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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?

#681

Post by kyawzazaw »

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.

Have you seen levels.fyi? Just make an account on teamblind.com and ask for referrals and leetcode enough

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

#682

Post by Grimm1 »

manigandham wrote: post #667
ianbutler wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never disputed that there is talent that exists and doesn't know it's worth. Crying shame is what I call that though.

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

#683

Post by kyawzazaw »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #527
creshal wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is there a norm I'm not aware of?

yeah at my company. they just submit a small ticket

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

#684

Post by ashtonkem »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #442
ashtonkem wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s less clear to me is whether or not the tech industry is like the car. Will the rate of innovation drop as we slowly approach an asymptotically perfect product, or will it accelerate as access to concentrated labor and knowledge drives up the rate of change?

an excellent question. however, it may be orthogonal to the question of whether or not other parts of the US, and more broadly, other parts of the world, can be where that continuing development happens. regardless of which of those two paths turns out to be the future, there's still the question of what SV's role will be.

Depends how strong the network effect is, I guess.

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

#685

Post by Too »

GianFabien wrote: post #678
vfclists wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

117 million downloads every month. 1 cent a download = 117,000,000 cents = $1,170,000. So the project is dying because they cannot get every downloader to pay 1 cent for every download. Even at 1/10 cent it would still come to $117,000 This is how screwed up open source is. An advanced technological industry which doesn't have infrastructure in place to collect fractions of cents per product delivery. Why can't the s…

I can't understand why there are 117 million downloads every month. I doubt there are 117 million programmers using Babel and why download it every month?

I'm sure 99% of all CI systems out there are just blindly doing npm install without any cache or pinned packages. Multiplied with microservices so that every run has to rebuild not just one service.

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

#686

Post by arp242 »

sokoloff wrote: post #284
arp242 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run a company with a monthly labour costs of $100k, and Babel increases efficiency by just 0.1%, then you get $1k of value from Babel every month. I'm no really involved in JS, but many people talk very highly of Babel, and I'm going to guess the actual efficiency increase is more than 0.1% for a lot of companies. $100k/monthly is perhaps 10-25 devs (depending on where it's located). So just $5/month sounds li…

0.1% of $100K is $100, not $1K.

Oops! Math is hard >_Still good ROI though.

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

#687

Post by tijl »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #622
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…

Comparing salaries isn't easy. Europeans get more vacation, more sick days, other (better?) Health care, retirement funds, unemployment insurance ... also they eventually pay less rent etc. Compering this objectively ain't easy.

What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes). $11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)

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

#688

Post by wildpeaks »

nsonha wrote: post #530
wildpeaks wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Typechecks are optional, just use transpile-only mode for the build: it merely removes the type annotations, it's fast.

You can have the best of both worlds: Intellisense based on types in the editor yet fast transpile in the build.

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

#689

Post by snemvalts »

hiram112 wrote: post #488
snemvalts wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Depending on where you work, if you're a great developer then the income can be around 2500-4500€ a month take home, which is 40k - 90k eur (gross, not payroll) a year. Considering the average (and very liveable) salary is 1100€ take home a month, it's really great living costs wise.

I think apart from the post-soviet Central European countries, Baltics are the outliers, and Estonia is the outlier among them (with Lithuania catching up). Mostly because of lenient tax policies and high levels of entrepreneurship. But all this growth does increase inequality a lot, a person in the countryside might take home 600-800€ a month in comparison.

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

#690

Post by nsonha »

rightbyte wrote: post #333
2ion wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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 Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only…

Babel is an complex perpetual maintenance solution to bad engineering in the first place. I'd rather be a "ossified tech lagger" then having to deal with that.

could you elaborate what is bad engineering? It's one thing to say babel is no longer a critical tool, it's another thing to say that it's "bad engineering"
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