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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?

#471
post #419

Eh, 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.

Everything is transpired to JS before it hits prod.

But yeah it's slow

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

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's really rare, right?

It seems to be MIT licensed, and if so then maybe anyone could. But probably the actual authors have the most legitimacy and knowledge.

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

#473

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…

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

An important difference is Rome Tools employees are being paid with VC money and not money from the community.

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

#474

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…

>> 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 good idea

It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...

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

#475
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What entry level SV dev makes 11,000 x 12 = 132,000 x 1.25 (tax) = $165k/year pre-tax? I know the salaries here are high but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If they are that high for entry level then I’m being seriously underpaid :/

In 2020, here are some companies paying $195k-$230k for entry level programmers - https://www.levels.fyi/2020/ FAANG is not on the list, FAANG pays $180k-$190k for entry level (Netflix does not recruit entry level much though). So total compensation, entry level at some places is $15k higher, or more.

A little off-topic I suppose but TC being nearly $200k but salary being $130k always feels disappointing to me, especially since RSUs rarely vest within year 1.

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

#476
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exi…

We actively discourage team leads from trying to be the "team lead that still codes a bit here and there", they mostly just get in the way and don't focus on the team's real needs.

I.e. we'd rather them take a late lunch or go home early than push a sub par PR nobody wants to criticise.

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

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but how does this not sound worse? "My job is to manage a team of employees who code." vs "my job is to manage a team of unpaid volunteers who code, while I earn a proper salary".

Managing volunteers is still real work - sometimes more so. It's hardly uncommon for non-profits to have paid staff managing volunteers.

I'm not doubting it's real work; just that why other people in the same team have to volunteer (or being underpaid in case of the other two employees), while a single person is paid "properly"?

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I: - built Project A - left Project A and started the competitor Project B - contributed a lot of PRs to Project B each week, and - saw that a guy in a similar role at Project A, has relatively few weekly contributions to Project A

My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing volunteers is still real work - sometimes more so. It's hardly uncommon for non-profits to have paid staff managing volunteers.

I'm not doubting it's real work; just that why other people in the same team have to volunteer (or being underpaid in case of the other two employees), while a single person is paid "properly"?

The article answers this.

> In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a salary for over a year, we expanded our goal to also support three additional maintainers: Jùnliàng, Kai, and Nicolò.

They started with one paid salary. Tried to expand that. Didn't get enough money to do so; now they're asking (fairly, IMO) for the community that treats them as critical infrastructure to pony up.

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

#480
post #393

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.

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