She wasn’t up to the job but decided to stay there because it afforded her a higher salary than ANY OTHER company would ever hire her for because very few people are worth salaries in the millions and Baker was not one of them.
My problem with Baker wasn’t her compensation it’s that her desire for that compensation caused her to occupy the CEO seat and tank Firefox. I’d rather Mozilla had paid her 50 million to retire and find a new CEO, it probably would have turned out better than to let somebody incompetent do a job because she was selfless in the past.
"According to the company's filings, Mitchell Baker's compensation went from $5,591,406 in 2021 [PDF] to $6,903,089 in 2022." Did not continue to dig further.
Mozilla tanked a lot, even Thunderbird is doing better recently. So definitely part of the 'parasitic upper class.
Definitely no star, heck back in the day he tried to convince Bill Gates to stop investing in this dead end “Windows” project because OS/2 was obviously the future. But certainly not a train wreck like Baker.
Edit: actually revenue did increase a lot under Balmer just not stock price.
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/1399/microsoft-stock-under-st...
Not to say Nadella doesn’t deserve most of the credit but it speaks well of Ballmer that an internally promoted employee like Nadella who replaced him did so well.
Again I can nitpick but he grew revenue and did not fatally injure MSFT. He was mediocre but not terrible is all I’m saying.
Negative salary-achievements correlation controversy
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[15] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million (in 2021, her salary rose again to over $5 million,[16] and again to nearly $7 million in 2022[17]). In August of the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues, after previously laying off roughly 70 in January (prior to the pandemic). Baker blamed this on the COVID-19 pandemic, despite revenue rising to record highs in 2019, and market share shrinking.[18]
In other words, no she definitely is. She fired 250 devs while doubling her pay multiple times to live a luxurious life while lying about the cause. People have to feed their families, she doesn't need that much and this is not good community spirit.
It gets even more interesting googling bit further and becomes a brilliant example of either "money corrupts people" or "i'm romanticising my upperclass upbringing", because she apparently went from patos filled stories about her dad paying just above minimum wage (lol) to firing 250 devs while she ran with the money:
"[about her parents] So I would call them progressive. I would call them really focused on -- well, so for example, he would never pay minimum wage. They ran a small business. It was pretty-- Weber: Doing what? Baker: -- hand to mouth. A pewter factory, making wine goblets and gift items out of pewter. Not so easy to do in the Bay Area, which is expensive. And so he would hire someone at minimum wage. But he had a period of time -- it was six weeks, or two months, or three months, or whatever it was-- after a probationary period, and then he refused. He felt he needed to pay a living wage."
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Leeching is precisely how I would describe someone who demands more and more money each year from a company that's declining due to their own mismanagement and at the same time takes money from those who earn less.
I think Mitchell has made many bad decisions the past few years. When I saw the news, my gut reaction was to post something negative. However, having known her and known all the work she put in early, I wanted to post a counterbalance. She wasn't a great CEO (and the $$ is a very bad look), but she's done a lot of good for the community over the past 20 years.
Oh, and she was considerate towards your feelings in an email, and a followup email?
I too have seen many corporate higher-ups be highly pleasant when you talk/correspond with them. But they do jack shit about the actual issue, but assure you that they care about your feelings.
I'd rather she was an absolute bitch to everyone, but actually steered the organization in the right direction. That would have had a better positive impact on the world than a few placating emails.
But that doesn't change the fact that early on she was instrumental in getting Mozilla off the ground and it wouldn't exist without her.
Both can be true at the same time, and I simply shared my experience of her.
I wonder if being a corporate lawyer at a corporate company is what hobbles Mozilla/Firefox. Could they have found better success, albeit chaotically, being organized/governed like Linux/Debian/Python orgs? And specifically not being for profit? And if so, would someone w/ her background be blinkered enough to not be able to see it?
I also disagree with her salary while layoffs were happening, however recent raises don't negate the fact that she also built Mozilla from the start.
She's not a member of the parasitic upper class. She was laid off from Netscape 20+ years ago, and just never stopped. She kept volunteering for free, and eventually lead the charge to spin it off into its own entity.
You can dislike where Firefox is headed, or be upset about Firefox layoffs (I was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032).
But to act like Mitchell lives in a mansion while leaching off people?? She started from nothing and worked hard on the same mission for 20+ years.