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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?

#711

Post by CRConrad »

rndude wrote: post #140
dandellion wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt the lead developers of a team of 4 make more than $11k in most of Europe.

$11k makes roughly €9k. If you work for a company in Germany this would be gross salary of roughly €6.5k a month. The rest 2.5k would be ancillary wage costs for the employer. That finally translates to €4k net after taxes including health insurance etc. I believe many good engineers make that amount of money in Germany.

There is nothing that says those 11K include ancillary costs. It's called salary, so compare to salary, not to salary + ancillary costs.

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

#712

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

rakalakalili wrote: post #646
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just fyi google in boulder starts entry level around 150k, and senior engineers with 4 years tenure pull in 350+

Understood. Thanks for the specifics.

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

#713

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

sangnoir wrote: post #615
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right? I want Babel to continue to exist , even if it steered by an engineer who is not "the best in the world", if we take your assertion at face value (higher salary = better engineer). Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously, I will posit that there is a least 1 Eastern European engineer who's better (based on HackerRank/leetcode/CodeJam stats),…

> Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously

Umm... Colorado?

We're more than a thousand miles as the crow flies or 20 hours of driving away from Silicon Valley.

More to the point: If the rest of the team is in US time zones, coordinating with an Eastern European developer is much harder. It means someone has to stay up really late or get up really early, and typically you still don't get much overlap.

Granted if such a brilliant developer who needed very little input from the rest of the team were to apply, they'd do well to hire them. But as the other comment mentions, how do you find such a developer on demand?

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

#714

Post by CRConrad »

cycomanic wrote: post #219
jeltz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, $11k is a very high salary in Sweden. Almost the only way to make that as a developer is to be an independent contractor.

But he essentially is an independent contractor, that's the point. And talking about Sweden, you miss the pension, health insurance and the employer contribution to the taxes.

How is he an "independent contractor" when everyone -- not everyone here, but he himself and his, ahem, employers -- is talking about him as an employee, and he's been there for years? Never mind the GitHub commits, analyse how many times in the last year he's had to hunt for next month's gig.

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

#715

Post by hultner »

jobigoud wrote: post #695
ThalesX wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more. Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I…

> Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. Here in France and I think in most western Europe 65K received by the employee will correspond to ~130K shelled out by the company, the rest going out into taxes on the employer side and taxes on the employee side, so it's basically the same.

It’s the same here in Sweden, about 3k€ net/mo will cost the employer at least 7k€/mo, and then there’s other costs associated such as paying for book-keeping, business insurance, pension etc. Billing 11k€/mo would barely cover the costs of a single employed developer with a medium salary here in Sweden.

I suppose every country is different but at least here in Sweden you would have to incorporate as a business and tax the money as one, you can be a sole proprietor but then the tax situation is usually even worse. And I’ve not even covered for things like vacation and sick days here. There’s quite a difference between what income you get into the business and what you can expect as a salary.

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

#716

Post by fire »

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.

wow, any open roles? international hiring or europe only?

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

#717

Post by rightbyte »

nsonha wrote: post #690
rightbyte wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

The browser compibatility mess. I did not mean to say Babel is bad engineering, but a solution to the problem of bad engineering.

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

#718

Post by eterevsky »

CRConrad wrote: post #707
eterevsky wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for Google in Switzerland and I have plenty of polish colleagues. The salaries here start around 150k per year, including bonus.

150k what, CHF? How much is that in currencies anyone knows anything about, and is it pre- or post-tax?

CHF is somewhere between USD and EUR. 150k pre tax, around 110-120 post-tax.

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

#719

Post by patrec »

robjan wrote: post #666
patrec wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not at all. FAANG is just a convenient and geographically comparable reference point. I have no trouble finding non-FAANG UK developer jobs online that pay more than ~$65k/year and neither should you. I'm not deeply familiar with babel, but I'm pretty sure that if you can lead that project (which should involve a fair amount of in-depth knowledge about JS, coding chops and CS knowledge) you will have many options to earn in excess of $65k anually.

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

#720

Post by SixDouble5321 »

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…

I get paid about 10k shy of this for primarily javascript and knowing AWS. If you don't think people who work on something so foundational are worth it, then you are what is bananas.
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