Keep in mind that employee expense != employee salary since there are also taxes, insurances, pension contributions etc to be paid. Plus you need IT, office space, infrastructure.
yes, understood, but its a good chunk of it (probably 2/3). and for a non profit to be spending nearly $300K per employee seems problematic. (i.e. average salary is probably close to $200K.
Mozilla employs some of the world's best talent who could walk away any minute and double their salary. I'd even wager that it is a great service some of them do to stay where they are and not be lured by the big money they could be making literally anywhere else. The salaries they earn are more than fair, in my eyes.
I'm terribly disappointed that Mozilla lost so much talent not to attrition but to layoffs. Hopefully, they find newer sources of income and become financially strong again.
Yeah the "hello, I'm looking to hire Mozilla employees" on various places that I read about the layoffs (hn, reddit, twitter) is a telltale sign that Mozilla employees are highly wanted in the industry. Compare it to threads where recent grads (out of good institutions) complain that they can't find employment in CS. Nobody posts there.
It's comparable in so far that both are on the job market right now. From what I read, recent grads seem to have an extremely bad experience because of Corona. It seems that the virus has enlarged the gap in how people just starting their careers are treated vs people from a place like Mozilla, instead of treating both equally worse.
Why would you expect companies to take a risk on a new grad when they could instead hire someone who has already proven themselves at a different company? Especially during a pandemic where there's so much uncertainty. I'm not saying it's right but it makes sense.
How would a recent grad cope working fully remotely without any mentorship? I would much rather go with someone with more experience.
That being said, I have to admit that I was very impressed with the work done by the two interns that were on my team (at $BigTech) who are leaving next week. But they had their own projects and weren’t on critical paths.
We have no idea how they - or any fresh grads would do as full time employees. I think they would do okay. But they are treated with kid gloves compared to FTE’s.
Why do you think they should be paying significantly less just because they are a non-profit? I'm sure they can pay a bit less because people join because of their values and not just because of the money but I suspect they still have to stay somewhat competitive. I can see people being okay with making 10-20% less working for a company whose values they really like, but 50% less? Doubt it.
When I worked for a non-profit, the rule was that salaries could be no more than 90% of the general going rate for the same job in the same location (we had offices across the country). I don't know if it was a rule specific to this organization, or if it's an industry-wide rule of thumb.
Because of this 90% rule, the company never set any salaries. After you passed the interview and they wanted to hire you, they sent your resume and job description to an outside consulting firm, which would then calculate what your salary would be. The consulting firm contacted you directly and let you know what your compensation would be if you accepted the job, and why.
For the quality of people that work at Mozilla, going rate for a senior dev is more like 350-400k in the SF Bay area. Mozilla pays well below 90% of going rate.
Maybe they should not be in SV then (especially if they expect to survive from donations from people from all over the world). You can find developers just as good all over for 1/4th the cost.
Google’s recruiters and their truckloads of money are happy to reach out regardless. You want the talent capable of building and maintaining a web engine? Be prepared to pay for it.
Do they though? There are many good unemployed or poorly paid programmers all around the globe. Even if they do start allowing more remote work this will not change much as they will still have around the same number of employees.
What’s your definition of a “good developer”? I’m the first person to call out companies that think they need “ninja, rockstar developers” to build their Node CRUD app. But, how many developers are there that are out of work that could actually contribute meaningfully to Firefox? Writing a modern browser engine/Javascript engine and the related underpinnings is hard. Not even Microsoft - the third most valuable company in the US - wanted to keep taking that on. Every other company in the world besides Mozilla who wanted their own browser thought it was better just to use Webkit or Blink.
Even though I am a developer and work for Big Tech, I got in through the backdoor via cloud consultancy. I looked at what it would take to even be competitive to not embarrass myself during the interview process and decided I wasn’t interested. I’m assuming that Netscape has similar standards . I can’t imagine that anyone who is good enough and disciplined enough to get through the process can’t get a job.
> Why do you think they should be paying significantly less just because they are a non-profit? I'm sure they can pay a bit less because people join because of their values and not just because of the money but I suspect they still have to stay somewhat competitive.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about this, but the logic is kind of telling. If you're right, the only possible conclusion to draw is that non-profits shouldn't, and effectively don't exist in a modern capitalist economy. Why? Because a non-profit still has to compete on both the labor market and the commodities market, which means salaries about as high as their for-profit competitors, and making something they can sell (ideally to ad tech companies, since they have the real $, not ordinary people). Even if profiting off the business isn't supposed to be the motive, most people are going to be profiting. And perhaps it's no surprise that the people in charge of making these decisions are the ones who profit the most. Decisions are going to be made in almost exactly the same way as they would be made at a for-profit company. But this process of decision making is the thing we're trying to escape when we talk about something like Mozilla.
Maybe the problem is that we think of Mozilla as a typical case of non-profit organizational structure. Would an alternative structure be possible, for example Mozilla existing only to organize teams of volunteers, not to produce something that could be sold (i.e. to advertizers) but to make something good that people want? (Obviously, the people who run Mozilla have a strong material interest against ever finding this out.) I think we're imaginatively limited when we talk only about "businesses" as the fundamental actor in the modern world. Maybe being non-profit (even "anti-profit") should be about more than that.
I'm surprised people believe it is so bad to spend on salaries. Contrary to startups and traded companies, Mozilla has no stock to inflate compensation, so they have to pay large salaries.
Not at all bad to pay salaries but stock comp is used to tie pay to performance. Can't really do that if you've committed to paying a colossal salary.
Which is why Mozilla exec leadership is still in place after a decade of losing market share to Chrome and flailing about trying to find a business model that works. Firing 25% of your company is a huge sign you fucked up. No shareholders, and only vague accountability to stakeholders. Moz Foundation board should fire her, though since she's chairman she has absolutely zero oversight.
> Which is why Mozilla exec leadership is still in place after a decade of losing market share to Chrome and flailing about trying to find a business model that works.
In the 2+ years I've been at Mozilla, I think there's been almost complete turnover at the C-level.
For example, Chris Beard was CEO of Mozilla from 2014 through late 2019.
There's a frequent sentiment in these comment threads that Mozilla leadership is failing and facing no professional consequences, but I think that sentiment is misplaced.
How much more capital could they get if they had really talented fundraisers? Both for profit and non profit companies have the same goals - to make money. What they do with their money is different. Could Mozilla save money and be just as effective if they got a bunch of a boot camp grads?
It’s been a long time since anyone was candid with me, but at that point someone told me that all told, developers cost them about 2x my salary.
Say you have thirty six developers. You need one manager for each six, and another for those managers. You need an office administrator, and at some point that person gets an assistant. You need a few IT people and other forms of maintenance.
I never really understood how they called developers overhead, when there’s all this that actually is overhead. Not a one of those people has billable hours, for any definition of the term.
It is very simple, from the quality of the work you know that those people worth the price. If you are not paying that, they will leave and work for other companies that could afford them.
> (i.e. average salary is probably close to $200K.)
Two bedroom rents in the cities nearby Mozilla Corporation's HQ are about 4.5k a month. That's about 54k a year just in rent. But you still need to feed yourself and family, pay taxes, send your kids to school, buy health insurance and save for retirement. In that context, 200k a person is frankly cheap; their competitors pay 2x that.
Yes, and take home pay is post-taxes. Which are not insubstantial, considering both state and federal (and potentially city). 200k is about on par for getting by, if not a bit below market rate.
> The fed (Department of Housing, maybe?) guideline is that you should pay no more than ⅓ of your salary in rent.
That value is absolutely absurd. It seems clearly intended to apply to those making under 100k a year in rent. Take the extreme case. If the highest paid employee of Mozilla makes $3M a year, does that mean their rent should cost "less than" $1M a year? What does that even mean?
Money has a decreasing marginal utility for individuals. When you talk about 54k a year in rent on a $162k salary, that's over $100k left over after you pay for rent. In other words, more than twice what I and my partner made together last year, before we had to pay rent. And we have the same expenses as anyone making that $100k after the rent is paid. Food, utilities, childcare, and so on.
One person having over a hundred thousand dollars to spend after rent has quite a lot of money and should become relatively wealthy relatively quickly. The 1/3 figure just serves to hide this basic fact.
There are places where you can get a decent house for about $50k, total. Why the hell people remain in an area with that kind of rent is beyond comprehension. Nothing about the bay area is worth that.
Where are these places? How does the (pre-pandemic) quality of life compare to that of a metropolitan area?
At one point I joked that I could buy an entire block of houses in Detroit. It doesn't matter if there is nothing for me to do there, no schools for my family, or preferred entertainment options/venues.
Non-profits should hire people who personally care about the non-profit's mission. Paying less than average is a good way to filter out people who're only in it for the money.
Non-profits, like any company, should hire the best people who can help the company achieve its goals, preferably at the least expense. Having employees subsidize the company (via reduced salaries) simply because the employees care about the mission is a great way to lose out on good talent.
Pretty much everyone employed today is “in it for the money.” Whether for-profit or non-profit, we all want to maximize our income.
I think you are quite mistaken. I don't want to maximize my income, I want tom maximize my impact. There are some people in the world who care about things beyond themselves. Everyone should have some self interest but there are other things that matter besides maximizing income.
same reason people take a huge paycut to work at startups, and its not for the equity (which more often than not is 0). Its because they are working on what they want to work on. It's not about maximizing their net worth, but working on what they want to work on.
