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Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

babeljs.io

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Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#81

Post by [deleted] »

opk wrote: post #61
holistio wrote: post #8

I was horrified and humbled to see that the people making this amazing stuff are making considerably less ($2k/month) than I do... or frankly, than most of us here on HN do. Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.

I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures. They do quote $11k for a full-time position as others have pointed out. What I make is much nearer to the $2k figure but I am in Europe. Maybe they'd do better operating out of of somewhere cheaper. Many older open source projects including those I contribute to aren't owned by…

[deleted]

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#82

Post by js8 »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #31
hnbad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century). The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of t…

Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.

Hm, a solution. They privatize it, and then companies will say to their webdevs, we don't want to pay extra for a profit of some capitalist, write the website without it.

So each webdev will end up with their own half-baked solution. Tragedy of the lack of commons!

I hear you cry, but that's irrational! Precisely, but so is not caring about the commons and letting them die.

I am not under an illusion that under capitalism, people cannot pass the buck (responsibility for maintenance) away too.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#83

Post by baybal2 »

switz wrote: post #60
baybal2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling. How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all. Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find. Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, a…

Nonsense. Transpilers have been misused at times in the javascript community, but overall they have played a *massive* role in modernizing javascript and enabling us to write much sounder, more robust, and bug-free code that runs everywhere, including on older devices and runtimes. Society as a whole has benefited immensely from babel and other transpilers. As time goes on, transpilers may ultimately become slightly…

Baseline ES6 been supported for many years now.

There are very few things a transpiler will do for you today. Some critical langauge features are completely impossible to substitite, or emulate. Given this, what's the point?

The few non-critical features can be more reliably polyfilled manually than relying on transpiler which will mangle the rest of your code which has nothing to do with that function, and with 50/50 chance to introduce own problems.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#84

Post by FiberBundle »

toyg wrote: post #65
genezeta wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one person who is full-time has a very different salary: > we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source The people getting $2,000 per month are part-time: > a "part-time" rate: we could initially afford $2,000 USD per month. It is also explained that if possible, they would go full-time and the salary would then be raised to "the full-time rate". > Our hope was by anno…

There’s something to be said for those salaries being too “Valley”. $121k per year is a lot of money; you’d likely be able to find good JS developers in the UK for half that and in continental Europe for even less (in Eastern Europe you could probably get away with $30k…).

$121k is not a lot of money for someone writing compilers. And I would seriously doubt that you could just take your average developer and expect them to be able to contribute to a project like Babel in an equally productive way.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#85

Post by swyx »

opk wrote: post #61
holistio wrote: post #8

I was horrified and humbled to see that the people making this amazing stuff are making considerably less ($2k/month) than I do... or frankly, than most of us here on HN do. Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.

I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures. They do quote $11k for a full-time position as others have pointed out. What I make is much nearer to the $2k figure but I am in Europe. Maybe they'd do better operating out of of somewhere cheaper. Many older open source projects including those I contribute to aren't owned by…

not at all just FAANG. the US tech scene is just that competitive. most decent Series A-B startups in the US can easily pay six figures. fwiw i got 150k at netlify, about 1.5 years after graduating from bootcamp. of course, i have had an atypical career, but i dont think i have an atypical salary story.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#86

Post by jwr »

captainmuon wrote: post #6

This is another case of tragedy of the commons. Individually, it doesn't make sense for a company to donate. I can't even resent them, since it puts the company at a (slight) disadvantage. Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. But collectively, we would all benefit to fund something like this. (Edit: I like culturestate's response of budgeting a small a…

> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur.

I am a solo entrepreneur with a self-funded business and I set aside a percentage of revenue to be paid in developer sponsorships, through Github sponsors, Clojurists Together, and directly. I sort the libraries that my code uses by "indispensability" and fund the top 8 or so. It's not much, but if everybody did this, the ecosystem would be healthy.

I'm happy to see that at least the Clojure community is very mature and this approach is rather common.

It is in my best interest and it does make sense: I rely on those libraries, I want them to be maintained. And if they get abandoned, I will bear the very significant cost of rewrites.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#87

Post by cycomanic »

I find the comments here fascinating. So the lead developer was paid $11k a month, and somehow many start calling this a problem. Apparently, if you work on OSS you should be working for something slightly above the poverty line. People are comparing it to other salaries, but seem to forget that this salary likely does not include any other benefits (health insurance, stock options ...). I mean he is the lead developer for a "product" that is used by millions of people, what would a person like that earn in industry? Significantly above that salary, even in most of Europe.

If we want to create a sustainable OSS infrastructure, we definitely want that developers make a good living from it. But it seems the dominant notion is that developers should donate their time/money and live close to the poverty line, so that companies can rake in billions in profits, without paying for the tools they use.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#88

Post by tmsbrg »

Sorry, but as someone who doesn't live in the USA, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone for not being able to earn "$11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source."

Sure, it's nice to be able to make a living from open source based on donations. That doesn't have to be comparable to Silicon Valley salaries that are fueled by huge ad money and other dubious sources. I know many people here are from Silicon Valley so they might even think it's a low salary, but I'd ask you guys to get some perspective.

If I know my donation would be used to fund someone's (in my eyes) incredibly high salary, I'd prefer spending it on somewhere where it would have more impact. You know, people who are actually struggling to make ends meet.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#89

Post by esquire_900 »

axguscbklp wrote: post #67
esquire_900 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to give a similar comment here. I get that this is more common in the US compared to Europe or asian countries, but I'd expect that 5-6k a month would be a far more reasonable salary. You're not in open source for the big payout I assume.. And then again, 2k just to help on the side, that's about minimum wage here for full time employment.

$11k / month is pretty close to an entry-level Bay Area salary. Given that Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development, I am surprised that all the creators can afford to pay themselves is one near-entry-level Bay Area salary and a few intern-type salaries.

Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, but because the salary is paid at SF levels all the "poorer" users have to step up and match the SF expectation? I couldn't find where Henry lives, but this setup allows him to go live anywhere he wants.

I'm also unconvinced by the "most popular tool" argument. Sure a huge amount of people make use of babel, but it's only a (very) small part of the complete tech stack an average company would need. I.e. database, frameworks, other programming languages, nodejs, deployment and management tools, the underlying OS; there are dozens of dependencies that are critical nowadays, all which need to share the available donation pool.

Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?

#90

Post by dandellion »

cycomanic wrote: post #87

I find the comments here fascinating. So the lead developer was paid $11k a month, and somehow many start calling this a problem. Apparently, if you work on OSS you should be working for something slightly above the poverty line. People are comparing it to other salaries, but seem to forget that this salary likely does not include any other benefits (health insurance, stock options ...). I mean he is the lead develop…

I seriously doubt the lead developers of a team of 4 make more than $11k in most of Europe.
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