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

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

#391

Post by yonaguska »

dingaling wrote: post #337
NiekvdMaas wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Back when I was a senior programmer I would probably have had as few credited code changes as that. But what you wouldn't see are the hundreds of problems I debugged and analysed for other programmers , down to the level of "make this change on line 530".

The most productive team lead I worked with didn't do a lot of story work. He was constantly checking in on everyone else to ensure that no individual contributed was blocked on anything. A problem that would have taken me 3 hrs to figure out, was solved during pairing in 15 minutes.

So thanks for being that guy for a lot of other devs that learned from you.

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

#392

Post by ericlewis »

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…

Just as an FYI: Rome was started under the react-native team at Facebook and has been in development for well over 2 years, Facebook let him take it with him when he left.

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

#393

Post by 19h »

nicolo-ribaudo wrote: post #254

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 everythi…

To me $72k for a non-full-time project per year is still insane.

The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.

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

#394

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #131
qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the problem would actually be solved if the project was a bit more capitalist and charged money for usage, no? This isn't capitalism failing, it's Burning Man gift economy type stuff failing.

I never understand the reluctance to charge for software amongst this community. Especially when you consider projects like Babel are mostly being used in commercial environments. Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free or that the developer should have to beg for a few crumbs at the end of the month.

I really like the model where tools are free for educational, open-source, and other non-commercial uses. I've ended up paying for software libraries because I was first able to try them out for free in school and other personal projects.

One issue with fixed pricing or licensing is that it can lock out people in developing countries from participating. A few hundred dollars is nothing for a San Francisco based company but it might be a huge amount for someone in Latin America. How many great ideas fail to take off due to insufficient access to funding?

In recent years game engines have been doing an interesting job at exploring this space. You can use stuff like Unity or Unreal and the price depends on how much money you're making. I think something similar is done in the mobile app store ecosystems as well.

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

#395

Post by icholy »

david_allison wrote: post #351
dsr12 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creator of Vue.js Evan You's perspective: "Working on a project" doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of "I'm responsible for this". https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392088730438090756

Evan You[0] has over 4x more contributions than Henry Zhu[1] this year. Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6]. Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everyth…

> it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day

What about long running feature branches that get squashed before merging?

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

#397

Post by ceejayoz »

adamrezich wrote: post #389
Touche wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Management? Fundraising? There's more to running an organization than just coding.

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

#398

Post by asmosoinio »

19h wrote: post #393
nicolo-ribaudo wrote: post #254

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 everythi…

To me $72k for a non-full-time project per year is still insane. The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.

That's the pay the employee gets? Before their taxes, but after the employer has paid a fare share of expenses on it?

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

#399

Post by ianbanks »

david_allison wrote: post #351
dsr12 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creator of Vue.js Evan You's perspective: "Working on a project" doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of "I'm responsible for this". https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392088730438090756

Evan You[0] has over 4x more contributions than Henry Zhu[1] this year. Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6]. Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everyth…

To add another data point, on the BabelJS Slack, in the last 12 months, @Henry (hzoo, based on the matching profile pictures) has posted 96 messages, and @nicolo-ribaudo 251.

One can bring the messages up with these filters:

"from:@Henry before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11" and "from:@nicolo-ribaudo before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11"

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

#400

Post by capableweb »

19h wrote: post #393
nicolo-ribaudo wrote: post #254

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 everythi…

To me $72k for a non-full-time project per year is still insane. The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.

Yup, same in South-West Europe and most places I've worked as a developer and manager. These quoted salaries are extreme for private companies and I don't understand them at all for open source work, even less when they don't even seem to work full-time.

But then I don't live in Silicon Valley either, where these salaries seems to be judged from.

Seems extreme weird to hire people who live in Silicon Valley though for a supposedly global project. Hire people so you can make it sustainable without having to pay extreme salaries. The rest of the open source ecosystem already figured out that you need a nimble operation, wonder why it's hard for team Babel to understand?

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