The ceo of MSF, who imo does a great job, is paid 120k a year.
Brian Chesky, AirBNB ceo, is paid $0 right now, because at least he can recognize how tone deaf talking about your companies financial struggles is whole you're still taking full comp.
Brian Chesky is not merely the CEO of AirBnB, he is also the cofounder with a networth of 4.1 billion dollars.
It is one thing for a literal billionaire, who owns the company to undergo 'hardship' in order to save the company they built over the past 10+ years.
It is a whole other thing for a mere employee to sacrifice their salary during a company downturn. To do so is an act of pure charity---which while it may be inline with ethos of a non-profit worker, isn't something that we as total 3rd parties should expect.
Mitchell Baker is just an "employee", despite her long years of service. She was even fired from Netscape during a round of layoffs, and served as a mere volunteer for years.
I don't think many would complain about their salaries if what they did actually worked. But Mozilla is being run into the ground before our eyes.
If the availability of people with a non-profit ethos affects competitive pay for non-profits, then that should be taken into a account.
Maybe such a person exists to lead Mozilla. But the primary goal should be to find someone who can turn the organisation around. I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that current management can do it.
Just because accepting the sacrifice might not make sense for the current ceo and family doesn't mean that asking for it doesn't make sense for mozilla.
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
I know a few organizations that might fall under that abbreviation. Can you be more specific?
$63,504 a year for a $400 million organization.
I feel like the CEO is absolutely in the wrong here. If they're making 20x what a technical writer or tester is making, it absolute is a bad look not to take a paycut when you're sending 250 people into the street.
I can guarantee that you’d find a perfectly willing CEO somewhere in the people laid off now if you told them you’d only pay them 500k.
It's. Just. A. Job.
I suspect this is yet another manifestation of the crippling, organizationally-irrational-but-individually-rational levels of risk avoidance we're operating under now.
We can see it right here how it’s killing a value generation vehicle. The CEO won’t accept a pay cut, but is willing to shut down entire product lines. A similar story has played out across America.
Being CEO of Mozilla could attract highly qualified, passionate people, who are not primarily driven by "competitive compensation". You know; the same impulse that underlies the whole open source movement.
These are non-profit execs. They exist to fleece the donors and live off the spoils. It just happened that the non-profit in question has a mission appealing to the technologists.
Why should their CEO get any money and not a pink slip? Their mismanagement and financial games caused the company to have to lay off 250 people.
If mozilla want to be more like EFF and focus on the advocacy aspect then maybe they should be similar paid. Even better, merge the two organizations and replace the leadership with the one in EFF. No need to go and look for a CEO willing to be paid 1/10th of current wages as there is already one available doing that now.
> Would you find a person who doesn't fire the MDN team and still keeps Mozilla profitable?
I think there's such people among the engineers at Mozilla, but maybe not among the current execs
With a greater probability than the current management, yes.
That question is impossible to answer, but my instinct leans towards ‘yes, potentially’. Even if they do not, they’re still 2M/year better off.
This is not about an abstract CEO. This is about a CEO who is a total utter failure that could only get this job in a non-profit/corp hybrid.
There would be a very long queue of people willing to do any of the C-suite jobs for $500k.
The $2.5m -> $500k is an easy soundbite, but it doesn't have to even be that drastic.
Granted, shaving 'only' $1m off might only allow you to 'save', say 8-12(?) jobs, but... that's 8-12 people, some with families
Would that be a bad thing? How? I'm sure somebody would step up to make decisions, and you never know, they might actually be competent. The odds don't seem markedly worse.
Github was leaderless for a long time. And during that period it was chaos. The company had no direction, employees were doing random, incoherent things. And multiple factions fought for power.
