Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

And Mozilla's poor track record suggests that if Mozilla insists on paying the same CEO salary, they might do well to find a different CEO to give it to.

I think the point is less that this CEO should take a pay cut — although she probably should — but more that the mediocrity + layoffs + exorbitant-CEO-salary situation here reeks of self-dealing.

Let's assume good faith and that executive pay in general at Mozilla was not competitive.

That would be similar to a company noticing that it has been underpaying software engineers and then choosing to bump up compensation significantly.

A question that raises is: do executives (and software engineers?) bring the value that is associated with those pay grades, given that they seem increasingly detached from other roles?

I don't know - are many people here on HN familiar enough with executive-level strategy, connections and work practices to discuss whether that value is justified?

In honesty I believe that some executives are probably capable of using their personal networks to bring on-board significant expertise, industry influence, negotiating power and other talents (such as, frankly, the ability to dominate conversations and sway opinions, for better or worse - as long as it doesn't hurt the company) that are typically hard to quantify or certificate.

If the tech industry continues consolidating into a smaller number of more important companies then it seems understandable that those influence and network effects become more important in order to stay competitive.

I'm not sure if that's fair - those might not be the kind of skills that can necessarily be learned; I'd argue they're frequently side-effects of people's upbringing, social networks, and psychological profiles (including some dark/problematic personality types). But it explains the realpolitik of the situation without demonizing individual decision-makers for what may be rational choices in the environment.

- the (old) rule of thumb is that each point (1%) of search market share is worth $1 billion per year to an ad serving company. That's why Mozilla's Google contract is so lucrative, and why they need to fight for market share.

- publishing a current browser on desktop and mobile is incredibly rare and valuable to the world, despite profitability, but also expensive to maintain.

Opera was bought by a Chinese group for $600 million for that reason:

https://www.engadget.com/2016-07-18-opera-browser-sold-to-a-...

- I've used Firefox as my daily browser since 2000 (It was named something else back then, maybe SeaMonkey) when I worked at Netscape (I say next to Mike Homer.) It has always worked well, unless you're a partisan Google fanboy, and the Firefox developer tools options are fine for vanilla-js work. Try it out.

- Mitchell Baker was a very early non-engineering employee of Netscape. She's a lawyer.

- I met Mitchell Baker at one of the early O'Reilly Open Source conferences (between 2000 and 2006). She was making $500,000/year then, now it's $2.4 million. Based on the current market share and failure of many Mozilla subprojects, I think she is important to Mozilla for legal/governance/continuity/Google negotiation projects, but other people should be doing the business/marketing and tech leadership, if available.

- what killed Netscape was a failure of imagination in the end. I talked to some managers, and their belief was that 2,000 employees couldn't be paid after the browser was free.

But that was myopic since Netscape had the people to move into early ecommerce, content, search, video ... you name it. (Early Yahoo servers were actually hosted in a Netscape rack at a time when bandwidth was a prohibitve $1000/Mbps. In fact part of the reason AOL bought Netscape was because their respective bandwidth loads were complementary.)

Meta: I'm shadow-banned, so somebody please approve/upvote/whatever this post to make it visible.

on edit: removed extra what

I agree with you, but isn't the problem more that they're sinking the ship? To take it to the extreme, if I joined a fortune 50 company as the CEO, and started losing billions a year with my decisions, should the board pay me more because I've created a risk to my reputation?