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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?

#481

Post by tarruda »

oneepic wrote: post #478
tarruda wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

It is one thing to raise the issue in private with "Project A", another thing is to tweet this to thousands of followers. Especially after "Project A" already had resolved the issue on its own.

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

#482

Post by dominotw »

explorigin wrote: post #454
dominotw wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

employees here have employer sponsored healthcare. The gap is huge even if you take out of pocket expenses into account.

Don't just look at salary, compare against cost-of-living. There are gaps, I'm not denying that. It's just not as large as is looks on paper.

Yes its not that large if you work for some enterprise in midwest. I have mid career friends in bay area pulling in 500k tc in the bay area. This is next to impossible in europe and certainly not a possibility for average engineer.

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

#483

Post by altendo »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #416
mellosouls wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.

The original article notes that funding took a hit in 2020. 2020 was an unprecedented year for any number of reasons. To simply say someone did a poor job fundraising in a year beset by constant challenges everywhere lacks proper context.

That's not to say more could have been done; I don't feel, however, that I'm in a position to say. Making money on open source is a difficult enough prospect regardless how one does it without also considering other factors that increase that difficulty.

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

#484

Post by MetallicCloud »

indemnity wrote: post #275
sofixa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$90k/year is between a good and outrageously good salary for Europe, depending on the country. So yeah, plenty of talent available for cheaper than $90k/year.

I don’t understand why salaries are so low in Europe. I work in New Zealand, not exactly a tech hub, and I’m on $220k p.a. (mid career). $160k US, 130k EUR. 39% top tax. I wouldn’t say I am significantly above average and I’m not in management (architect/principal engineer). Similar story in Australia. Not quite US levels but decent compensation, I don’t feel taken advantage of.

Really? Maybe that sort of money is available in Sydney. I never saw anything close to that level in Melbourne, particularly for a mid level developer. I've had to move to the US to make a decent wage.

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

#485

Post by rdsedmundo »

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.

What your comment and all the others here saying that on country X this is a very good salary for a "median" senior engineer is missing, is that the average senior engineer has no clue on how to maintain Babel.

Most people in the software industry (including senior engineers) are doing CRUD work, you got a web dashboard that calls an API that then insert or retrieve content from the database, you got a simple `if` condition or a `for` loop here and there, and that's it. Compare this to creating a compiler, the difficulty is on another level of magnitude.

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

#486

Post by explorigin »

dominotw wrote: post #482
explorigin wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't just look at salary, compare against cost-of-living. There are gaps, I'm not denying that. It's just not as large as is looks on paper.

Yes its not that large if you work for some enterprise in midwest. I have mid career friends in bay area pulling in 500k tc in the bay area. This is next to impossible in europe and certainly not a possibility for average engineer.

The bay area is all kinds of insane in many ways. :-)

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

#487

Post by andrew_ »

swyx wrote: post #419
0x000000E2 wrote: post #187

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.

bingo. tsc for dev. sucrase for prod.

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

#488

Post by hiram112 »

snemvalts wrote: post #263
sofixa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$90k/year is between a good and outrageously good salary for Europe, depending on the country. So yeah, plenty of talent available for cheaper than $90k/year.

Keep in mind that most taxes and benefits are missing there, so it's better to consider US salaries as payroll costs in Europe. In my fairly liberal country (Estonia), 75k eur a year renders around 42k eur a year take home, really great salary living costs wise but taxes still take a large chunk.

75K EUR / year is a legit salary in Estonia now? Wow, you guys are really catching up fast. I would have assumed former Soviet bloc countries were still down there at $30K or so (even less in Ukraine, Moldova, etc.).

Is this something special with Estonia, or are salaries catching up in the rest of Baltics, Poland, etc?

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

#489

Post by wrnr »

rough-sea wrote: post #292
wrnr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be overlooked, I was wondering why the original author is no longer involved. Babel, Rome, Deno, are all transpilers the tech isn't as unique as it once was. Things come and go in JS land, and Babel will go the way of Dodo.js

Deno is a full server-side JavaScript VM - it doesn't even solve the same problem as Babel...

Idiot

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

#490

Post by [deleted] »

WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote: post #439
phpnode wrote: post #374

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…

Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd. Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool. Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money. Out-of-touch, kn…

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