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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?

#301

Post by ForHackernews »

FiberBundle wrote: post #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…

Just license your software under the GPL, then corporations can't take and use it without contributing back.

It's hard for me to feel sympathetic for people who deliberately sign up for a model that encourages free-riding and then complain about it.

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

#302

Post by larzang »

madeofpalk wrote: post #183
PaywallBuster wrote: post #63

Good work so far but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries? USA and it's biggest cities are already hugely competitive even for profit making enterprises. Even a company like Mozilla with real commercial partnerships and solid income every year can struggle, let alone a tool which is barely noticeable by 90% of users.

I know HN isnt a single hive mind, but its funny seeing these responses all in contrast to "devs shouldnt take a pay cut if they move to a cheaper state/country"

Working for a for-profit company is a completely different labor relationship than working for an OSS org or other non-profit. You absolutely should fight to prevent management from extracting more of the value you generated just because you cut your personal costs, but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor. One is adversarial theft, the other is the willing donation of your time to a cause.

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

#303

Post by Broken_Hippo »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #276
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they just pay for health insurance premiums instead of the health care. Deductible followed by a percentage of everything until you reach your out of pocket coupled with poor paid leave if you get paid leave at all is a significant cost to health care. This is combined with a culture that glorifies not missing a day of work for any reason, which can't help folks use the health care provided.

While I agree about the culture glorifying overwork (recent post on HN) and the difficulty of using health care / PTO at times, numerically my employer-backed health care plan is actually quite generous. My $0 premium health care plan has only a $2000 deductible, $6000 out of pocket max, 20% coinsurance for “big” procedures, $10 copay (regardless of deductible) for primary care, and I actually get PAID a $500 yearly…

My tax rate here in Norway is less than my federal tax, state tax, and insurance premiums were in the states. I now pay about $300 a year out of pocket and have no deductible. The wait times aren't really worse than they were in the US, and when folks do have to wait (for non-life-threatening things)... paid time off if you need it.

I broke my arm and got paid time off since I couldn't do the job while I was healing.

I have no gap in health insurance if I do not work: I don't have to consider such a thing when looking for a new job. You might be healthy, but other people aren't (or their family isn't) - which means they stay at a job they might otherwise not. Fast food workers and children and office workers all get the same level of care.

If things do go wrong, they will send a nurse to my house up to 6 times a day, which helps folks not have to quit their jobs to take care of family. ANd a bunch of little stuff like that. While you might not use this stuff now, your family members probably could use some of this.

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

#304

Post by true_religion »

FiberBundle wrote: post #84
toyg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

120k is a wildly high salary in Europe, and contrary to popular belief Europeans don’t just cut ties to their homeland and move to Silicon Valley just because the salary is higher. You can find a lot of compiler experts sitting safely in the UK or Italy or Russia.

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

#305

Post by mschuster91 »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #276
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they just pay for health insurance premiums instead of the health care. Deductible followed by a percentage of everything until you reach your out of pocket coupled with poor paid leave if you get paid leave at all is a significant cost to health care. This is combined with a culture that glorifies not missing a day of work for any reason, which can't help folks use the health care provided.

While I agree about the culture glorifying overwork (recent post on HN) and the difficulty of using health care / PTO at times, numerically my employer-backed health care plan is actually quite generous. My $0 premium health care plan has only a $2000 deductible, $6000 out of pocket max, 20% coinsurance for “big” procedures, $10 copay (regardless of deductible) for primary care, and I actually get PAID a $500 yearly…

> My $0 premium health care plan has only a $2000 deductible, $6000 out of pocket max

So, realistically, you have to account and budget for about ~330$ a month of your wages going away additionally for your healthcare during employment term negotiations.

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

#306

Post by 2ion »

ChrisRR wrote: post #283
capableweb wrote: post #261

> 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

> $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

Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.

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

#307

Post by true_religion »

arp242 wrote: post #145
Toutouxc wrote: post #66

There are many services that people only use as long as they're free or cheap, but stop using when a price tag appears or the price increases. Is it heresy now to propose that Babel maybe isn't THAT valuable?

If you run a company with a monthly labour costs of $100k, and Babel increases efficiency by just 0.1%, then you get $1k of value from Babel every month. I'm no really involved in JS, but many people talk very highly of Babel, and I'm going to guess the actual efficiency increase is more than 0.1% for a lot of companies. $100k/monthly is perhaps 10-25 devs (depending on where it's located). So just $5/month sounds li…

If I had to choose to pay for a compiler I would pay for Typescript even if it were 3x more expensive and supported less plugins than Babel. Babel is something I really struggle to not use, but find myself forced to use at times.

I’d much rather plunge money into any competing compiler to get it feature compatible.

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

#308

Post by mellosouls »

NiekvdMaas wrote: post #212
akmittal wrote: post #105

See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve. >The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a…

Looking at the the commit activity of some maintainers, that seems to be correct: 7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202... $110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions

Depends entirely on their contract and what is expected of them. Coding is just one possible duty of a lead in this sort of project - the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.

Having said that, the salary looks excessive and the commit history isn't a good look without clarification.

But assumptions aren't always the best guide to what is actually going on.

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

#309

Post by capableweb »

FiberBundle wrote: post #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…

> This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken

This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it. The team handling the economy of Babel right now, does not, hence Babel is not sustainable.

But, if you'd make the salaries a bit more realistic, Babel would have money over each year. But that's based on them not giving themselves one of the highest salary in the world. Let's see what they'll do.

> Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence.

"merely guarantees subsistence", what the hell? Maybe if you live in SF, but any other place in the world, this kind of salary is not even what seniors pull in yearly. My own anecdote:

> Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116591

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

#310

Post by bidirectional »

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…).

The requirement for working on Babel is being a Javascript expert and compiler engineer, not a good JS developer. It's 85k GBP, that is very reasonable for those skills.
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