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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?

#491
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.

What does "strip out types in production" means ? I've never heard of that.

For what I do, Babel is the slow part. switching babel to esbuild (still with tsc) divided my build times by 10.

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

#492

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.

Honestly the very idea of a JavaScript compiler like that is destined for obsolescence per standardized features added to browsers. Folks should just develop their own shims where necessary and TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS. Sure no one likes doing that, but it’s important to follow the fast-pace ECMAScript adoption.

> TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS

I mean, how does that not just push all of this towards companies and open source solutions that provide access to old browsers and what not? I mean no matter what direction you push, it's going to be someone else's open source code that needs money.

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

#493

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…

Guy is pretty young (created babel in high school I read) so maybe that's part of it. I find that the older I get the more empathy I have.

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

#494
post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Idiot

Come on, you were in the right, but now you've lost the argument. This is not the place for this kind of discussion.

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

#495
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thoughts. If the dev moved to a nice SEA country he could live a very comfortable life with that kind of money.

So in order to work for product you're passionate about and used by millions, instead of being paid well you should consider moving to a different part of the world just to live well? Your work should not be rewarded in proportion to the impact you are having? This is ridiculous. Great engineers should be incentivized to work on open source projects. Would you rather the engineer and project get absorbed into a compa…

- Had they figured out how to monetize it, you and me would not have had to try to solve this problem - monetizing is part of long term project sustainability cause time is money and living is not free..

- I don't hold any opinion on how to solve this problem or if they should get paid or not... consider this, 11K is the Yearly / Half yearly salary of a mid-level developers in most parts of Asia, double it and you can hire a decent senior developer for that price..

I can understand the dilemma the person is in, but, making 11k a month, this person is part of the top 10% of the richest people worldwide.. little hard to care too much.

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

#496

> 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…

Just to give one data point I'm in Poland and I'm earning around 3500€ in a fully remote senior developer/engineer position working on AI tech in a company of around 1k employees. I'm one of the best paid people among my colleagues. The absolute top range job offers in this field in my country would be somewhere around 5000€ but that may be available only to a few developers in the entire 40 million country. I'm sure one could argue that one US engineer is worth 2+ polish engineers but I'm doubtful it's such a large difference. Quite the opposite in fact, I heard rumours that our engineers are quite valued internationally, once you get past the language barrier of course.

Just my 3 cents.

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

#497

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…

deleted

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

#498
Savage of Sebastian to call out Henry like that on twitter. Are you on drugs or something? https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522

Publicly accusing Henry of not actually working on the project seems short sighted. Only looking at a one year slice of contribution rather than the lifetime of the project masks the full picture of Henry's contributions. Also in Henry's defense, the past year has been a terribly difficult one for most all of us to get through this pandemic.

Not a good look for you Sebastian. Feels like you are looking for a place to point blame and unfortunately decided to direct that blame in Henry's direction. Henry Zhu is a great developer and contributor. Really deserves better than this.

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

#499
post #61
post #8

I was horrified and humbled to see that the people making this amazing stuff are making considerably less ($2k/month) than I do... or frankly, than most of us here on HN do. Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.

I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures. They do quote $11k for a full-time position as others have pointed out. What I make is much nearer to the $2k figure but I am in Europe. Maybe they'd do better operating out of of somewhere cheaper. Many older open source projects including those I contribute to aren't owned by…

$11k/month contracting in the US is very different from $11k salary in the US, let alone Europe.

~7.5% extra tax right off the top, versus salaried (employer usually pays that part for salaried employees, and it's not stated as being part of one's salary, ever) in addition to all the usual taxes.

Our version of a "public pension" is terrible, so you'll need some contributions to a 401K if you ever want to retire, and unlike someone salaried the employer won't be chipping in any extra above your salary (typical for salaried employees is some % of "matching" money for your contributions, so you put in 3% of salary and your employer puts in the same amount, above your salary). Then there's the fact that for any competitive goods (say, housing in a decent school district near where jobs exist) you're competing with people who are choosing not to save that money, so there's pressure on prices that wouldn't exist with a better compulsory pension system.

Health care for a family will probably run 1.5-2k/month without an employer chipping in, and still leave you exposed to $20k-$30k of risk per year ("out-of-pocket max") and spending another $500-$1,000/yr even in a good year.

Depending on your arrangement, you may have to deduct pay for any vacation or sick days taken. Take 30 working days out of that (not unusual for sick + vacation in Europe, if we're comparing to European total comp) and that's another ~10% of your annual pay gone.

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

#500
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.

Looking at tech salaries globally is always going to be weird. Technically, they're mostly similar across 1st world countries, except in the US because of the bubble on the west and east coast, where they're absolutely completely wack.

There's a lot of complicated, nuanced reasons for this, but it is what it is for now.

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