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

babeljs.io

291–300 of 729 posts

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

#292
post #168
post #144

If you have a problem paying a high salary then don't base the company in a high salary area. Any other place would be just as good and way cheaper. Also the origial author says someone is misappropriating money[1] on top of this! They definitely don't deserve more funding before they fix those two problems. 1: https://mobile.twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522

This seems to be overlooked, I was wondering why the original author is no longer involved. Babel, Rome, Deno, are all transpilers the tech isn't as unique as it once was. Things come and go in JS land, and Babel will go the way of Dodo.js

Deno is a full server-side JavaScript VM - it doesn't even solve the same problem as Babel...

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

#293
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I never even noticed their "teams" things. And it looks like the full pack is now $650.

Holy shit, I must be grandfathered in, I’m still paying US$150 per year for the all products pack. Just paid three days ago too.

149€, third year onwards, individual use

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

#294
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thoughts. If the dev moved to a nice SEA country he could live a very comfortable life with that kind of money.

So in order to work for product you're passionate about and used by millions, instead of being paid well you should consider moving to a different part of the world just to live well? Your work should not be rewarded in proportion to the impact you are having? This is ridiculous. Great engineers should be incentivized to work on open source projects. Would you rather the engineer and project get absorbed into a compa…

I don't see it. Either you run a company and earn money and deserve every penny or you get donations and be thankful for every penny.

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

#295

HackerNews should make each such topic a fundraiser. Want to comment on it? This will be $10. An upvote? $1. A downvote? $50. A snarky comment could cost $100 to be overlooked by the moderators.

Looks like you're out $100 then.

But he should get a part of the upvote money.

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

#296
post #282

Hacker News: Raw raw, libertarian objectivist open market capitalist fetishm for the win!!!! Also crab-ass Hacker News commenters: how dare those commies make more than minimum wage writing open source software!?!?!?

Minimum wage in the US would earn you about $21k for a full time job. That's objectively nowhere near $130k

You’re missing my point pretty hard.

Most of the people getting outraged about $130k are the same people ready to defend Musk and Bezo’s billions.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

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

#297

> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source. > For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem, I used to donate to Babel, before they made it apparent they are just interested in funneling the money to one developer. 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last tim…

Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley. $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living

> Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.

Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas.

A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit, I must be grandfathered in, I’m still paying US$150 per year for the all products pack. Just paid three days ago too.

149€, third year onwards, individual use

But the individual license can be used at work, it just can’t be transferred to another person since it’s licensed to you.

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

#299
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source projects funded by donations need accountability. Regular reports about how much money is available, how it's being spent, and what the results are. If I saw that this guy, getting a full-time salary, creating fewer PRs in a year than me in a week, I'd be pissed, and the project certainly wouldn't get my donations.

If they were getting a fulltime salary and not actually working on the project, can't they be accused of commiting fraud?

That is unlikely unless contributors got any legal document signed

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

#300
This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some of their maintainers have, which pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors, it's frankly ridiculous that they are expected to work for significantly less money. Not to mention that the abstractions some of these people wrote basically allow a significant number of people to enter the industry in the first place.
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