this is why i preferred Corporation backed open source project like Microsoft's VS code. MSFT fund it. no drama.
Instead you get Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
411–420 of 729 posts
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the people who are working on these projects are talented and can command high salaries, $11k/mo is realistic. It's already a large pay cut. > 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? Are all those people capable of managing Babel? I think the real question is: do you need top talent for important open source projects, or are aver…
You somehow seem to think that amount someone earns is somehow related to how good they are. > $11k/mo is realistic. It's already a large pay cut. Yes, sure, in Silicon Valley anything is possible but for the 99% rest of the world, 11K USD per month is ridiculously high and even people with decades of experience won't collect that unless there is a specific situation. It's definitely not normal outside of Silicon Val…
You realize that $11k has to pay their taxes, healthcare, and retirement state-side right? It’s peanuts.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#413Babel 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.
How many of those engineers rely on Babel every day? ;-P
Median pay for a software engineer in the US in 2020 was over $110k per the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/...
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#414Isn't it an obvious problem that lots of OSS people have? If your project is non-trivial and effective, millions of people want to use it but it takes a lot to maintain it. In most cases, without vetting, it is hard to accept PRs from random people because you pretty much have to review the entire code and in most cases, it would probably take ages to understand enough about something like Babel to be a useful contri…
The problem is the contradictory nature of commercial open source. You want everyone to have access to the code but you also want to charge businesses. You can't have both. So OSS companies split the code base in to a community and a business edition. The business edition builds on top of the community edition which requires the community edition to either be GPL licensed with a CLA or a permissive license with the r…
Another option is to offer the code for free, but charge for support and a managed instance.
I can provide an example: NextCloud.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#415Babel 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.
Those $72k is equivalent to EUR 45k in Italy (at least, in my region).
You can check it using a "taxes calculator" website: https://it.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=45000&from=year&... (it's in Italian, sorry). On top of those 45k EUR gross the employer pays 13.5k, so it's 58.5k EUR.
As of now, $72k USD is 59k EUR.
I don't have many data points, but so far I have been offered only one 20 hours/week job (at a salary that was way lower than 45k) and a full-time job which paid for more than 45k (but since I was studying, I didn't accept it).
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#416Earlier 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
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 ass…
>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.
So, he fundraised money to have time to further fundraise, and he did it so well that they have to decrease his salary?
Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.
That's nowhere typical, even in London you'll find that only in higher-end companies.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#418Babel 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…
This is very helpful transparency, thank you. I appreciate that it's not just spin, but you are willing to reveal some past challenges too (all projects will have challenges around relationships and decision-making and equity! When we talk about the publicly, we can help each other get better at managing them.).
I think the history about previously some people got more and some less and now it's equalized is helpful to be part of the information, and would have been helpful as part of the original post. I am also curious in general about how you are dealing with "decision-making"... who gets to decide how much who gets paid (or who gets hired or let go), how?
Your story makes sense to me, that someone's contribution isn't measured solely by github stats. But the fact that there is not currently a good relationship between the collective who maintains babel and the original babel author is... unfortunate I guess is a word. And makes me curious what happened there.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#419Eh, my take, Typescript won. Does the same thing as Babel but supports static types and inference in regular JS.
on the contrary - tsc is so slow that most people use babel to strip out types in production.
Re: Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
#420Earlier 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.
There’s an insane wage gap between tech in US and the rest of the world.
Keep in mind that many other countries have socialized medicine and a better nationalized retirement program. We pay for those and, because of our system, they are very expensive.