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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?

#421

Post by ianbutler »

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…

On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low.

My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.

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

#422

Post by thrdbndndn »

ceejayoz wrote: post #397
adamrezich wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes sense for a normal size organization but they literally only have three employees. And the majority of the fund raised was used for his salary.

If anything, it's not fair at all for the other two who did the substantial work and only earn 2k per month.

(To be fair they have changed the distribution this year.)

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

#423

Post by Frost1x »

rk06 wrote: post #405
david_allison wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 memb…

The necessary "glue" work that often doesn't get tracked but eats a lot of time, energy, and cognitive capacity is very often overlooked. I'm not saying that is or isn't what happened here.

I've worked with a lot of teams where no sort of solid leadership existed. Filling that gap is often difficult to justify because there's a tremendous amount of thought involved and it's a thankless task. Sure you can take the existing structure and direction and just plug away but ultimately, most efforts that do this fail. You need to look ahead and think about future adaptability if you want success. People often act like software development is as straightforward as data entry. You should have X entries per day. If you didn't add X entries then you must be slacking. Development requires not only technical prowess which is difficult to maintain in-and-of-itself but creativity, vision, and strategy. If you ignore the rest your project will fail or at least become an artifact of times past at some point.

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

#425

Post by danielsju6 »

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.

How much does your healthcare cost you? Retirement? Self-employment taxes? Housing?

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

#426

Post by kemayo »

capableweb wrote: post #320
TulliusCicero wrote: post #297

Earlier 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. Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas. A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is…

> A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers. Alternative narrative: All the companies want to be located in Silicon Valley but no developers actually want to live there. So you have to pay ridiculously high salaries for people t…

That seems unlikely, since it's a nice city in a temperate climate. Absent any discussion of the job market, I'd like living there.

Now, given the cost of housing in the Bay Area, having to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to afford living there...

Which, yes, is a bit circular. The tech boom (plus dumb zoning choices, and also California's property tax laws) has resulted in that vast increase in housing costs, as too many people try to cram into the available housing stock. Note news stories about rent plummeting in SF as people went remote for COVID.

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

#428

Post by omginternets »

capableweb wrote: post #309
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 o…

>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.

Isn't this a restatement of the problem? My (uninformed) impression is that there are structural issues that make it hard to effectively run crowdfunded open-source projects. As you say, the secret sauce appears to be a question of managing the organization.

Do you have any thoughts on how to reproducibly run such a projects?

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

#429

Post by tarruda »

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…

> In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.

> The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?

I had no idea he had started a competing project. This really stinks, almost like he is sabotaging his competitor.

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

#430

Post by ceejayoz »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #422
ceejayoz wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That makes sense for a normal size organization but they literally only have three employees. And the majority of the fund raised was used for his salary. If anything, it's not fair at all for the other two who did the substantial work and only earn 2k per month. (To be fair they have changed the distribution this year.)

The organization is substantially larger than just its paid employees.

https://babeljs.io/team

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