Only in fairy tale land does CEO/Executive compensation reflect performance.
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Mozilla lays off 70
891–900 of 962 posts
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#892Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profit…
> She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell. You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million. Is there some connection you would like to disclose? by the way, I'm not arguing her posi…
> Is there some connection you would like to disclose?
You're not allowed to post insinuations like that to HN. It's nearly always imaginary and poisons discussion badly. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#893Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place. I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component.…
It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?
I seem to recall some article about their expenses a couple years ago, and that their marketing department and budget exceeded development and infrastructure combined.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#894Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has she brought 2.5m of growth to the company in the last year?
I don't think that way of looking at things is fruitful, a CEO may have "presided" over huge growth, way above their compensation, but in practice that growth is most likely down to an amalgam of all the workers (and might have been higher without the CEO, for example). Each worker gives the same, ultimately, an hour of their precious life each hour they work.
Workers have goals, and they can accomplish those goals while macro goals like 'company success' fail.
The ceo is responsible for those macro goals. Those macro goals are failing, ergo while most works should be receiving increases in comp, the CEO should be seeing a decrease.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#895I don't understand Mozilla. How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends $450m annually and dedicates $43m just for future endeavors? Why couldn't they just focus on making the best browser possible with a small dedicated team?
> How did the go from a lightweight Mozilla Browser alternative to a company that spends Well, I mean, they started off as a HTTP server company with a not lightweight browser, won an antitrust case but lost the war, and reformed as a non profit. Or, well, a for profit company wholly owned by a non profit. At which point they went about rebuilding Netscape suite, the one with mail clients and calendars (and IRC and n…
Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#896Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand what you're saying, but the point is you're wrong. A company cannot go around firing any employees that donates or otherwise supports a candidate from a particular party, for example. The protections read: > No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or f…
Do you know the difference between threatening someone to coerce them into action, and actually doing it for said actions?
Both are prohibited, "...through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment". It's illegal to do influence employees through means of discharge or through threat of discharge. Firing someone for political activity and threatening to fire someone for political activity are both in violation of these employment protections.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#897Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lawyers in California disagree: https://www.worklawyers.com/illegal-firings-california/
That's a lawyer's marketing blog selling his services to sue for wrongful termination. The labor code § 1101 they cite is the same thing : it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions. This is an important distinction. It is illegal for an employer to threaten all employees with termination if they do not vote…
> it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions.
So your idea is that it's not okay to threaten to fire an employee over political actions, but it is okay to actually fire someone over political actions? No worker protections protects against both. Read it closely:
> No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through _or_ by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.
It prohibits both discharge and threat of discharge. The argument that Mozilla did not threaten to discharge Eich, and thus discharging Eich because of his political activity is not relevant. Both are prohibited.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
MoCo doesn't get the goodies. It's a cash generator (in theory, probably not so much at the moment) for MoFo, and money has to flow only in that direction as I understand it. It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.
No, sorry -- it is encumbered as a for-profit to pay taxes, but it cannot operate as a for-profit wholly owned by private investors or public shareholders would (I'm not saying that is good or bad). It is different. It's like many sports stadia/teams, universities, hospitals: for-profit wholly owned sub of a non-profit. As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-prof…
Thanks for the correction, I do appreciate it.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#899Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.
You've been downvoted; I sympathize. While you stick to "speech", I think you miss two things, one about speech and the other from a different area of law: 1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Am…
Respectfully, with full benefit of hindsight, do you think it would have been better if you had stayed at Mozilla, forcing them to either fire you (which would have been illegal) or learn to deal with dissent? I ask not to criticize but to strategize.
Thanks for standing up and fighting these good fights.
Re: Mozilla lays off 70
#900Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him. Just because someone has a CEO label doesn't mean they have to be paid extreme amounts of money.
>There's hundreds of other engineers that can probably do as good of a job or better than him. Says only someone who hasn't seen what happens when the average IC is forced into management.
Won't know until we try =)