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Winifred Mitchell Baker earns over 3 million dollars per year as CEO of Mozilla.

How many ads do they have to sell to earn only her salary. It’s mindboggling [1]. And she thinks she is „underpaid“.

Browser share down to 3.45% and they only live off their Google Money for the default search engine. If that drys up ...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker




I think it's funny to see the HN split brain on this: we have nearly daily threads where people soothe themselves by saying that their salary is justified by what people are willing to pay them and not their productivity, and weekly threads where a relatively small-fry CEO is disparaged for her salary.

Is the CEO of Mozilla "worth" $3M/year? I don't know. But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard from every other shmuck in this industry.


She's disparaged for giving herself a significant raise at the same time as laying off a bunch of people. And Firefox has continued to lose market share since then.


She didn't "give herself" a raise. That's almost never how executive compensation works (why would any company allow its CEO to pay themselves as much as they want?). The board voted to give her a raise, in accordance with their bylaws[1].

I linked her personal justification below, but to summarize: relative to her professional cohort, Baker is substantially underpaid. Not doing layoffs would have meant offering pay cuts to a significant number of highly qualified engineers, causing attrition. Instead of doing things the slow and painful way, she did them the fast and painful way. If I was in her position and had the knowledge I currently do (i.e., that just about anyone working at Mozilla can find employment elsewhere easily), I would probably have done the same thing.

None of this, however, means that I think CEOs should be paid as much as they are.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/bylaws/


> I linked her personal justification below

Might you try sharing that again? :)



I think it's a lot easier to criticize Mozilla here because the metrics are obvious. You can draw a chart going up and call that a graph of Baker's salary over time, and then superimpose a chart going down and call that Firefox's market share over time.

And from there it's very easy to ask why Mozilla's CEO keeps getting raises (hell, and hasn't been fired yet) while their main product keeps doing worse and worse by really the only metric that matters for this type of product.


If we're doing charts, you should probably superimpose a third: the average compensation of a CEO at a firm with a similar number of MAUs. Baker is probably underpaid, on average, for the size of Firefox's user base.

Does this mean that she's actually undercompensated? No. $3M/year is an obscene amount of money to pay anyone. But her public position is factually correct[1]: she could go somewhere else and make significantly more money, and it's up to the Mozilla board to determine whether that's a bluff or not.

[1]: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/paradise/money/


Given how terribly Firefox has done under her watch, the board absolutely should call that bluff. If she quits, it's a win. If she accepts a lower salary, it's a win.


> she could go somewhere else and make significantly more money

With all due respect, that statement elicits a massive DOUBT reaction. It's the sort of thing that the C class spouts to justify their backscratching, but it's hardly a fact for most of them - and for Baker in particular, at this point.


In that case, her board should call her bluff. It's no problem to me if they do!

I wonder how much they'll need to pay her replacement.


You just have to glance at their bio to get your answer: they have no idea what they are doing. The role is not compensated and clearly treated as a no-profit club.

The whole system of boards and execs is broken, generally speaking, but at MozCorp it looks more broken than average.


The board of directors probably has a nice cozy salary ... and the downfall is going for more than a decade. They don’t care, why bother.


I think Mitchell should pay Mozilla. Not the other way around.

Not because she is a woman, because she is doing a terrible job.

Mozilla will stay afloat so Google can tell their “we have no browser monopoly” story.

Mozilla gets 1.2 BILLION$ for 3 years. Mind blowing ... and they handle a product as a side project. Unbelievable.


>You can draw a chart going up and call that a graph of Baker's salary over time, and then superimpose a chart going down and call that Firefox's market share over time.

Certainly that is the metric you seem to be focusing on, but maybe the board rewarded her for something else, like reducing debt or improving cash flow or some other metric that might be also very important to Mozilla's long term survival.


Then that's bullshit. Firefox doesn't need Mozilla Corporation to succeed. They should wind down the corp, give any remaining money to the Mozilla Foundation, and run things like most other open source projects that are backed by foundations.


>They should wind down the corp, give any remaining money to the Mozilla Foundation, and run things like most other open source projects that are backed by foundations.

Specifically which project are you referring to and why do you think their success would transfer to Mozilla?


>hell, and hasn't been fired yet)

Are you aware that she became CEO in December 2019? The previous walked away presumably as he knew that layoffs were coming and people would be after his job, making it one of Baker's first acts as CEO.

I get why people are unhappy with her, but most of the problems predate her becoming CEO and the executive budget overall has shrunk as nobody has replaced her ole position to my knowledge.


Mozilla is a welfare company that exists so Google can point to another browser and claim they don’t have a monopoly


Even if this is true, I don't understand how it's material to the statement above.


> But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard from every other shmuck in this industry.

Because they’re not a real company. The same rules don’t apply to Mozilla.


I can't think of any sense in which the corporation that employees Baker is "not a real company." Are you saying that because they're a wholly owned subsidiary?


Companies provide goods and services in exchange for money. If Mozilla was a "real company" their goal would be to increase Firefox's market share.

Google's paying them, but it's not for Firefox to be successful—Google is paying for antitrust cover. To them, Firefox should ideally lumber along with enough market share for them to be considered a "competitor" but not enough to take too much away from Chrome.

Considering Baker's reducing expenses while keeping the status quo: I'd say she deserves that raise from Google's perspective.


> Companies provide goods and services in exchange for money. If Mozilla was a "real company" their goal would be to increase Firefox's market share.

Neither of these is the definition of a company in any country on our planet.

You can dislike her executive compensation (I don't think anybody should be paid that much), but there's nothing illegitimate or particularly unusual about it.


It's sentimental, isn't it? Seeing somebody vastly overpaid, underperforming is one thing, but when it's money to (seemingly) actively run one of your favourite things into the ground, it bites.


It hurts.

And they even want me to donate money to them.


> But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard from every other shmuck in this industry.

If any other schmuck in the industry does as much as a poor job as Baker has done, we'll be in the right by kvetching about them.


I don't know if I would throw that stone in this particular glass house. Socially speaking, the average SWE is probably doing something strictly worse for the world than Baker is (and this is faint praise, to be clear).


In theory this sounds like a decent way to rebuke this point, however there are two important things to consider:

1. Your average software developer employee just simply doesn’t have that much control over their own salary. I believe I may have greater than average control over my own salary, and that doesn’t even compare to the kind of control that high level executives of a company have over their own salaries. Because of this, developers lack the conflict of interest that a CEO has.

2. Though developers may be “overpaid,” especially in the more extreme ends, and other employees may be underpaid, the difference between developers and CEOs is not even in the same wheelhouse. It’s not just a mere discrepancy that can be explained with market rates alone. Data I’ve heard repeated paints a picture that shows CEOs pulling far away of basically everybody, even considering other executive wages being quite high too:

> In 2020, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 351-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 307-to-1 in 2019 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989.

(Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/)

I don’t think the question is whether the CEO is 351 times more important than the average employee below them. I think the question is, how is it even possible that it’s worth it, in terms of outcomes, to have a CEO make this much more than the average employee? Do you actually think that, if accountability were at least as tied to salary as it was for other employees, it would have been possible for things to get this disparate?

Even if it was actually leading to better outcomes for companies, this kind of income inequality is definitely leading to worse outcomes for society.


> Even if it was actually leading to better outcomes for companies, this kind of income inequality is definitely leading to worse outcomes for society.

No disagreement here. I think CEOs should be paid no more than 10 times their lowest paid employee, and that should be made enforceable by law.

Using 150k as a random number[1], Baker is overpaid by roughly a factor of two based on my "ideal" scheme. But I have the sneaking suspicion that HN would gripe even if she took a 50% pay cut.

[1]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm


Well. You got a point... what is a CEO worth. Is Tim Cook worth 100m per year, how can one human create so much „value“.

I don’t know the answer to this question, but i know that Mozilla is a bleeding company, that does not need 10 different nice to have projects, but a strong core product.

I have the feeling that these men and women just milking Mozilla dry. Firefox lost nearly ALL of their market share and I think the salary should be tied to goals. Real goals.


Maybe it's not create only. How easy is it to be in that position and fuck up 100m dollars' worth?


>But it's not clear why Mozilla's apparent executive valuation of her is held to a separate standard

Isn't it? Mozilla is pretty widely regarded as the last defense against complete browser monopoly.

The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from Federal income taxation under IRC 501(c)(3).


My understanding is that Baker is the CEO of the Mozilla corporation, presumably because 501(c)(3)s are subject to additional IRS scrutiny when their compensation is not deemed "reasonable."[1]

Whether or not Mozilla is the "last defense" is immaterial to how much she's paid, as is our Peeping Tom evaluations. If the Mozilla board thinks she's worth that much, then she's worth that much. If you have reasons to doubt their stewardship in ways that would run afoul of the IRS, you should report them.

[1]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...


More I think about it, I feel Firefox should just be a project under the Apache Foundation, which runs tons of wonderful projects. Mozilla shouldn't / needn't exist.


>Browser share down to 3.45% and they only live off their Google Money for the default search engine.

For others wondering, that figure is across all platforms. For Desktop, they're around 7.5% and for mobile it's 0.5%.




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