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

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

#521

Post by Qwertious »

bawolff wrote: post #223
edude03 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs. 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?

People aren't paid what they "deserve" but what value they provide to the company. If the situation exists (whether created by the CEO or not) that makes it more expensive to replace the CEO, then unless they plan on firing the ceo, the ceo's value to the company increases because they are expensive to replace. Or to put another way, life isn't fair and outcomes dont neccesarily align with what people deserve in a mo…

Also people aren't paid what value they provide to the company, but what they can negotiate for - for example, if you need your job then your boss can get away with paying you peanuts even if you do 3x the work of your colleagues.

Incidentally, this is the basis of unions - the union negotiates your salary with the union's negotiating power of having the company's entire staff walk, which hurts far more than merely losing one employee.

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

#522

Post by arethuza »

jeltz wrote: post #513
culturestate wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to. Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.

Is that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.

Definitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.

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

#523

Post by mensetmanusman »

Was Eich a turning point in Mozilla’s failure? I remember almost all my distant family in other parts of the country cancelling Mozilla because of the situation.

(Remember this is the organization being well run previously, until someone dug through private political data and found the previous CEO had made donations that were deemed double plus ungood by a minority of stakeholders.)

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

#525

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

ekianjo wrote: post #128
AmericanChopper wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had one of those. He was chased out for making $3,100 in donations the wrong political causes.

This cant be true because cancel culture does not exist, I am being told.

Berate the person that votes differently than yourself - that’s how you signal you support democratic choices...act as if there are none.

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

#526

Post by jacquesm »

gadders wrote: post #495
jacquesm wrote: post #100

> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That must be a real comfort to all the people they laid off. This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.

I realise some people didn't agree with his politics, but I wonder what the trajectory of the company would have been under Brendan Eich.

I think the big problem is that Mozilla/FireFox receiving money from Google served essentially as a bribe that allowed Google to pull a bunch of anti-competitive behavior that cost FF marketshare.

If not for that we could have easily seen a repeat of Netscape vs Microsoft, but it is hard to consciously decide to bite the hand that feeds you, especially when it is connected to the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla.

I suspect FF would have lost marketshare in any "under Eich" scenario too, maybe not as fast and maybe he would have re-focused the company earlier.

But that's all water under the bridge we are where we are today.

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

#527

Post by rattray »

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.

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

#528

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #208

My opinion for the last few years has been that firefox is a total shitshow. There's no innovation in usability whatsoever. All it does is open websites and if you want anything fancy beyond that you'll have to get an extension. Chrome already does this and markets itself as just doing it better while firefox kinda just passively takes it. Normal users don't read nerdy tech blogs explaining why the latest under-the-h…

> All it does is open websites

This... sounds good to me?

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

#529

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

RobertoG wrote: post #69

This: "Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [..]. Payments to Baker have more than doubled in the last five years." and this at the same time: "Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people." It's shameful. Specially for a "non profit".

That’s how you know it’s performative wokeness.

There should be more uproar about an indefensible salary like that but the CEO is a woman with asymmetric hair and conformist opinions.

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

#530

Post by lucideer »

rattray wrote: post #507
lucideer wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity. > Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model? This line of logic is so prevalent in the world, and isn't evidence-based.…

It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less. How? Who? Would you find someone who hasn't previously run a large, innovative tech org? How would you determine that they'd be good at this job? (Remember, switching costs for CEOs is high).

> It sounds like you're arguing that Mozilla could attract a more competent CEO while paying them much less.

The current CEO is well remunerated and seems by many popular accounts to lack competence, so this seems like a relatively low bar as bars go.

> How?

Hiring competent staff at any level is a challenge and depends on many things; there's no magic bullet. I at no point argued that hiring a competent CEO was easy, just that linking salary to competence as part of that hiring process is a faulty metric.

I'd say refining any hiring process by removing faulty metrics would be a good thing. Wouldn't you agree?

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