"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
The claim was not that they can't reduce but that an 80% discount was too much to ask of people (and thus also their families). I don't think anyone at any pay level would be happy being paid 20% of similar roles. Perhaps the problem was putting people in these roles in the first place that would accept 20% of market rate. Raising their pay subsequently doesn't make them better at their job!
The quote is not really crazy:
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own.
Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
> The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary
No it isn't - salary is salary, and these deals existed when the Mozilla CEO was not paid as much. By her own admission, at one point Baker just went "fuck it, other CEOs get paid multiples, why not me?", so now she brings home $3m per year, with the whole exec structure likely benefiting in similar fashion (because why only the CEO?). See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.
That's $3m that could pay for a dozen engineers at Bay-Area salaries, or 30-60 in cheaper locations - maybe enough to match (or surpass) Google's continuous push for new specifications that forces everyone else to play catch-up all the time, as well as stacking the standard committees where Mozilla is systematically overpowered.
> I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary
You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary. Even with 7 years of inflation, that's a lot more.
Mitchell Baker has given a lot to Mozilla, but she's now very clearly decided it's her time to cash in.
It really wasn’t clear to me at all until I read this comment. I interpreted the tweet (and GP) to mean “this chart tracks CEO pay at Mozilla, regardless of who the CEO is.” Seeing this comment completely changed the perspective for me, so it was helpful.
Perhaps they should find someone skilled who is willing to take that 80% discount from market.
Baker has clearly not been worth her increased salary; I don't even think she's worth the original 20%-of-market salary, given how Firefox's market share has dropped precipitously, and Mozilla has been forced to lay off staff.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a 100%-of-market-rate CEO for a 20%-of-market-rate salary, for CEOs who only care about compensation. But I think that's ok, especially given that some CEOs aren't even worth 20%. And you're much more likely to get someone who actually cares about the mission.
See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m.
Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when the CEO pay spiked, I doubt it's stayed that high and they arguably deserved that pay for earning enough extra money to prevent needing these ads for an additional five years.
>You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary.
Just to drill this home, Baker's CEO salary is not currently public.
This assumes that executives being poached would lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs.
If executive pay was rationally based, that might be true. But it appears to rather be the case that executive pay is really high just because executives get a lot of control over how much they are payed. More likely it would result in someone being promoted to executive and business continuing as usual.
The poaching companies are going to run out of places to put executives long before Mozilla runs out of competent employees who could run the company. In the meantime Mozilla gains a great reputation as a place to work if you want to get poached to a million dollar salary job, so it gains access to lots more competent engineers.
Or at least I think that's the sane argument for why Mozilla executives (and most companies executives) should be payed less. I'm not totally convinced that all the premises are true.
Nobody said anyone has to work for free. In general (not picking on Mozilla), I think it’s hypocritical when non-execs are told they should accept lower pay than they would make at a for-profit because “our mission!”, while execs justify their out-of-proportion pay by citing how much they could make at a for-profit. Shouldn’t executives be __more__ committed to the mission?
Honest question: If rank-and-file employees are expected to work for market rates, should executives be expected to work for market rates also? Or do we think they should work for less than market rates? If so, wouldn't Mozilla be at risk of having their executives poached by higher paying companies, which would likely lead to more than 70 employees losing their jobs?
If someone's gonna downvote me I'd appreciate some color on your choice too, thanks. ;-)
> Doesn't the board of directors usually set the CEO's compensation, not the CEO him/herself?
My understanding is that the board is just other executives and CxO from peer companies. Think Eric Schmidt on the Apple Board or the disgraced Citi CEO John Thank on Uber's board. Neither of them represent our desire to minimize executive pay.
I feel that execs and administrators have become parasites.
How could you organise large corporations and institutions so that they don't need C suite executives? I find it impossible to believe that anyone actually does $8M plus stock and bonuses worth of work.
> A number of explanations have been posited for the fact executive pay has soared in recent decades while other workers' pay has remained stagnant.
I think a simpler explanation is supply and demand.
If you want to hire as CEO someone who has worked in a close competitor's most profitable business unit and is credited for much of its success and culture, the pickings for Yahoo were quite slim. Also, Yahoo had brought in several other highly successful CEOs, including its original founder, who had all failed miserably. Mayer was clearly a last-ditch attempt to salvage the company.
> pay packages that serve the CEO rather than shareholders
You are describing incentives that do not simply reward share price growth? If so, and if you think supply and demand for qualified executives has nothing to do with it, what kind of pay package do you think Yahoo should have offered?
I'd argue that there has to be a time bias in the package. Share price growth is fine if the board is OK with Mayer taking 30 years to grow the company into a bigger valuation just before deciding to retire. But if more action in the near term is desired, and behavior other than the typical private equity style fat trimming is desired, what options are left?
These are exceptional times. The original Mozilla posts mentioned the effects COVID19 had on their business.
CEOs of much larger companies, with much larger salaries, have cut or take no salary. Here's a short list of some
Lyft, Fiat Chrysler, GE, Delta, Alaska Airlines, United, Southwest, Jetblue, AirBnB, GE, NBA
How is it not incredibly tone deaf to cut 25% of the company and not at least in a token gesture temporarily eliminate your salary when you're literally a multimillionaire.
---
Also,
>And you do want highly qualified people there.
That would be one thing if Mozilla was in a period of great growth. But it's not; it's in steady decline. Yet c-suite salary has grown in inverse proportion. Highly qualified? Are they?
> It's interesting how many people in the comments are against more transparency.
If I am not mistaken, salary packages for CEOs went up when that information was made public in the company's annual report because other CEOS could demand more money because the CEO of a similar company was much higher.
> Strongest idea I'm aware of is radical pay transparency.
This falls apart immediately. Executive compensation is radically transparent at every publicly traded company and yet people are just ok with the Grand Canyon sized gap that has grown between average worker and executives over the last 40 years.
This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further.
What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice.
"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"
"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, 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."
No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.
Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.
They're all failures and have no self awareness.
Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off
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