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

Post by digitaltrees » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

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…

Post by Grimm1 » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #608

ianbutler wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's valid too, but and big but, I'd argue your engineers aren't being paid their value though and that's largely down to what I feel is Europe not valuing engineers relative to what they accomplish enough. Don't drive our wages down, drive yours up. I'm consistently astounded that my friend who lives in France is only making what she makes given her level of schooling and skill. That doesn't detract from your poin…

An open source project funded by donations is not the vehicle to use to try to hike developer wages. Especially when that project is already underfunded. The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.

Post by sangnoir » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #568

ChrisRR wrote: post #283

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. $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living

I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic. I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants). Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actu…

Post by capableweb » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

19h wrote: post #315

nt2h9uh238h wrote: post #224

VueJS and Nuxt are also massively underfunded and are likely some of the highest-impact projects you can fund: https://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/

Evan You is getting EUR 14359 (~ $17450) per month via Patreon alone: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou . I don't know about "underfunded" but with that you can hire at least 3 full time senior developers in Berlin ..

Post by deckard1 » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #547

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…

You can send a PR with 1 million lines of code, or 3 lines of code. You can send PRs updating typos in documentation, or PRs affecting the core aspects of a project. You can send 100 PRs full of tech debt or 1 that makes the thing run 100x faster. PR counts suck as a way to measure work.