When did we decide the only people who could be CEOs had to be blessed with magic CEO-dust or whatever, and must be showered with cash because there aren't enough people so-dusted and they're apparently impossible to train unless they've had just the right pedigree from birth? Is there really no-one at the company who could do the job and would be happy to take a promotion and a "mere" $1M salary? It's not fucking brain surgery, normal people can figure it out, and they used to. It's just a job.

In Mozilla's case especially, such a gamble ("gamble"—I really don't think it's that out-there) seems eminently worth it, since they've been treading water at best for over a decade. What's the worst that can happen? They fail? Already happening.

I suspect this entire trend (across the economy, not just at Mozilla) is due to some combo of our modern intense aversion for taking responsibility for anything whatsoever, and pervasive self-dealing in the management class. Board won't replace the "right" kind of person with the "wrong" kind because it's Simply Not Done—why, if anyone in the top half of the intelligence bell curve and an OK work ethic could do their jobs with just a little experience and training, they might no longer command such insane salaries! Can't have that.

But, I'm open to the possibility that it did in fact become unworkable, for some reason I don't know about, to just train people into these positions as-needed, and in fact we do have to pay stupid amounts of money to a tiny, incestuous c-suite class who are the only possible candidates for these roles, or else everything will fall apart.

You don't have to hand wave a CEO as just magic dust. At least on paper the CEO is there for their ability to network at the highest of levels whether that is to recruit other executives, raise capital, predict global strategy, whatever.

Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".

> Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".

Sure—and I'm serious that I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape for non-shitty (i.e. not corruption or principal-agent-problem) reasons such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash, but it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way and things were... basically fine. Not that there weren't huge advantages to being in the "right" set, or whatever, as there has been in any time and place, but that it seems like for the specific case of CEOs it used to be more acceptable to train up existing employees, who didn't start their employment with the company somewhere in the top-exec echelon, into those kinds of roles, which behavior seems like it would act as a pretty effective relief valve on CEO comp getting out of control.

What's going on now sure looks like what would happen if the people in charge of hiring for these roles had a strong interest in keeping the compensation extremely high. But it's still possible there's something else going on, and there are good, non-corrupt motivations at work.

> it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way

I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

Its still worth being passionate about and rebelling against. While the general theme of the corruption may be similar its still eventful that it is occurring in new areas and in new ways (i.e. SPACs, ICOs).

> I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.

The 90s might be the wrong point to measure from. Isn't it pretty well documented that CEOs are getting paid greater "multiples" of average pay than they had in the past (e.g. they used to be paid 100x, now they're paid 1000x)?

Many of the things used to balance the scales in the past are no longer possible, historically if you owned a business, the workers (who lived in the same area, spoke the same language, and drank at the same pub) could unionize, or decide that they were going to compete with the original business. Now you have a generic international labor force, who dont trust each other, and have large legal infrastructures preventing them from directly forming competing businesses.

Admittedly, the "used to" is rather longer ago than the 90s :-) More like through the 70s.

> I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape ... such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash...

Even if there was a big advantage to hire from the same small pool of acceptable candidates, that's no justification for paying them "entire train cars full of cash." There's all kinds of scarce and valuable skills that are just as rare but compensation doesn't shoot off to infinity.

Again with this sentiment, you're not paying the CEO. "We" didn't decide that, the people with the 3M decided that person's services was worth that amount and it is their money to spend or waste as they see fit.

You get that I'm using that a touch poetically, which is a common usage of "we" in this kind of context, right? I.e. "what changed such that this is now how society operates, even though it seems kinda worse than how it operated before?" I (obviously?) don't mean that we all got together and decided this, and that only a small set of probably-biased-by-their-own-interests people are the ones making the decisions is exactly one of the possible reasons for it that I highlighted, making it (surely?) even clearer what my post was about.

Cool story bro. You should just start your own company and get a CEO and pay her $40k.

> "Is there really no-one at the company who could do the job and would be happy to take a promotion and a "mere" $1M salary?"

I want to reserve my response until you clarify who 'we' refers to. I just do not want to assume.

Why is that insane? A CEO is just a job and how much you get paid depends on how much the industry is willing to pay you. So turning down 10mil to earn 3mil is indeed a sacrifice. Unless you have something against people making a lot of money or think once you hit some number you should not say anything bad about the pay. People don't get salaries because they earned or deserved them, they get them because that's what others are willing to pay for their work.

> So turning down 10mil to earn 3mil is indeed a sacrifice.

Agree whole-heartedly.

I'm all for reducing exec pay and wage disparity, but still... let's give ppl props when they do pro-social things. That's the moral equivalent of a talented software eng opting to take a 70% pay cut to work in non-profit or government sector instead of private sector. The majority of ppl reading and judging are doing no such thing

Taking money from an organization that intends to do good and riding it into the ground is sabotage, not charity. At least Marissa Mayer fixed Yahoo up long enough to pull off a sale. Firefox alternates between stagnation and self-injury.

First, I would still say yahoo was operated worse. Second, job performance has nothing to do with how much pay she accepted before even performing the job. If she is that bad they can fire her. Again, "their" money. Mozilla is not a corporation that wants to do good, it is a corporation that needs to make a profit. Which Mozilla service are you paying for? The few that coulr potentially be paid were implemented recently much to the horrir of the small number of fanboys.

Because there are plenty of people who are willing to take on the role, who love Mozilla products and actually believe in the mission. 3 mil. is more than enough for the CEO of a non-profit or a company like Mozilla. If she were to really be worth 10 millions as CEO she would be at FAANG, or a unicorn, etc... In that comment which at the time people called out, she was just doing more of the virtue signaling we are used to, and just revealed the type of leadership Mozilla have.

that is less a problem with mozilla and more a problem with CEO class that get massive pay yet often its difficult to distinguish who is a real proffeshional and who is full of hot air

Well, if she can be getting paid $10M somewhere else, then it is a sacrifice.

If that's a real opportunity she has, I wish she'd leave Mozilla and take it. But given the abysmal performance of Mozilla, is she actually worth as much as she claims? Why should we believe her?

That's what happens when you cheap out on a CEO and pay them $3M instead of $10M :-)

This is a "let them eat cake" style of statement. Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake, but read the room. Especially as Firefox has made lots of layoffs recently.

I can't parse this comment. Who's the princess, what's the bread, and what's the cake? And what are they supposed to read in the room? As far as I can tell, "read the room" is something that people have been saying a lot on twitter over the past few months in order to silence people when they are correct, therefore difficult to argue with.

> Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake,

This is the opposite of what the anecdote is meant to say, right? The joke is that the poor can't sustain themselves on cake because lacking bread also means lacking cake. Is $3 million the bread? Is the CEO the poor? Am I having a stroke?

"Let them eat cake" is a famous example of "not reading the room" because it was said while French peasants were starving and the royals feasted. Its an incredibly crass thing to say, like bragging about your wealth while your next door neighbor is being evicted.

By comparison here is a CEO announcing a noble "sacrifice" at 3 million/yr salary while people and projects were being axed at Mozilla - and in my view Mozilla continues to falter relative to what its trajectory could have been given the extreme amounts of capitol and talent they've had access to.

A real sacrifice would've been to take $0 (presumably this individual is already enormously wealthy).

The people getting axed...how much money did they make per year? Are they now in the poor house?

Is it not standard for lower paid product and sales roles to be axed first in these circumstances?

You do realize in these organizations not everyone is making 150k+.

I'm not parent and I agree that it was not a carefully thought-out comment, but I'll give it a shot.

comment 1: How dare she say 3 million is a sacrifice? That's more money than many of us will see in an entire decade, if not more! None of us can get imagine getting 3 million!

comment 2: Well she could make 10 million, so 3 million to her is chump change.

My guess is as follows: The "us" in comment 1 is the poor, the failure to "read the room" is comment 2 mentioning the 10 million when the vast majority of people identify with comment 1 and thus think mentioning 10 million when even 3 million is unattainable is tone deaf.

Thus, loosely speaking, 10 million is cake, 3 million is bread.

But I agree with you that the analogy is not perfect.