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Let me pay for Firefox

(discourse.mozilla.org)
802 points csmantle | 3 comments | 13 Jul 25 08:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.783s | source
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gr4vityWall ◴[13 Jul 25 10:08 UTC] No.44549048[source]▶
I used to want to donate to Mozilla Foundation, but I've long lost any hope that the corporation would spend that money in a way that makes sense to me. The pessimist on me would expect donated money to be spent on more built-in "campaigns", "studies" or ads. Or maybe a bonus for their executives.

I just want Firefox to be faster. I'm donating to Floorp (a Firefox fork), at least they seem focused on making the browser better.

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Uehreka ◴[13 Jul 25 11:35 UTC] No.44549541[source]▶
I get why people are pissed at Mozilla, but I do feel like people on HN also underestimate how much hating Mozilla is becoming a hacker tribal signifier. It almost feel like each commenter is competing to out-hate the others or to add a layer of “in fact its so bad that we should (consequences)”.

Like, in general, I find that any HN thread where most of the comments are just agreeing, one-upping and yes-anding while invoking the same talking points and terminology (CEO ghouls, etc.) is probably a topic we might need to chill out on.

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ericpauley ◴[13 Jul 25 11:51 UTC] No.44549647[source]▶
Completely agree. For all the hate Mozilla gets on HN, I’ve been using Firefox every day for a decade and it pretty much just works, supports a rich collection of (vetted!) extensions, and performs exceptionally well with sometimes hundreds of tabs.

Mozilla makes mistakes just like any organization but they’ve done and continue to do more for an open Internet than most.

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WhyNotHugo ◴[13 Jul 25 12:04 UTC] No.44549741[source]▶
Firefox works, but it’s got thousands of annoying issues (many of them just paper cuts, but still).

The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs. Imagine how many of those issues could have been ironed out over the years.

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sealeck ◴[13 Jul 25 12:11 UTC] No.44549794[source]▶
The issue with the salary is not that it costs the same as 30 developers – good leadership can make a difference worth >30 developers over the same timespan (especially in an organisation with 1000s of staff). The problem is that the Mozilla leadership hasn't been great, which makes the high salary especially difficult to defend. It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.
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BeetleB ◴[13 Jul 25 13:47 UTC] No.44550438[source]▶
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay an extremely high salary to get a good Mozilla CEO - something like 2-3x the average staff engineer would make sense.

It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.

Yet many over here are getting paid double that.

Salaries are rarely based on value created. They are based on what others pay.

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urda ◴[13 Jul 25 17:53 UTC] No.44552143[source]▶
> It's unclear to me that you need to pay more than $150K total compensation for a good SW engineer.

I, and many good or great SWE's, wouldn't even begin to entertain such a low offer. Your numbers are a little off.

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1. jrflowers ◴[13 Jul 25 18:09 UTC] No.44552247[source]▶
Thousands of software engineers have been laid off in the past few years and the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down. I expect that there will, at some point, be quite a large number that would entertain a hundred and fifty thousand dollars versus no job.
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2. Jach ◴[13 Jul 25 18:32 UTC] No.44552418[source]▶
It can be tricky to narrow down definitions but there are at least a million and probably less than 5 million software developers in the US. The last few years have seen ~100k students graduate with CS degrees each year. Thousands of layoffs over the timespan of years isn't going to impact it all that much. If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded, and anyone with a handful of years of experience is going to be above that and should consider shopping around for >$150k if they aren't there already.
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3. jrflowers ◴[14 Jul 25 06:00 UTC] No.44556907[source]▶
> If you played your cards right you could get a $100k+ starting salary at a BigCo (not necessarily a FAANG) 10 years ago, I only expect that to have expanded

CompSci graduates have a noticeably high unemployment rate at the moment.

I agree that it’s not like everybody is losing their jobs, but the layoffs aren’t because of some cataclysmic economic event like in 00 or 08. Tech companies are choosing to lay off software engineers. Either these companies genuinely don’t need those engineers at all, which would drive down comp because it strengthens management’s negotiating position, or they do need them but have enough money to get by with skeleton crews until the cost of software engineers goes does, which also itself drives down compensation because it strengthens management’s negotiating position.

Either way there is downward pressure on SWE comp, and it’s being exercised by folks that can outlast every last one that insists that they wouldn’t even look at 150k. If your bosses decide you’re worth 70k max and nobody in your industry is unionized you will be looking at 40k being competitive