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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

Fuck, I'll do it for a mere million dollars. The market has spoken.

I can't do much worse than losing 85% market share.

You'd think that there are even qualified people who would do it for (almost) free, just for the chance of building a resume...

As a professional that gets offers like this ("it will be good for your portfolio") I hate this comment.

If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Apparently you get monkeys if you pay millions too...

Well it's the market rate, right?

That's because you're looking at this with your "professional" hat on. If your look at this with your "philanthropist" hat on, the optics are suddenly very different.

There's a weird type of logic going on where almost everyone who would be willing to do it for almost free is probably not qualified for the job. Would you really stake the future of your foundation on someone who still needs to build their resume?

I don't believe that for a second. Unless you just mean it in the sense of "90% of people that apply to a job aren't good at it". You can get many many qualified people for $250k.

Paying more doesn't get rid of the risk, so yes do the version that has risk but without the bonfire of cash.

$2.5 million per year is in the top 0.1% of income in the United States. No matter how you shake it, whether you want people with management experience, tech experience, browser experience, or some combination thereof, you will find a significantly large number who would be able to do the job, do it well, and make more than their current salary.

I bet any mid level tech manager from a large company (who loves open source) would do a much better job and work for 1/4 her salary until he proved he was worth her old salary and raised the tides of success for the company.

You could make this same argument about professional athletes, but all across the world no one seems to follow through on this obvious money-saving hack. So I presume it's more complicated than you're suggesting.

Many peofessional athletes are not well paid at all so I am not sure I get your point.

Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m. There are other C levels that make 3 times what the Toyota CEO earns in direct compensation.

Japanese CEO salaries in general seem to be below USD1m on average.

Those numbers seem so much saner than the US.

Still insane, though. Nobody needs that kind of pay. This is not supply and demand, this is the executive class enriching themselves.

I disagree, if you're a company raking in $270B a year in revenue, you want the absolute best running it. The Toyota CEO is like 0.001% of the revenue, an extremely small price to pay for the right management.

> Japanese CEO salaries are famously very low. The Toyota CEO makes about USD 3.5m

I'm genuinely curious: Do you not see how insane it is that you believe this is low? Earning even a tenth of that would be stratospherically high.

It’s all relative. Compared to their western counterparts, these numbers are low.

Toyota is a huge company though. It's nothing like Mozilla. I would imagine there's a lot of responsibility riding on it. And I'd imagine that in Japanese culture badly performing CEOs actually face consequences.

We can show with good data that the actual CEO is not qualified either for this job. So why not getting somebody unqualified but cheaper?

Almost everyone in business has an MBA so that qualification is pretty easy to get.

The passion they need is a lot harder.

Do nonprofits really care about the market? Not sure how that works, what would it take to replace her if she doesn't want to be replaced?

The professionals that work in those nonprofits do. If you want a capable manager or SEO, you need to pay a correct market price.

Market rates don't matter all that much if the person setting them has a significant influence on what they are. It's like a child determining their allowance based on which one of their friends was able to grab the most money from their mom's purse.

If I cared badly enough about the mission and it wasn't a for-profit enterprise, I'd take the pay cut. The non-monetary part of my compensation (the feel-good factor and the actual good done in the world that I can't get in a for-profit enterprise) would more than make up for it, at least for a couple of years.

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