Comment by Uehreka

> 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.

> Mozilla CEO

Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.

If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.

Has it been good leadership, though?

They invested BILLIONS of dollars on things like:

* Firefox OS * Mozilla Persona * Mozilla VPN * Firefox for TV (e.g. Amazon Fire) * Lockwise * Mozilla Hubs

Did anyone ask for those things? What a huge waste for all of that to be built and abandoned.

> 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.

By objective measure I’d agree with you but you can’t deny the reality of the job market.

If someone is a truly effective CEO they’d be able to get many, many times more than 2-3x staff engineer salary at pretty much any other company out there.

This.

Unfortunately, in our current "Greed is God" late-stage capitalist world, it's virtually impossible to find a competent tech CEO who is willing to work for mere honest wages. And (evidently) too difficult to even find one who's willing to work for 30X.

Fx user here since it was called Phoenix and cookies were called delicious delicacies in the options, and Mozilla browser before that. IMO as a power user, it is a second-rate browser. The bar is set by [Opera v12](https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/).

* no spatial browsing, not even as an extension. This feature alone I would use literally thousands of times a week. * no fit to width * no cycle display images enable/disable/cached * cannot edit menus or icons as simple configuration file * no tab thumbnails * reader mode that actually always works every single time, not just when the browser feels like it * no editable key bindings * no shortcuts for highlighting next/prev URL, next/prev heading, next/prev element * no presentation mode * no panelise web page * no navigation bar

CEO pay has grown wildly in recent decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...

Does mean that CEOs are wildly more effective? Or just wildly better at diverting profit to themselves? I'd argue the latter.

Further, CEOs and wannabes have a strong incentive to structure organizations such that they depend ever more on the CEO, justifying massive compensation and of course feeding their egos. But I would argue that beyond a certain size, having to route everything important through one guy is an organizational antipattern. So yes, I'm very willing to argue most CEOs shouldn't exist. Or at least most CEO positions.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation. That is incredibly incorrect thinking. Good CEOs and bad CEOs are two different creatures and lead companies to very different places.

If the “bad” CEOs don’t take pay cuts or subsequently struggle to find work, then that thinking is obviously not as “incredibly” incorrect as you claim.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.

Yes. This is absolutely true. Most CEO’s are not worth this kind of money. In fact, most CEO’s could disappear overnight and cause zero disruption to the operation of the company.

I think the complexity of the job is _far_ overrated, and the main reason people think they’d suck at it is because they have no/less confidence.

People that become CEO’s are purely better at faking that confidence. If you are lucky, the confidence is built on skill instead of bluster, but they both get paid the same regardless.

CEO should exist, and it's normal that their compensation is the highest of the company.

However it shouldn't be a 268 to 1 ratio with the median worker like the SP500 average. There is no way the CEO is worth that much money to the company.

> I keep seeing this line as if people think CEOs shouldn't exist or aren't worth their compensation.

Yes indeed. There is no CEO in existence worth 30 of the employees that work under them. It's certainly true that good and bad CEOs exist, and that a good CEO can be a force multiplier that deserves higher compensation. But 30x (and often more!!) is an insane overinflated view of CEOs' worth to the company. The only reason they get away with it is that they are hired by the board of directors, which is.. other CEOs. So a good old boys' club is keeping salaries high completely divorced from any actual value provided.

Everyone's acting like a competent CEO is some kind of rocket scientist unicorn.

In reality they don't do all that much. And most of the decisions are driven by data and advice from Gartner that just recommend the highest bidder, not some magical insights.

After all the CEO works for the board which is made up of shareholder representatives. They have very little industry knowledge and they just want the company to jump on the latest hype and "industry practices". They're usually very risk-averse.

So the CEO is kinda tied by what's happening in the industry anyway. The only CEOs that are capable of breaking that are the ultra confident ones like Jobs or Musk.

> I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO

If you just do nothing, you'll be better than the last 10 years of Mozilla's CEOs.

Well just look at that one CEO instead of doing the same mistake you accuse others of.

In theory, every one of the CEO's reports (other than their administrative staff) is capable of stepping into the CEO's job. If they aren't capable (albeit some with coaching and support) that calls into question the company's overall hiring and promotion practices.

In that case, for every CEO there's literally a dozen other people at that company alone who could do their job. Why do we keep repeating that good CEOs are in short supply?

Moreover study after study has shown little correlation between CEO pay and quality of decision-making. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer#Yahoo!_(2012%E2%...

And finally, rich people eventually look for other ways to feel valued. Status is a big one. Having the top job at the company is a big perk in and of itself. If they don't feel privileged to be the CEO, why the hell even take the job?

I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement issue, where today's world makes people think that they deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism in the US.

How did your CEO become CEO? Mine got there because he was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with another CEO that was golfing buddies with the company that ultimately bought out my old CEO.

How does that make them "worth it"?

> but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company

Look, I've interacted with CEOs and frankly the job isn't nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. The most important aspect of the job is socializing, not managing the company like you might assume. It's putting on a good show and making potential clients like you. It's every bit just being a good salesperson.

There's a reason, for example, my CEO currently lives in California even though his company is halfway across the country and has no offices in CA.

Now, that isn't to say the Job of a founder CEO isn't a lot more difficult, it is. However, once a company is established the CEO job is a cakewalk. There's a reason companies like FedEx had a CEO literally in his 80s that gave up the reigns right before he died.

If you have the ability to schmooze, sit through meetings, and read power-points. Congratulations, you have what it takes to be a CEO.

Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser.

I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

Like you I have found Firefox to work pretty well in real world applications. The one place I found it did fall over was Microsoft Office Online. FF runs like molasses in a large online Excel spreadsheet vs Chrome.

> “We have an internal app that has screen with a JavaScript table thingie with 40,000 rows loaded locally. Crazy? Yeah.”

Crazy, no; a loop over 40,000 items should take a fraction of a second, and at 1KB per row it’s less than 1% of a 4GB memory stick.

The 1 billion row challenge leader parsed a billion rows of CSV - 10 GB of data, through a Java/graal VM - in 0.33 seconds!

This works because you're deliberately targeting a set of features Firefox supports, and the overwhelming majority of the time they're a subset of what Chrome (and increasingly, Safari) support

Read over the various web platform blogs out there, and keep a tally of how many times you'll see "Firefox gains support for XYZ in 139, bringing it to widespread availability. Chrome has supported this since 32 and Safari since version 16"

And many of these are fantastically useful features. Sure, they're not ground breaking building blocks like in the old days when IE didn't even support certain types of box model, but they're echos of the past

- Advertisers buy user data from Firefox, who can then resell or provide this data to others.

- Others buy that data.

- Big data companies and others aggregate this information.

- Cookie or IP are not necessarily required to identify users; thumbprinting, datetime, and behavioral matching can identify users adequately.

- Advertisers and analytics giants can ingest data that includes PII, if it’s encrypted, and that can be decrypted.

- New methods of tracking have replaced old ones and new methods are even better than old ones.

- This data can be used to group users in many ways, so it can know essentially who you are, when you do things, what you will do, and who you’ll do them with.

- This information is used for targeting ads, but can be used for other purposes.

- Technology to utilize this data has been evolving much more quickly.

- Why just target ads? Why not provide users with a version of reality that optimizes their consumer behavior?

- Why attempt to ensure control through enforcement? Why not control motivation and thought?

- Why have political elections? Why not control decisions?

MDN was a consolidation of several vendors’ web documentation efforts (I still remember Opera’s Web Fundamentals course fondly), which they collectively decided to put under Mozilla’s stewardship because surely Mozilla, among all of them, would maintain it neutrally and for the public benefit. It was a good run and Mozilla did do a good job at the maintenance for the last decade, but with their recent monetization efforts around MDN, I’m not hopeful for the future. (This is also why I’m incensed by Google’s web.dev—it’s not just the domain name, it’s that they are reneging on that old agreement.)

The Mozilla corporation made sure to wash its hands of all those successes.

kaios is basically dead

Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.

I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.

But maybe you see things differently.

IMO buying defaults isn't as bad as Google's rigging the ad market. At least others have outbid them for search defaults in the past and in other markets.

A-Frame is awesome; I use it to share all the photospheres I take with friends and family. I'm not aware of another easy, cross platform way to do that.

That’s very... VRML of them. Not that VRML was bad as a concept, just surprised to see it make a comeback.

If you think what I said was a vitriolic personal attack, I have no idea what I could say that you wouldn't construe as one, and honestly, don't care enough about Internet debates to try; best of luck.

I don't see how you're responding to the parent's comment. You seem to be exemplifying it tbh.

The parent isn't saying Firefox and Mozilla are without problems. In fact, they actively recognized them! So I'm not sure why you respond as if they don't.

The parent is saying that the complaints are often used as social signaling. The fact that this happens makes it harder to address legitimate issues. Which Mozilla, without a doubt, has issues.

The result of all this is very apparent: it helps Google. You can even think Mozilla is evil, but you have to ask: is Mozilla more evil than Google? It's hard to argue yes. Frankly, they don't even have the capacity to do as much harm