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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?

#401

Post by wussboy »

eplanit wrote: post #390
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.

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

When that “carpenter” is also answering the phone and doing quotes for work, apparently. If Henry is also the community manager and main fundraiser (which from the sounds of other posts he is), I’d argue that the last thing you’d want him spending time on would be code.

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

#402

Post by riffraff »

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.

software engineers in Italy are vastly underpaid, but USD 72k are EUR 60k, and as an employee the company is spending much more in taxes, healthcare, retirement etc.

You should compare this with a self-employed consultant-style job, not with a normal employee.

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

#403

Post by drstewart »

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

>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.

You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there?

Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?

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

#404

Post by Dylan16807 »

eplanit wrote: post #390
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.

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

Not per day, but over an entire year. If you're making things that are held together with nails then that is not a bad starting point for evaluation.

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

#405

Post by rk06 »

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…

Evan's metric and henry's are not directly comparable.

Someone on vue core team (perhaps evan himself) said internal group co-ordination and management is handled by other team members, most prominent among them being Chris Fritz[1] (before he stepped down) and Sarah Drasner[2].

This reduces managerial burden on Evan and gives him more energy & time to focus on technical challenges

While Henry is the senior most member in babel team, so most of the management work is on him. which eats his time a lot more.

[1] https://twitter.com/chrisvfritz [2] https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/

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

#406

Post by bobbycodes »

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.

There’s an insane wage gap between tech in US and the rest of the world.

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

#407

Post by randomdata »

capableweb wrote: post #345
bfrog wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The valley you'd be make closer to 300k

Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?

Presumably because that is the alternative, requiring sufficient incentive to stay away from the alternative? It is not like you need to live in SV to work in SV.

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

#408

Post by adamrezich »

andrew_ wrote: post #363
nwsm wrote: post #353

Here's [0] a blunt take on the situation by Sebastian McKenzie, who left Babel to start Rome Tools. He blames the full time salary of Henry, who he doesn't think contributed enough. [0] https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522

And a rebuttal by Evan You, absolutely torching Seb for being a massive hypocrite https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392096427313147908

can you explain what makes this statement an "absolute torching?" I must be missing something

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

#409

Post by drstewart »

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.…

That doesn't justify a $100k+ difference in salary, sorry.

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

#410

Post by bobbycodes »

asmosoinio wrote: post #398
19h wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s pretty common in Europe to be self-employed tech positions, so this might as well be pre-tax.
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