Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

babeljs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 729 posts

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

#381

Post by the_lonely_road »

amelius wrote: post #229
barry-cotter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our economic systems weren’t invented. They’re all hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. Every economic theorist of note is well aware of that and they always have been. Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Usually they’ve failed completely but occasionally they’ve gotten something functional at the end, but not what they designed. I’m reasonably confident every economist kno…

> Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Has anyone tried to design an economic system recently, based on tools from the information age?

China would probably be the best case study available, but they are of course notoriously difficult to get reliable data about. DeFi (Ethereum Decentralized Finance) would be the next best case study but finding someone capable of wading through all of the scams to find the actual projects is going to be almost as hard as getting reliable data out of China.

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

#382

Post by pointjek »

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

[flagged]

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

#384

Post by andrew_ »

phpnode wrote: post #374
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…

I think this is a really bad look for Sebastian. He started babel and made the most contributions overall, but he hasn't been involved in the project for 5 years at this point. He left to join Facebook and babel would have died if it weren't for the efforts of Logan, Henry, Nicolo and the other contributors. The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situatio…

Based on his track record (he did the same thing after departing Yarn), I'd say that's a definite risk. Unstable ground, to be sure.

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

#385

Post by [deleted] »

mschuster91 wrote: post #181
opk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. US salaries are higher than European ones, but that is mainly because Americans need to account for healthcare and (especially in SV) extremely high cost of living. I have a ~62 m² 3 room flat in somewhat center of Munich and pay only 1.000€ a month in rent, whereas in the US…

[deleted]

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

#386

Post by bidirectional »

kuschku wrote: post #103
axguscbklp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development. Why should its developers and maintainers not make at least as much money as entry-level Silicon Valley developers?

Why should they make more than senior engineers with decades of experience in Berlin? Why should customers/users of the project have to pay/donate twice or thrice as much for the same result, just because the devs want to live in the US instead of e.g. Paris?

A handful of people doing highly technical compiler work relied upon by much of the industry, while also being experts in JS probably do deserve to be paid more than the average senior in Berlin. These aren't cheap skills, the people who are this good can probably get remote work at well-paying US companies wherever they live.

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

#387

Post by maxerickson »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #303
Jorge1o1 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

People in this thread aren't bragging up the US healthcare system, they are saying that high salary employees of large companies don't really face significant costs from it.

Maybe the salary differences really are just $6000 a year?

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

#388

Post by bidirectional »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #153
throwaway8709 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me? FANG has lots of offices in Europe.. I work at one of those at around 20-35k USD / month, depending on stonk prices :) Making 11k USD is not uncommon for contractors in northern Europe, Switzerland or Germany. Sure, you can find many who are paid less. But talent is expensive.

That's how much is needed to be paid for getting people to do unethical work. It is not directly comparable to working on a compiler used by many people.

What about the people working on open source compilers at those companies (e.g. ReasonML at Facebook).

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

#389

Post by adamrezich »

Touche wrote: post #372
andrew_ wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seb is a well-known narcissist, suffering from ego created by his own Twitter myth. I cannot name a single peer among the many circles I converse in which respects the person (another matter for the technical ability). Seb has only to look in a mirror to identify the issues with the current state of the Babel project management.

Can you imagine taking a job at his startup. You have a bad week, run into a hard problem and start to sweat that your commit log isn't full enough.

I have no horse in this race but where are comments like this coming from, in response to this:

>I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12 issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests. This is across all Babel orgs.

100k+ for a year of that sounds pretty cushy. he didn't say that he did "only" 1 or 2 PRs a week or something. where are these hyperbolic comments in response coming from? what other kind of work could have possibly been done in addition to this meager amount of code work to justify such a salary?

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

#390

Post by eplanit »

Touche wrote: post #372
andrew_ wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seb is a well-known narcissist, suffering from ego created by his own Twitter myth. I cannot name a single peer among the many circles I converse in which respects the person (another matter for the technical ability). Seb has only to look in a mirror to identify the issues with the current state of the Babel project management.

Can you imagine taking a job at his startup. You have a bad week, run into a hard problem and start to sweat that your commit log isn't full enough.

It's like measuring a carpenter by how many nails they've driven per day.
Post reply on HN