Babel maintainer here (one of the two contributors going from $2k/month to $6k/month). It's the first time I write on HN. I saw different comments (here and on Twitter) about how Henry was getting $11k/month from our funds but wasn't doing much for the project, and so I want to share my view of the story.
Be careful when you try to evaluate how much someone is working: even if Babel is open source and almost everything we do is on GitHub, simply looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/commits/main and counting the number of commits for each contributor does *not* tell how much someone is working.
One starting point would be to at least check all the activity in the Babel GH organization: for example, you can see that:
- I did about 700 contributions so far in 2021 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...).
- Jùnliàng did about 500 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...)
- Henry did about 160 (https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021...)
The number of commits does not reflect the number of contributions, because the "writing code"/"reviewing PRs"/"issues triage"/etc tasks are not equally distributed across the team: for example, I prefer reviewing while others prefer coding. However, even according to these stats Henry is doing less than the other two paid maintainers: again, we cannot just use GH stats to measure how much we do. If you are considering sponsoring us and you want to know what we did or what we'll do, we have a "things we did" page (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/features-timeline) and a roadmap (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/roadmap), but feel free to directly reach out to us and ask what we are working on or what we plan to do.
Henry is the one who contacts companies trying to explain to them why they should support us, the one who gives most talks at their internal events: he's the one working on fundraising for the team. Even without him, many companies would probably donate, but I don't think we would have ever reached the current levels that enabled us to pay a small team.
That said, there was a big problem that no one in the team was talking about: whilst we all knew that Henry was not "doing nothing", I felt that I deserved more than just one fifth (or more than one fourth, since Henry decreased what he was taking) of Henry's salary. What I was doing wasn't _less valuable_ than what Henry was doing. When some people reached out to me about it, I realized that this feeling was shared by other people in the OSS community.
I thus decided to talk with the team about it: it was hard for me to do so, because I consider everyone in the team a friend and it's hard to tell a friend "you should earn less because I want to earn more". However, everyone in the team was receptive to my arguments and everyone agreed that we should have re-assessed our salaries. The main reason that Henry was earning more was that initially he was the only paid contributor, and when the remainder of us wanted to be paid, we just divided the remaining incoming money.
We have now rebalanced how funds are distributed, and we will keep communicating between us how we divide the funds, so that no one in the team will feel like there is some kind of injustice in future.
When we settled on $6k/month I was asked by a team member: "Do you think this is the right amount of money for you, or you might still not be happy about it in the future?". I can't speak for the future me, but for now I don't think I "need", "deserve" or "want" to earn more than the other paid team members. If we get enough money to pay the three of us $6k/month, my next goal would be to expand the number of paid people rather than paying ourselves more (but that's a discussion we'll have as a team when we'll have more money).
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Also, to address the comments about "earning X is too much" and "earning X is too low". I don't have a universal answer for "what is the right salary for working on OSS?", and I see that there are people arguing for both sides.
If it helps to put things in perspective: this isn't a "side project" for any of the paid maintainers. We don't work 40 hours/week, but we still dedicate a big amount of time to the project. I can only speak for me, but:
- I'm a student, and I'll graduate this summer. I currently have 12 hours of classes per week, + some time to study and to work on my final project.
- I dedicate about 20-30 hours per week to Babel. It's not always the same: sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more. It depends on what I'm working on for Babel, and on how much I have to do for university each week.
- I don't know if it's the same all over the world, but (at least in the few countries in which I know how it works) if a company hires you for $6k/month gross, the actual cost for the company is more. Since from a legal perspective we are self-employed, $6k/month is the actual cost taken from our balance.