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

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

#661

Post by justsomeuser »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #648
capableweb wrote: post #261

> 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…

> 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas No, it's not. I work from home, remotely from Europe and I get paid $17K per month writing some PHP and JS code. I imagine writing Babel code isn't some trivial task that you can hire a junior dev to do.

Any roles going?

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

#662

Post by danielsju6 »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #655
danielsju6 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a software engineer in the US? That’s like green out of a boot-camp rate, not even close to senior, let alone staff, principle, or fellow.

I am a SWE with ~10yr experience (and no degree) and can't seem to find any of these jobs. For most of the country this is far above average. Where should I be looking for these jobs? I interview well, the problem is always getting into an interview. Most recent was an Erlang/C++ position on the east coast but they only want to offer $90k. The apparently pulled my resume only because of my Erlang experience.

Everywhere… IDK? FWIW most of my career has been remote in northern New England, working with companies in Boston or SF. Seriously, I’ve only received a single (non-founder) offer below 6 figures since I dropped out of college, at a non-tech company. I walked out cold when it got to negotiations because they were so far off base. A bit rude, yes, but I was genuinely insulted. It was three times lower than the next lowest offer I have received at that point.

I’ve been trying hard to just be an IC too ever since I burnt out on my own startup. Avoiding management hasn’t been hard with Ruby/JavaScript and a bit of Swift/Kotlin exp. I’ve only recently started entertaining eng.manager/director conversations and been clear that would take $600k+ to get me back into that world, and leading with number has not been a show stopper in my convos with FAANG companies.

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

#663

Post by danielsju6 »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #655
danielsju6 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a software engineer in the US? That’s like green out of a boot-camp rate, not even close to senior, let alone staff, principle, or fellow.

I am a SWE with ~10yr experience (and no degree) and can't seem to find any of these jobs. For most of the country this is far above average. Where should I be looking for these jobs? I interview well, the problem is always getting into an interview. Most recent was an Erlang/C++ position on the east coast but they only want to offer $90k. The apparently pulled my resume only because of my Erlang experience.

I suggest https://www.levels.fyi/ as a starting point in setting your expectations. Make friends with a recruiter, helps to see the world from their perspective & learn what the bands are / who’s hiring.

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

#664

Post by dash2 »

hnbad wrote: post #325
dash2 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the logic of public goods does not require any assumption about the economic system. Any set of actors whose actions create a negative externality, and who cannot enforce agreements to cooperate (either through the courts or via repeated interactions) will overproduce the externality. So, you could say the assumptions include the legal system. There are numerous tragedies of the commons under socialist economic s…

I'm not sure who you think you're arguing with but so far most of your rebuttals attack points I never made. I never said that humans aren't "self-interested" or that humans, in the abstract, can be described as acting optimally within given constraints. I said that the constraints influence behavior (which you agree with) and I said that the current economic system results in a tragedy of commons (which you also agr…

OK, fine. But this is also false. There are many tragedies of the commons that are successfully avoided under capitalism. As you point out, affluent rural areas are one, and the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque. (Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.) Another example is cartels. In the end, what's left apart from the uninteresting claim that "constraints influence behaviour"?

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

#665

Post by nsonha »

AncientPC wrote: post #625
cuu508 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?

A disagreement between two individuals should be initially communicated between those two and ideally resolved privately. Hopefully both sides have enough empathy to understand the other's perspective to reach an amicable conclusion. Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here) is a sign of immaturity and not what someone does if their goal is to fix the original concern. By airin…

> Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here)

No, this is after the issue has been corrected, which is even worse

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

#666

Post by robjan »

patrec wrote: post #535
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 think you should entertain the possibility that not all that salary gap is explained by geography. I suspect that one of three things would have to be true of either you or the two hypothetical devs: 1. You are really bad at salary negotiation. 2. You would be willing to take an enormous (> 50%) salary hit to work on Babel compared to what you could get in industry. 3. You are insufficiently skilled to lead a proje…

You're making the assumption, which many people on this forum make, that everyone wants to work for FAANG

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

#667

Post by manigandham »

ianbutler wrote: post #421
capableweb wrote: post #261

> 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…

On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low. M…

Two of the most expensive regions in the US are not representative of talent. The world is a big place with some brilliant engineers at very different pay scales.

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

#668

Post by charrondev »

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.

Payroll cost is higher than that. Those numbers don’t include the other costs paid by the employer - payroll taxes (as and Medicare) - unemployment insurance (SUTA/FUTA) - workers comp - health insurance (most Americans have the large percentage paid by their employer).

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

#669

Post by cacarr »

capableweb wrote: post #261

> 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…

> 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley ...

There are many cities in the USA where $11k/month is not at all outrageous: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, DC, NYC, etc.

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

#670

Post by ZephyrBlu »

anon98356 wrote: post #505
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

220k is sweet as in NZ even if you're living in Wellington or Auckland.

Yeh I'm sure 220k is a great salary for NZ. But in terms of purchasing power, how does it compare to $70k-£80k in the UK (I don't know, as I said haven't lived in NZ for 6 years)? I'd also be interested to know how common it is to be on 200k+ as a dev in NZ (edit: spelling/grammar)

Not sure about purchasing power, but from a salary perspective I thought that kind of money simply didn't exist at NZ companies. Maybe at Amazon or Microsoft in NZ you can get paid that much though.
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