MDN Plus

OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down.

So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.

The person you replied to was specific as well. Execs are paid well industry wide. If you aren't willing to pay market rates then you aren't going to get competent leadership to manage organizations at that scale.

Currently seems paying market rates and not getting competent leadership, so something seems amiss.

Ah yes, FireFox's issue is they're paying Execs below market rate.

If they want to get better market share they should start paying more!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol...

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Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?

Do you apply the same rigorous standards to all your purchases?

Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?

Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of Nestlé, Nike, etc.?

(EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.)

People like only certain things about Mozilla, most of which aren't due to execs. Firefox being well engineered (and not having meddling pointless features such as "Colorways") and up on the latest standards, good engineering representation in browser standards from a non-Google, and MDN. That'll do. Oh, and Rust, but the execs already did for that.

Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.

And that's why people are worried about where the money will go.

So, good engineering things are not because of execs.

Bad engineering things are all because of execs?

No idea. But the things I care about are detailed and engineering-related. Execs shouldn't exist by default. Even if I couldn't point to anything bad they've done, that's not enough activation energy to require them.

Generally, yes. That is the allegation. If you don't agree with that fine, but I'd imagine alot of engineers would agree with that in general with their experience in industry. Let alone Mozilla.

But Mozilla's revenue and market share went down since the drastic increase in execs' pay. Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?

The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is that it's Google's fault, because they changed their sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to square 0.

I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give to Mozilla any money since that change happened.

Yes, that would be revelation. Engineers saying engineers are right, doctors saying doctors are right.

I spend as much of my time, and as many of my resources, as possible away from those horrid greedy bastards.

I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not good. Our system where huge resources go to a self selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it as I can.

I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I do not.

Looks like if you do pay market rates, you still get execs running a company into the ground. The high salary comes with the expectation of results.

I agree with that but I see 90% of the time people just complaining about the high salaries. As much as those salaries may seem ridiculous the Bay Area is a very competitive place and I do not see many competent execs taking a massive downgrade in compensation just because they may believe in Firefox on principal.

That being said poor performance is for sure something to criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about competing with some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth - not an easy job.

>Would that be acceptable in a for-profit company?

If their revenue went way up, absolutely. Which is what happened when the executives got more money.

what revenue? Without Google's half billion dollars per year they are dead.

Nothing is amiss. Paying competitive salary is necessary condition not sufficient one. Just like paying IT staff competitive salary is basic requirement but that does not guarantee projects' success at all.

Are you serious? What company or organization works like this? With goal posts like this, you've got the perfect excuse to never donate any money to them.

How do you give an organization money, and ensure that that specific dollar doesn't go to the execs? Any money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to pretend they don't exist.

They didn't get competent leadership though...

> This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.

I would bet you that most people are in the latter group, not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such services from ordinary companies, as I don't see sufficient value in them.

In 2010 it was a tenth of a billion dollars. If any public company went from revenues of $120 million to $560 million executives would unquestionably get a raise.

And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.

It isn't just "Mozilla Execs", it's specifically Mitchell Baker[1] because of:

> "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.""

> "By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.[15]"

That is, the people who developed one of the more hyped new programming languages of the last decade were let go, the main MDN team is gone, FireFox OS is gone, long-standing FireFox loyalists were given reduced customisations and a move towards a copy-of-Chrome-but-worse experience, marketshare is down enormously since the peak, there's been a churn of janky also-rans like promoting Goya beans or something, who even knows.

What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries? Microsoft's share price is 7x higher since Satya Nadella took over. Tesla's share price is 15x higher since 2018. Amazon's share price has almost tripled since 2018. Apple's share price has more than tripled since 2018. Facebook almost doubled since 2018 (but has fallen some). CEO thinks it's unfair that other CEOs get paid more??

It's not even uniquely greedy, if the service is going well. I am annoyed at travel tickets for trains in the UK which are more expensive than flying, often late, all too often don't turn up at all, often crowded to the point of cramped standing room with the argument that "our contracts prevent us buying more carriages". If then the CEOs were saying "it's unfair that well run travel company CEOs earn more, so we're going to raise our salaries" that would be annoying. (They probably even do say that, but they have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, or to make up something about doing a good job).

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

Paying Mozilla is mostly a donation, not a purchase. It is reasonable to scrutinize on the accountability when it comes to donations, even for normal donors.

I do have a regular donation to the Mozilla Foundation but I too wish I could chip in specifically to Firefox proper.

>What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries?

Using the same timescale as the Wikipedia article, 2008 to 2018, Mozilla's revenue had risen from $78.6 million to $436 million. A more than 400% increase. Does that justify her salary?

Using the same timescale, Wikipedia itself (the Wikimedia Foundation) went from $5M revenue to $120M, 24x. [1],[2]. During that time the Executive Director's salary went from $168k to $387k[3]. At the end of Sue Gardner's leadership in 2014 there was a question about her $300k salary[4] which included the response:

"(2) Retention bonus to compensate Sue for lost opportunities during the transition period: $165,000."

This seems to undermine Mitchell Baker's reasons for her salary increase, doesn't it?

Wikipedia also gets a slightly higher score from CharityNavigator than Mozilla, edging them out on more efficient earnings, lower admin overhead, but far ahead on "growth of expenses": https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 vs https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200097189

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#sec...

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

The Wikimedia Foundation is solely a charity and makes it's money from donations. The Mozilla Corporation makes it's money from the contracts the executives negotiate. None of the board members of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the corporation, receive any salary from the Foundation.

They're not really comparable organizations. The corporate comparisons you started with were closer comparison, though Mozilla has some unique circumstances.

Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?

No, I'm normally not that picky (or actually not that well informed, which would be a prerequisite), I just avoid anything from Nestlé, I'm subscribed to /r/FuckNestle/ on Reddit to spot their many subsidiary brands I would not be aware of.

I indeed don't care at all about the MDN Plus perks, it would just be a donation to keep a browser alive. I would hate it if the money did NOT go into keeping the browser alive. Current execs are killing the company while pocketing insane (market competitive, sure, but incommensurate with the absolute lack of success in their leadership) salaries, while devs are being let go. I can't support this status quo with my money.