Looking at the Twitter responses, I don’t know why people assume that every single Mozilla employee would put “being part of the open web and contributing to open source” above people’s crazy obsession with having a job and being able to afford food and shelter.
Modern web browsers are among the most complex piece of software out there.
If you’re qualified to write that kind of code, basic needs are surely well taken care of and are the least of your concerns.
To put it simply, these people will not have a hard time finding high paying jobs. And since they are able to choose, “being part of the open web” makes a lot of sense.
I was making almost that much pre-Covid as a regular old SAAS CRUD developer in the south East US. It was comfortable but far from not needing to work for a few months and hold out because I was concerned about “open source values”.
I jumped at the chance to work remotely at BigTech three months ago. I’m sure many of them would too.
When you have kids, bills, trying to save for retirement, etc. I can’t afford to be out of work for an extended period of time. Even making $120K a year (just trying to make the math easy), means every month I am out of work I am losing $10K.
But I was replying to this...
If you’re qualified to write that kind of code, basic needs are surely well taken care of and are the least of your concerns.
The Mozilla developers aren’t getting paid minimum wage by any means, nor am I doubting their skills, but they definitely aren’t making the salaries of great engineers if levels.fyi is accurate.
That was my entire point. I wouldn’t get past the first technical screen for an entry level software engineer at $BigTech without “grinding leetCode ((tm) r/cscareerquestions) as a CRUD developer, but I made about that much even before I got a consulting job at $BigTech and I am living on the opposite coast from Silicon Valley.
Well, the key is that you trade your time for something and — if it is indeed harder to find a fulfilling work — you wish to maximize that something in a time you do work in order to be able to allocate more time towards more satisfactory ends.
I tried something like that. What happened was that the free time I had left was completely unproductive. Doing unfulfilling work is exhausting, turns out.
Not saying I have all the answers, just what happened to me. This fulfilling thing is hard.
Because another partner would pay to be the default search engine of a browser with declining market share. Would you want to count on donations to fund a company the size of Mozilla?
I'll arbitrarily guess 1.2 billion iOS users (the rest being Macs). In that case, there are maybe 6x as many iOS users as Firefox users. Therefore, if Google paid the same per Firefox user as they did per iOS user, they would have paid $1.3 billion for Firefox users. That's a difference of about 2x per user from what they actually paid.
iOS users have demonstrably paid for (or been gifted by people who paid for) premium electronic devices, which I would expect makes them more valuable advertising targets. I'm mildly surprised that the difference isn't larger, but I don't have a good feel for advertising expenditures.
I actually don't get how it works working at a non-profit. Like everyone else I know working in tech, the vast majority of my compensation is in stock. If your company doesn't have stock... what do they do? I guess they don't pay you 4x the base rate to compensation?
First of all, you probably will get less total comp at Mozilla than you could elsewhere. You'll still be paid well compared to many developers working outside SF/NYC/etc, though.
Second, instead of stock you'll get a higher potential bonus. The bonus percentage increases based on your level.
Third, benefits are generous. Being able to work remotely was a particularly unique and valuable one for a long time.
Fourth, the class and scale of the problems Mozilla is solving are interesting and challenging, which is a motivation for some employees.
Fifth, the mission and the commitment to open source are a motivation to many employees as well.
(These are just my personal observations as a current employee)
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the people you know are a relatively thin slice of the upper few % of people working in tech, compensation-wise.
Most of the people I know in tech work for governments, non-profits, small business, private companies, etc. that don't offer stock-based compensation. They just make much less in total comp than BigTech stock-heavy jobs.
I don’t know why not. That’s what I’m asking. Is that what they do? If Google pay you $200k plus $500k stock do Mozilla pay you $700k cash instead. Maybe they do. Just seems doubtful somehow... seems like there must be a reason Google prefer to put it in stock.
Companies pay in stock because it's not an immediate cash cost like salary, and because the value is tied to the success of the company which encourages employees to drive progress/profit for the business.
