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Comment by Spooks | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I never understood that argument. We have a fairly large and wonderful kids hospital that looks for donations and some of my friends said they wouldn't donate because their CEO makes 500k and he should donate his money instead.

I had to explain you want to recruit great talent, and that 500k is less than he could make some place else.

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Right. What people actually want is some form of income equality, which would bring executive level salaries in line with their actual worth. You're not going to achieve that by starving non-profits of executive talent in the meantime.

I respect you a lot, but how is what Mozilla's doing in regards to that at all respectable? It's not "starving them of talent" to not increase Baker's pay as Mozilla is laying off employees? She's been there since (almost) the beginning, and the performance of Mozilla has gotten worse over the last decade.

I'm responding to the general complaint that executives at large non-profits are paid too much, and therefore the non-profit is not using money wisely, and so should not be donated to. There's a certain pool of people who are qualified to run companies of these sizes, and in order to attract that talent, you need to pay a competitive wage. The non-profit-ness of the company can be a factor, but like it or not, money is a major motivator, and will affect what kind of talent you can recruit. The problem isn't that a given non-profit executive is overpaid, the problem is that all executives are overpaid.

This isn't a Mozilla problem, it's an income equality problem. Punishing Mozilla by restricting the size of the pool from which they can recruit won't solve the problem.

I can't speak to the current Mozilla executives' performance. I'm not qualified to judge that. I will say that browser market share seems a poor metric, especially given the reach and pocketbook of Mozilla's primary competitor.

In general I definitely agree with you, certainly.

I bet a non-profit like that could find many qualified executives for much less money. There's an amazing amount of talent in the middle of most org structures that never make much past $100k/yr. I'm certain that a handful of these people would excel if given a chance and promoted to the top.

This doesn't happen because most boards are a good ol' boys club where networking matters, not because of a lack of available talent at a price point.

The Mozilla Corporation laid off like 70 employees the other day, and Baker's compensation has been inversely tied to the performance of Mozilla.

I doubt it has been tied, as in a contractual goal.

The word you're looking for is "correlated".

You're assuming the $500k guy is great talent.

Our local YMCA pays the Executive Director $400k/year. The child care workers make $11.50/hr + free membership. (ie. minimum wage) The Y is great, but I'm not donating anything to them.

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