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 ter…
I might agree with your overall point but there is no reason for the name calling, this is not Twitter.
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…
Soliciting donations is an entire profession unto itself in the non-profit world. Ironically the practice is also called "Development". So, Henry could have the joint titles of Lead Developer and Lead Developer.
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…
You realize that $11k has to pay their taxes, healthcare, and retirement state-side right? It’s peanuts.
I think it's somewhere in between. Taxes, healthcare, and retirement are big in the US. And keep in mind that self-employment taxes (operative here) are more than the taxes taken out as an employee. But $11K/month * 12 == $132K. To roughy back-of-napkin equalize for higher self-employment taxes, let's say that's equivalent to $100K salary if you were an ordinary employee. (I just made that up, I don't know how accura…
Back of the napkin to me: say $25.5k pre-tax retirement / college savings for child, 30% federal, 15% state, $3200/mn to rent an apartment in a mid sized city in the US, $400 month for car and gas, $1k for food, $1k for healthcare, $160 for utilities, leaves them with $288/mn. Not enough to ever own a home, build wealth, travel; better hope they have a spouse that is employed & has employer subsidized healthcare.
Relevant:
> 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.
Business stuff is what pays the bills. You can't have 2/3 of the work force just merging PRs and find out 6 months later that nobody paid the taxes and you won't be bringing in enough money to make payroll next month.
I wasn't saying not to do administrative tasks, but that they shouldn't be over half your entire company's work-hour allocation . Even with fundraising in there too. Imagine if you had 3 employees and 2 of them were HR. That is not a good allocation of labor.
If you're including sales in the bucket of administrative tasks (and fundraising is very much equivalent to sales), many successful companies are at or near 100% administrative tasks.
It does seem odd that so much of the work would go towards paying to keep looking for more money (fundraising for fundraising), but there are plenty of sales oriented organisations out there who don't make anything. It's just odd in this case that an OSS project seems to have gone on that direction.
I suspect nobody should be earning such a salary working on a project like that.
Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer. $500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
> JetBrains asks for $500 per year For IntelliJ; their other tools are $200 a year. And I suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending than a random JS fullstack devsecops person.
> suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending
Engineers get discretionary spending? I haven't ever had a dollar discretionary. My last job paid for an ergo mouse for me (Logitech Vertical) at hire time and I was so ecstatic at the park and got myself a jumbo mousepad to go with it.
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…
I'm the lead dev of Ardour, paid entirely by voluntarily payments for the software, and I make about $100k/year from the software itself. That's after nearly 35 years as a C++ software developer. Some people think I'm a brilliant programmer, I'd settle for "probably about as good as anyone you're likely to be able to hire". So why it is not ridiculous that I'm not working for twice that or more at some larger tech ou…
How big of a problem is it to change from babel to some alternative? I'm thinking of a possibly bigger disadvantage should that need to happen. I'm genuinely asking, since I'm not familiar with js tool chains.
I successfully removed it years ago because Typescript replaced everything I was using Babel for, things even build way faster and I even got Intellisense autocompletion and refactoring as bonus.
I doubt typescript is faster than babel with all the static analysis it does. In fact it's typical for projects to use typescript as a check in CI and actually build with babel, for speed. Fast alternatives to babel are things like esbuild and swc