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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty unfair article.

The author presents firefox market share (a relative term) on one axis and CEO pay (an absolute term) on the other.

The sad reality is that the CEO pay should be a relative metric to tech companies of similar size in the bay area, where Mozilla is based. Or at least US tech companies of similar scale.

As the internet has enveloped the globe in the last 10 years, a huge amount of money has accumulated to this one industry & area. Even if executive salaries were constant, returns from stock at FAANG and startups would, I think, make $2.5mm a pretty small total package for an org like Mozilla.

Eg GitHub founders are now worth billions. A lifetime at 2.5mm wouldn't get you there.

This sucks. It's sad. It's weird. But blaming the good people at Mozilla feels pretty unfair here.

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Pay should be relative to your value to the company and the CEO is not providing said value. You are allowed to run a company that gasp drives down average CEO pay instead of herding your pay brackets.

I disagree. Pay should be relative to the market rate for their skills - capped at your value to the company.

If a company needs to buy some widget - and this widget is worth $100 to the company - the company would be foolhardy to ignore the market and pay $100. Instead, the company should be looking at different suppliers and choosing one with the best quality, price, etc. If there is a lot of supply, it might be able to get the widget for $10. If the supply is limited, it might be forced to spend $90. In both cases though, the value to the company is $100.

If this CEO is not performing adequately in his role, then he should be fired. Full stop. But bringing his pay into the picture (which isn't all that much higher than high-level employees at FAANG) is just trying to incite anger in the mob.

If the widget provides $100 of value, just buy it for $100 and save all the manhours wasted in tendering.

Tendering encourages reduction of quality in order to minimise cost. It wastes time, and time is money. And quite often it means that opportunities are lost whilst wading through tedious processes.

Still it makes no sense to pay people millions of dollars when a company is not doing well financially. In this regards what Iwata did while being CEO of Nintendo during hardship (cutting his salary in half and getting no bonus) is the way to go.

If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well. You might get lucky with someone cheaper, but it will require that luck.

The fact is that 2.5 million probably isn’t enough to get the kind of turnaround leader Mozilla needs. They have no revenue model. You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use. Lots of tech companies spend billions and never find revenue streams outside of their core business until they make acquisitions.

> If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well.

I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People.

What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what if you just get people who focus on financial incentives and career development, and what if those things do not strongly correlate with actually delivering higher value for the company?

> You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use.

"Here's a product that brings in 450-500 million a year, see what you can do". The users of Firefox aren't Mozilla's customers, it's Google & Co that are the customers. The users are the product.

> What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives

You aren’t guaranteed the best people if you do; but you are excluded from getting the best people if you don’t.

If a person is the best person, then all other things being equal (they interview well, like all potential job opportunities equally), they will accept the job with the highest pay. Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.

Focusing on financial incentives and career development is what makes most of us get better. I study my craft and improve not just because of intrinsic value, but because I can make more money. The extrinsic rewards are the only reason people join corporations, otherwise we’d all work for ourselves. You may not like it, but it is true.

> Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.

Yeah, I believe it's an oversimplification to the point that it ceases to be useful. All other things are not the same when you're running a privacy-focused "for the public good and the internet" charity vs when you're running a profit-focused "the public good is irrelevant" ad-tech company.

I don't know who the best developers are, but I have a feeling that a few of them are working on open source projects and aren't working on new ad products that would make them dozens or hundreds of millions if they worked for Google.

My impression is that you'll get a narrow field of candidates if "we pay you a lot" is your argument for why they should work for you. And on the flip side, if you say "we pay you well, but not FAANG level", then you exclude some people with a certain personality trait. I'm not sure that you're creating an issue if you don't attract those people when your motive is not "profit above all else" but essentially "profit doesn't matter, we're a non-profit".

A good CEO of a charity would be pumping their excess income back into the charity, so there's either no need to worry about pay or clearly the CEO is wrong.

Who does this? Maybe Bill Gates or others who have their own foundations. If this were true no charity would be able to find ceos.

Yeah, it really stings when CEO's get paid a lot while their company struggles (especially layoffs, etc).

In the case of for-profit companies like Nintendo, the CEO typically owns a ton of stock. If they turn things around, the financial returns to them will be huge – especially compared to letting the company crater.

Steve Jobs took no salary for years while Apple struggled (great!), and still ended up with several billion dollars, mostly from Apple.

That can't happen with Mozilla. If they cut the CEO pay in half, they'll probably quit and go work somewhere else. Then what?

Do you try to hire some other CEO for a tiny fraction of what they'd earn at an equivalent role at a for-profit company? At a time when Mozilla already looks like a sinking ship? Sorry, most folks who are talented enough to have multiple options would choose something else, even if there are "warm fuzzy feelings" for working at a non-profit.

The problem is not that the CEO of Mozilla makes a lot of money. The problem is that this CEO of Mozilla makes a lot of money.

> The sad reality is that the CEO pay should be a relative metric to tech companies of similar size in the bay area, where Mozilla is based. Or at least US tech companies of similar scale.

Or move to Europe or Asia and get 2-5x output per Google Search dollar.

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