Comment by WhyNotHugo 3 days ago
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.
> 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.
If salaries were based on value added, a lot of software dev salaries would be orders of magnitude higher.
Hmm if this is true why is it so rare that software devs quit their jobs and make more money freelancing or starting their own companies?
Nobody pays for Firefox, so I’m not sure how you would determine value added. Development could also stop today and most of us would never notice the absence of upgrades.
You could probably calculate it based on how much ad revenue one can gain by having your own default search engine be the default in Firefox.
At least, that's probably how Google determined value added when deciding if it's worth the return when they funded (read: paid for development at) the Mozilla Corporation.
As one of the people at a corporation who sees the actually salaries people get paid...
Most developers make less than $150k in their local currency. A lot of the ones claiming to make more than that are inflating their numbers.
And this was before the mass layoffs that have been pushing down dev salaries.
All engineers in Europe (except maybe Switzerland) would kill for 150k a year. ESPECIALLY remote.
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.
> They are based on what others pay.
That's the excuse given to make you accept those higher salaries. The truth is that there are not infinitely many positions for a CEO. There are certainly more people who can be competent CEOs than CEO positions.
If you give an indecent salary to your CEO, you will get a CEO who looks for a crazy salary. That doesn't mean it's the most competent CEO you could get. Try offering a decent salary and you'll see that people still apply. You may not get the typical narcissistic profile, but it's probably not a loss.
In my experience, a CEO pretty much sets the company culture. And it feels really weird to choose someone who's here for money/title to set your culture. But of course, the CEO is not chosen by the employees, but rather by other people who are also here for the money/title :-).
In a startup, the CEO also convinces VCs to invest. And again it's interesting: VCs have no clue about the technology, so you would think they try to invest for CEOs who set a good company culture. But instead they get convinced by the CEOs who bullshit them the best. Which makes sense: not only VCs don't have a clue about the technology, but somehow they think they actually do understand. I have heard a few discussions between CEO and VCs in startups (talking about the technology I was actually working on), and it was hilarious.
> If people work less as a result they don't really care.
They just don't know. Even if they genuinely try to ask feedback from the employees, it's biased. Employees generally don't give honest feedback because it's a risk for them (especially if the company culture is bad, which is where the feedbacks would matter the most).
I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.
I was offered a job at a big tech but I'd have had to move to the US to their campus because they hate remote work. And they offered only 120k (they probably figured that sounded like a ton of money to a European). But I started looking at the cost of living there and it was insane. I'd have had to share a flat and it would have to be far away, not a few km from the office like I'm used to. No way.
Of course then Trump started happening and I was so glad I didn't move there. I'm kinda LGBTQ too so I'd be royally screwed if I'd been there now
I would say it's both. A high market rate for labor pushes CoL up (because people have lots of money to spend), but a high CoL also pushes the market rate for labor up (because you can't get anyone to work for you if you don't pay them enough to make ends meet). Trying to decide which one is the root cause is a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
The CEOs and managers don't understand that for every square meter of office space you need like a dozen square meters of residential space. It's very easy to have excessive amounts of office space that make you think you can hire more people, but in reality you have already exhausted your local recruiting pool.
> I think that factors in cost of living in silicon valley. I don't think devs even in other areas of the US make that much.
Depends on the specific job, company (big tech vs not), and city. Seattle, NYC and a handful of others may pay on par with bay area.
For a senior at random faang or equivalent, that might mean $300k-$500k / yr. More for some NYC positions in the finance industry.
> 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.
Baker left the board in early 2025 https://www.theverge.com/business/615977/m
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.
I think there is a small set of people who would do a good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as Mozilla CEO.
But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.
Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.
The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.
For me it's those horrible cloudflare and recaptcha things. I get them soooo much. And also that stupid cloudflare "We're checking if you're human" page.
I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.
I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.
2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
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.
I've had this conversation at least three times on HN. I'm convinced anyone who says that Firefox has a thousand issues simply doesn't use Firefox. But, I'm always open to being wrong. Can you point out the specific issues Firefox has that make it a second rate experience?
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
My argument is primarily against commenters on HN who claim Firefox to be unusable, bug-filled, and then blame Mozilla for the current Blink-based browser apocalypse.
You feel that Firefox doesn't have a bunch of features that you would use - but those are not bugs. I recognize this is HN - where there will definitely be a higher percentage of power users, but an open source project not having the features you want doesn't make it a second-rate browser, it just means it would take more work for you to customize. Listing cred of having used FF in the Mozilla days is the same as saying Linux is second rate because you installed Caldera back when people were still scared of Y2K.
As a daily FF user - Firefox is great. And more users should give it a whirl, especially ones that haven't used it in a decade.
> The CEO’s salary is enough to fund >30 extra devs
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. Just like you want to pay more for highly skilled developers, you want executive pay to be competitive to hire someone capable of the job.
Put it this way, you could pay me $1m in annual compensation to be Mozilla's CEO (sounds like a good deal?), but I am sure I will be the most terrible CEO in the history of the company and cannot even run the company properly at a daily basis.
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.
My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.
Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.
Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.
So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.
> Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs
Right, that explains why Tim Apple got 100 million dollars in 2022, he was just that good at channelling the spirit of Jobs.
> 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.
Real talk: what are the issues with Mozilla's? I hate plenty of CEOs so I'm familiar but I've never heard... really anything, good or bad, about Mozilla's.
This is desktop market share, their "stronghold":
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1j07hrt/heres_how_...
That alone is enough to disqualify all of them. Now look at mobile - the biggest market ever. Firefox does not exist on mobile. That is a reason to remove the leadership and the board with it.
Raking in 100s of millions and not improving Firefox is one thing. Another is spending those millions on acquiring companies that produce no revenue, aka setting money on fire.
Zen Browser has been producing the features people have been asking for from Firefox with $0. I can't imagine what motivated devs like those could produce with just 1% of the money Mozilla burns.
It's not that they haven't done great things for the web. It's just that we expect more from their most popular product considering the money that they're rolling in.
> 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.
At a very large company, I think some individual decisions the CEO makes will have much more impact on the company than the work output of 268 employees. I think some CEOs really are probably worth that kind of money. People like Steve Jobs.
However, most ceos aren’t genius superstars. And I don’t think CEO pay really makes sense given supply and demand. I think there’s plenty of people who could do at least as good a job as many CEOs do, and would happily do so for a lot less money.
I suspect a lot of CEO pay is an arse-covering exercise by the board. If the board hires a super expensive CEO, and that person turns out to be terrible, the board can say they did everything they could do to get the best ceo. But if the board hires someone for much less money who turns out to be a turkey, they might be blamed for cheaping out on the ceo - and thus the company’s downfall is their fault.
Is the Mozilla CEO really so amazing at their job that they deserve such insane compensation? I doubt it. I bet there’s dozens of people at Mozilla today who are probably smart enough to do a great job as CEO. They just won’t be considered for the role for stupid reasons.
I disagree (not a CEO). What’s the median worker at a company like Walmart or Amazon paid? To think that a CEO of those couldn’t improve (or degrade) the company’s performance by many thousand times more than a Walmart or Amazon worker seems strange to me. They’re paying them to not make those companies into Sears or J.C.Penney.
Investors (and the boards they hire) pay CEOs for results. That range of results is very wide for large companies.
> 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.
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.
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.