Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.
Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.
You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
I think this reasoning is not straightforward for Mozilla as it would be for a traditional company.
Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual class shares, which can partially insulate the management from the owners control, but it more or less works this way.
In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not hold. The board of directors is completely self managing; they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company, except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet deal.
>Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO
Citation needed.
>But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.
AFAIK a non-profit can't make the kind of search engine deal that generates the vast majority of Mozilla's income, and currently funds Gecko development.
> And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability, then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.
That presumes that a CEO should be making more than a distinguished engineer. The truth is that CEO salaries are completely public so there's much deeper competition for the highest-paid ones (the ones getting paid the most, not necessarily the best at the job) in an ever expanding bubble the increases the salaries from those making less ("this is what it takes to run an organization of this size"). If we had an actual way to measure value on the job things would be better (something like points above replacement) but no one has figured this out for large organizations that require cooperation (+ different kinds of value).
Those numbers are only true of a handful of household name tech companies that are very competitive to get into. I guarantee you that most line level people at most companies are not making 300-500k.
Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.
You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.