> If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well.
I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People.
What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what if you just get people who focus on financial incentives and career development, and what if those things do not strongly correlate with actually delivering higher value for the company?
> You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use.
"Here's a product that brings in 450-500 million a year, see what you can do". The users of Firefox aren't Mozilla's customers, it's Google & Co that are the customers. The users are the product.
> What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives
You aren’t guaranteed the best people if you do; but you are excluded from getting the best people if you don’t.
If a person is the best person, then all other things being equal (they interview well, like all potential job opportunities equally), they will accept the job with the highest pay. Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.
Focusing on financial incentives and career development is what makes most of us get better. I study my craft and improve not just because of intrinsic value, but because I can make more money. The extrinsic rewards are the only reason people join corporations, otherwise we’d all work for ourselves. You may not like it, but it is true.
> Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.
Yeah, I believe it's an oversimplification to the point that it ceases to be useful. All other things are not the same when you're running a privacy-focused "for the public good and the internet" charity vs when you're running a profit-focused "the public good is irrelevant" ad-tech company.
I don't know who the best developers are, but I have a feeling that a few of them are working on open source projects and aren't working on new ad products that would make them dozens or hundreds of millions if they worked for Google.
My impression is that you'll get a narrow field of candidates if "we pay you a lot" is your argument for why they should work for you. And on the flip side, if you say "we pay you well, but not FAANG level", then you exclude some people with a certain personality trait. I'm not sure that you're creating an issue if you don't attract those people when your motive is not "profit above all else" but essentially "profit doesn't matter, we're a non-profit".
I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People.
What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what if you just get people who focus on financial incentives and career development, and what if those things do not strongly correlate with actually delivering higher value for the company?
> You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their competitors make a better product for free use.
"Here's a product that brings in 450-500 million a year, see what you can do". The users of Firefox aren't Mozilla's customers, it's Google & Co that are the customers. The users are the product.