will do just fine on 500k a year.