It's not a reward for failure, it's an insurance policy.
Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?
A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.
I would really love to hear even one example of a CEO's career being damaged by failure in any material way.
Meanwhile, people for whom income is literally making the difference between getting food on the table and not get 2 weeks at best, often nothing at all.
I mean, I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that no one should take a job unless it has absolutely zero risk of ruining them financially if they fail at it, but it's pretty clear that this is a benefit only extended to very few people who don't really need it.
> Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Keeping in mind that "below market rate" is still "retirement within a few years at the Mozilla CEO's rate.
So even if your career were damaged, and it's easy to not have it damaged, you can retire after like 3 years. That's a fine insurance policy.
> If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
Of course you'll get a lot of money.
1. You can give yourself a raise. If the Moz CEO had come in and we saw market share increasing do you think anyone would give a shit about increasing their pay? The issue is it's tanking and they laid off a ton of people at the same time they took a huge pay raise.
2. Executives are compensated with stock. Company does well, your stock goes up.
You don't want that kind of executive anyway. You want someone that identifies with the market and is seen as a safe hand to run FF into the long term future. That alone will do a good part of stopping the drain.
At the position FF/Mozilla is in, even finding such a person is a challenge:
Ideally, FF would need a developer or another seasoned IT person at the helm, but let's be real most of our profession find management borderline disgusting at best.
The MBA/beancounter/finance-type execs have no fucking idea about the business or the spirit behind a project like FF, all they care about is financial numbers - and the ones you might want from that group can earn ten times the compensation outside of the NGO sector.
And the NGO execs... most of them have absolutely no experience leading a project as large and international as FF and the ones that do (e.g. Greenpeace) don't have any idea about technology either.
As stated, the offer is for a job that's almost sure to fail and will damage the taker's career if it does. Combine that with undermarket pay and it's definitely a tough ask, even if you restrict yourself to those who feel strongly about Firefox's mission. If you buy into the notion that an effective CEO has a particular, rare set of skills in business strategy and people management, then your job gets even tougher.
Most people cheered when Pat Gelsinger came back to Intel and I bet he even believes in Intel's mission, but he likely wouldn't have accepted an 80% pay cut relative to other industry CEOs. And Intel's prospects are infinitely better than Mozilla's.
Here's a CEO job offer: take on a nearly impossible task, for a salary that is far below the market rate. If you fail (and you probably will!) it might damage your career and make it harder for you to find another job. If you succeed, you will get prestige, but you still won't get a lot of money.
What kind of executive would accept an offer like that?
A golden parachute is the insurance policy: it says to the candidate, we know this is a nearly impossible task, and it might damage your career if you fail, so we will guarantee you some money if you fail in order to compensate you for taking on that risk.