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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?

#641

Post by merb »

woah wrote: post #566
tommoor wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an open source project, if those discussions were happening they'd still be largely visible as contributions on github.

Why? Maybe they talked on video chat or a screenshare, or a messenger like slack. Forcing people to use a possibly less efficient communication method just to have a hard record of their contributions seems like the hallmark of an extremely dysfunctional and distrustful development organization.

open source projects that want public funding should do stuff like that in the open. and record it.

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

#642

Post by prepend »

cjaybo wrote: post #570
tommoor wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an open source project, if those discussions were happening they'd still be largely visible as contributions on github.

You say this definitively, as if every OSS project uses GitHub exclusively for all communication. This is obviously not the case.

They’d use something visible or their process is borked and not transparent and not welcoming to new users.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a listserv, or an IRC channel, or a GitHub issue. But it does matter if the collaborations are invisible to the team and to others on the project.

It’s their project so they are welcome to organize as they wish, but for a healthy open source project, I think having some collaboration method where newcomers can understand all the meaningful and helpful discussions is a good thing.

If a super awesome person is doing 1:1 calls/DMs/Emails all the time, that’s going to be tough to maintain. Not to mention a pain for any work where it’s multiple people collaborating and coordinating a changes that impact each other.

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

#643

Post by R0b0t1 »

aniforprez wrote: post #593
R0b0t1 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is levying accusations that money is, effectively, being stolen. That is not polite but if he genuinely believes it to be true, you are suggesting he remain quiet instead?

He is welcome to open a channel with Babel privately and, if unaddressed, make a proper statement about it. Blasting someone by using GitHub contributions as KPI on Twitter is highly unprofessional and awful behaviour

It seems it has gone past that. If it is an accusation of theft (or what he perceives to be theft) he is surely allowed to say it publicly. You can still give them both the benefit of the doubt.

You must have never talked to someone who can't be reasoned with. It is best to do some of these things in public. The conception of libel that, say, the UK has is quaint and open to abuse. No such issue in the US.

I agree there's problems with looking at the proposed KPI but that does not mean it is pointless to speak up. For the vast majority of people you could ask about this, pulling that kind of money from a nonprofit is ridiculous.

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

#644

Post by danielsju6 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #587
danielsju6 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back of the napkin to me: say $25.5k pre-tax retirement / college savings for child, 30% federal, 15% state, $3200/mn to rent an apartment in a mid sized city in the US, $400 month for car and gas, $1k for food, $1k for healthcare, $160 for utilities, leaves them with $288/mn. Not enough to ever own a home, build wealth, travel; better hope they have a spouse that is employed & has employer subsidized healthcare.

And yet, regardless, it's still more than 85% of incomes in the USA. That seems striking. Is 85% of the USA living on subsistence peanuts, not even enough to survive? Possibly.

Not saving for retirement and one surprise bill from insolvency is the status quo. AMERICA!!!!

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

#645

Post by mssundaram »

mottosso wrote: post #607
dharmaturtle wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screenshot of deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/ai6ntjt.png

Screenshot of the above message: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2152766/117868229-... ;D

I like the meta joke

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

#646

Post by rakalakalili »

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…

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

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

#647

Post by bsder »

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?

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

Maybe?

Everywhere I've worked in the US, I always had some level of discretionary spend--even as a lowly summer intern at a behemoth like IBM. It could be software; it could be books; it could be training; it could be computer hardware; it could be lab equipment; it could be groceries or office supplies.

As an intern, I bought some of the first O'Reilly books (mostly about X11) at the Cucumber Book Shop in Bethesda, Maryland courtesy of IBM. As someone way more senior, I once put a T3 line card (about $15K at the time) on my credit card in order to break a budgetary logjam between two feuding departments (and made BOTH of them angry at me--it was beautiful).

Obviously, the more junior I was--the less the value of that spend was. And it went up as I became more senior. And I always had to provide receipts and maybe a bit of justification.

But I've always had some level of discretionary cash spending at even the crappiest companies I've worked for.

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

#648

Post by bufferoverflow »

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.

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

#649

Post by breytex »

ThalesX wrote: post #461
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…

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…

I have to object.

I am from germany, and the avg. salary for a decent senior dev here would be between 60 and 80k€ depending on the town you are living in.

Babel is a very complicated piece of software. Even as a senior dev I wouln't feel comfortable to lead-maintain it. You wouldn't find more than a couple of ppl. in Germany who have the skillset and mental strength to maintain a project like that. And those few people would easily be making 150-250k€ as freelance consultants.

I think that 11k$ for maintaining one of the most important OSS projects in the webdev world is more than fair.

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