> your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.
It's entirely possible that Mitchell Baker was responsible for getting hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Firefox when they switched search provider and then back, invoking a clause in their agreement with Yahoo.
Which seems like some pretty skilful playing of a bad hand.
I talked to one of the corporate lawyers that worked that deal, and told him it was a genius move.
But I don't see why it needs particularly rare skills.
And lots of people do really hard jobs for much much much less money.
I wouldn't want that job, and I'm not sure I could do it.
Always being on-call, and having to constantly context switch and synthesize questionably-accurate material from reports, to make important decisions.
(And that's not even broaching the political tasks... which are required, because it's the only way to become and remain CEO)
No one is hired to fail, and no one tries to fail.
They're hired to try and succeed, and sometimes it doesn't go that way.
> I wouldn't want that job. However, with the right team I AM sure I could do it.
Remember as a tech lead, if you are heroically writing a lot of code burning the midnight oil, banging out tickets and completing sprints by yourself, you are failing. As a CEO, the more you are doing the more you are failing. This is probably why it is so hard for people like us to he leaders. It is very difficult to delegate and not meddle with things. It is easy to say let go but very hard to actually do so.
Remember that even Steve Jobs delegated all operations and supply chain stuff to tim cook. And that's Steve Jobs! We are not Steve Jobs.
There is no reason why my manager should make more money than me.
There are many jobs that I wouldn't want and that are not paid 6M a year. There are some things that I can do that not everybody can do, and still I am not paid 6M.
You can try reverting it: a CEO earning 6M a year could not necessarily be a firefighter. Yet firefighters are not paid 6M a year. And they actually risk their life.
IMHO, the stronger argument against CEO compensation is that the delta (in company performance) between a great CEO and a midling CEO isn't equal to their compensation.
If a firefighter sucks at their job... someone dies. But (unfortunately, if we're being honest) that's worth less than +/-1% of large company performance.
(Personally, I think public safety, medical non-doctors, and teachers should all be paid a lot better)
I would consider most min wage jobs harder than what i (computer programmer) do. Compensation is often inversely correlated with how shitty the job is.
I don’t either! But apparently they’re rare. One pays dearly when trying to go cheap, or broaden the pool in seemingly innocuous ways, in executive recruiting.
> lots of people do really hard jobs
Fortitude is necessary, but by itself insufficient.
Do we have good evidence for that, or is it just what the people that hire CEOs tend to think?
When I think of disastrous CEOs that I've managed to hear about, they weren't cheap. They got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters.
(Edit: Missed the word “never” up top)
Watching The Grand Tour[1] season 1 it feels stilted, awkward, like they are reciting their lines for some forced humor while Amazon showers cash and flashy cars all around trying too hard. If it was like this with three unknown people I wouldn't bother - I'm only watching on the hope that the lightning in a bottle sparks up again as they settle in, because the highs of Top Gear were good - friends messing about for a laugh, daring bold ideas, beautiful filming and settings.
e.g. scaling the Guallatiri volcano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOcJOn0nxnU
Crossing salt flats in Botswana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OETj9aTYO2Q
Driving to the North Pole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkvASxfEWQ
Driving the Bolivian Death Road: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daQcxVqQJsI
Building their own amphibious cars and crossing the English Channel in them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTVPPTV-bQM
Trying to run out of fuel before arriving at the Chernobyl exclusion zone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YtVV1VJ4f8
Getting lost trying to leave a traditional Italian city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI
Budget Italian Supercars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCff8nCxBU
[1] When they stopped Top Gear, Amazon snapped up Clarkson Hammond and May to make a Top Gear knockoff for Amazon Prime, that's The Grand Tour.
I think so, and it’s largely in the attrition of start-ups due to executive leadership breaking down. Start-up founders are already a rarefied group; that so many break down or flip out or can’t handle all the balls in the air is telling. (There is plenty of academia on the topic. It doesn’t support massive paydays. But certainly single-digit millions, i.e. life-changing money for someone who may already be rich.)
> got paid huge amounts to cause their disasters
Look at the state of the company they took over. Golden parachutes are often required to woo top talent to a trash pile because top talent knows the world is stochastic.
Yes, I'm specifically thinking of companies that were doing fine when they took over.
Remember Mitchell killed FirefoxOS (I know you were likely happy about that @gkoberger), and now Mozilla is complaining about not getting level playing access to other OSes. Guess what, when you have no platform, you'll be forever a second class citizen.
Baker is a good motivational speaker, but should never have been allowed to made any operational decision.
But Mozilla had no chance in the real smartphone market. If Microsoft couldn't manage to attract developers with their billions and dedicated hardware, Firefox supplying only the OS and no hardware just had zero chance to make it mainstream. It would have been relegated to the same position as Sailfish: A cool curiosity but not interesting enough for anyone but some hobbyists to develop for.
I don't think it was a bad idea trying: At that time the duopoly in the smartphone market was not as firmly established and there were other open projects like Ubuntu as well. They might have attracted a huge party like Samsung (after all, they did go for Tizen in the end!) and things might have worked out differently. But the choice to drop it was inevitable at that point.
KaiOS got Whatsapp support thanks to shipping in India with a single carrier (Jio) that has a very large user base. Deployment in the rest of the world has been a struggle and the company is not in great shape.
All that to say that Mozilla could have kept the lights on for a couple more years and get access to large markets. Hard to predict what would have happened but we certainly would have more diversity in the OS space.
Which would have been because they thought they could make more money using it than Android.
Which probably wouldn't have bode well for user-friendly changes to the base image.
Android's value prop to manufacturers was "Was to sell a lot of mobile phones, but not have to pay for most of the development? And get a working Maps solution? Here you go." Which Google could afford to torch money on.
And I'd imagine carriers don't, as they'd no doubt love to go back to the feature-phone days, but they're all (individually) too weak to do anything about it.
Only aggregated can they offer the resources to support an alternative.
My thoughts that FirefoxOS was mismanaged from an executive level are in no way a reflection of the work I saw coming out of your team, and I took no pleasure in it shutting down. I felt the executive team got caught up too much with things like presenting at Mobile World Congress, at the cost of a ton of focus.
Mozilla should have been focusing on the one thing anyone cared about, the browser. Rust and Servo were the correct risks to take. But I know, hindsight is 20/20.
When the thing you are good at is being a CEO (as opposed to, say, being a teacher), then you are very lucky. Because other CEOs before you managed to make it acceptable to earn an indecent salary for just doing a job. Ok, let's say they don't sleep at all, so they can work 2-3x as much as the average people. Are they paid 2-3x more? No! They're paid orders of magnitudes more. That's indecent.
Right now, you’re simply complaining about a perceived problem without offering any logical argument for an alternative.
I do not mean to sound flippant, I’d like to hear what your alternative ideas are.
To the problem of human beings receiving way too much money for the time they spend doing their job?
Easy: crazy taxes. If the company really wants to increase the salary up to some limit, knowing that 95% of that increase will go into taxes, then good for them. Otherwise they can do something else, like increasing other salaries or hiring people.
Also if you ask me, there should be laws for the difference between the lowest and the highest salary in a company. I.e. "the highest salary cannot be more than X times the lowest salary". Which means that if the CEO wants to earn more, they need to raise the lowest salaries.
Consider that you could attempt to solve your perceived problem in multiple ways within the existing structure. 1) Garner public support and lead a campaign to change our laws to be more inline with the thoughts you have around increasing taxes; 2) Exploit the market opportunity you’ve identified (of paying CEO’s less to pay others more) by starting companies that follow this ethos, attract talent, and deliver value to consumers; 3) Attain a leadership position as CEO or in the Board of Directors for a company where you can take responsibility and change these perceived compensation problems; so on and so forth.
The responsibility lies with you to bring the change you seek.
I'd imagine that at a place like Mozilla (effectively a high-tech nonprofit primarily staffed by white-collar workers), this difference in compensation is actually not that big, compared to, say, a business that hires hourly workers.
Who said it would? Though I may argue that it is not clear at all if you really get the best person for the job when you make them rich just by getting the job. Not saying that all the CEOs are here "just for the money", but... well if they are not here for the money, why do they get that kind of salaries?
> I feel like something has taken a left turn in this thread.
I feel like when people are talking about the salary of a CEO and whether they "earned it" or not, I am entitled to say that no human being can ever deserve that kind of salary. Just like a liberal could say "they don't deserve it because they did not please the shareholders that much".
Because if that's the case, I think it is completely stupid. You don't get to make up rules and then say that I am objectively wrong because your made-up rules disagree with me.
FF has 3.3%.
I think FF would have done mych better under his leadership.
The idea that nobody possibly could reconcile these issues and yet should still be paid egregiously is absurd
Now imagine your market share is down a ton (and decreasing), and there's no clear way to change that trajectory.
Then imagine that despite being CEO, you're owned by a non-profit. So, you have a boss, and your boss has different goals than you do.
Then imagine attracting and retaining top talent, while not being able to give out equity.
Then imagine that your product is free. You can't charge more for it; you give (almost) everything away for free and there's no clear path to monetization.
And then imagine that almost all of your money comes from your biggest competitor, and your only lever is to negotiate (from a position of weakness, because they're much bigger) a deal every 3 years in order to keep paying your employees.