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Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

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Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#201

Post by FootballMuse »

eek2121 wrote: post #147
birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

FAANG isn't the world. Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.

They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#202

Post by selcuka »

ericmcer wrote: post #127
ricardobeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

Having worked on design system teams before people can burn a lot of time and money doing overly nuanced stuff. I have been in meetings discussing removing/adding a property on a React component before. That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient to build a css library, but you could 100% have a team of 20 and they would find stuff to do.

> That said 3 motivated developers and a designer should be more than sufficient

That's how they worked (they had 4 employees and recently fired 3 of them). Four employees is still a huge cost, for a CSS library with lifetime subscription plans.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#203

Post by selcuka »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #186
narmiouh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?

120k USD ~= 180k AUD, which is a rate I have _definitely_ seen advertised for Seniors in Sydney + Melbourne.

I'm in Brisbane, but salaries are wildly different between US and AU. The exchange rate is not a good approximation. We don't see many US$275K (AU$410K) remote jobs [1] advertised in Australia either.

[1] https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#204

Post by tpmoney »

raincole wrote: post #187
birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Blender pays their developers ~ $3M/year. [0] I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot. [0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.

According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.

As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.

[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#205

Post by likium »

knowitnone3 wrote: post #166
birken wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

Tailwind is not a FAANG, they are glorified frontend CSS devs

Tailwind requires a compiler to work.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#206

Post by leetrout »

tpmoney wrote: post #199
ricardobeat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No ill will towards the team, but isn’t it almost absurd that a CSS library is funded to the tune of 1m+ yearly and is still in financial difficulty? It is technically complete. There is no major research work or churn like in React, no monstruous complexity like Webpack.

Let's say you're paying your devs $100k / year. All in costs on those devs are probably $150k or so. That means your $1m / year will fund 6 full time developers with a little left over. This podcast from the CEO[1] says their engineering team was 4 people and the remaining staff is the 3 owners, the 1 remaining engineer, and one part time customer support person. So assuming every full time person was costing $150k i…

They were posting a job for $250k last year.

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#207

Post by dbbk »

guluarte wrote: post #140
arcfour wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was honestly surprised they weren't already, given how heavily they use and promote it! Good to see they are helping out now too, though.

companies are suddenly sponsoring tailwind just for marketing

Vercel in particular needs all the positive PR it can get

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#208

Post by vidyesh »

leecommamichael wrote: post #45

How did a CSS library make any money at all? How did a CSS library have employees?

If Tailwind wasn't making that much money, they wouldn't have been able to keep developing Tailwind up to this level of sophistication.

To be specific, they had 4 staff engineers and had to fire 3 of them[1].

[1]https://socket.dev/blog/tailwind-css-announces-layoffs#:~:te...

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#209

Post by utbabya »

Kudos to the high velocity action. Given it has to at least go through decision makers, finance and legal, I bet they made the decision almost immediately.

Curious how we would solve this class of wealth distribution problem in the future. All these critical libraries supply chain hit the bottom line of tech companies directly, but to extrapolate, all knowledge / work creators who used to live a comfortable living now have all their hard work scrapped by aggregators. Yeah I understand the genie is out of the bottle, all that and there will be (is?) systemic change to viable businesses. But people still have to live during the transition. It's also in the best interest of these aggregators, who's there to feed them new free works if it's no longer viable?

Re: Google AI Studio is now sponsoring Tailwind CSS

#210

Post by onion2k »

redox99 wrote: post #135

Last year they claimed they had $800k in ARR from sponsors alone[1]. Add to that whatever they made by selling Tailwind Plus ($299 individual / $979 teams one time payment) How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library? I understand everyone wants a really fancy office in an expensive city, lots of employees with very high salaries and generous perks, and so on. But all that is not needed to maintain a…

How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?

If you want to continue to develop new versions, you need enough to pay as many engineers as you need to do that. If you're not developing new versions then the money from sponsors will eventually stop.

And they used the AI bad get out of jail free card when a lot of their drop in sales probably comes from shadcn/ui and others which offer something similar for free.

shadcn is built on top of Tailwind. If Tailwind dies, so does shadcn.

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