Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
babeljs.io
babeljs.io
> 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 time this came up, but this time I cannot do anything as a reaction as I've already pulled my funding.
But my guess is that a lot of people feel the same way, as the donations seems to be going down. 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley, which since you're doing open source, you should really really consider.
Open source is not "VC fueled develoment" and I don't think we should go that way either. Make your operation nimble and survive on little, otherwise you'll soon disappear. Optimize for sustainability, not for paying the one of the highest salary in the world (minus SV bubble of course).
It's not wonder Babel is going the way it's going, as the economy you've setup for yourself is nowhere near sustainable.
$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
Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas.
A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.
Alternative narrative: All the companies want to be located in Silicon Valley but no developers actually want to live there. So you have to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to even consider living there.
Now, given the cost of housing in the Bay Area, having to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to afford living there...
Which, yes, is a bit circular. The tech boom (plus dumb zoning choices, and also California's property tax laws) has resulted in that vast increase in housing costs, as too many people try to cram into the available housing stock. Note news stories about rent plummeting in SF as people went remote for COVID.
But taking a cynical angle like yours, you could apply that reasoning to any big city in any country: why do they have to pay more? Well, obviously because people hate Tokyo/Paris/NYC/Milan/London/etc.
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 need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.
I believe Detroit automakers used to account for 90% (I may be off by +/- 10%) of global car sales coming out of WW2.
By the 2000s Japan, Germany, and others had eaten away half of that share in the US market, and an even higher percentage in global markets.
Silicon Valley has had a many decades head start in Tech just as Detroit did in Automotive (let's say 1900s-1960s for autos and 1970s-2020s for Tech). To think global competition won't eventually start eating away at this dominance is foolish, especially given the profits at stake.
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.
130k base salary is comparable to a new grad or mid level SWE in the bay.
If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.
[0] https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/senior%20developer...
Everything from the price of broadband, pint of milk, loaf of bread, healthcare, car costs, etc etc contributes to someones buying power vs their salary
You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there?
Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?
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 project like Babel.
This is based on the conjecture that a suitable lead for Babel should have no problem finding a FAANG job and doing a quick search for average FAANG salaries in the UK.
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 actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer.
I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. 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), and is willing to accept a lower salary. So Babel might be better served recruiting there.
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?
$130k is the kind of money a reasonably experienced developer can get in southern New Hampshire, or Ohio, or Arkansas.
Even the reduced salary of $6,000 is still quite a lot if all you are going to do create a couple of small PRs per month: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
Maybe not, but it is still a major PITA.
My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.
> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.
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 point though. Only the hassle of hiring outside of the US may be a blocker there as well.
The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.
I was responding to that poster's general comment about hiring quality engineers.
Compering this objectively ain't easy.
Some Europeans. AFAIK all the Nordic countries are similar in discussing salaries as pre-tax. Dunno for sure how it's done around the Mediterranean, but I wouldn't jump to the assumption that it's net-in-the-hand there either. Could well be that this "European norm" is just a German and perhaps French (and apparently Belgian?) thing.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know what is the situation in your location, but in one country which fits your description it is customary to talk about the _net_ salary, i.e. after all national and local taxes; in the US, the UK and in many other places the salary is always discussed on pre-tax bases.
To make things worse, in that particular country even the official figure - the one that is put on a contract - is not what the company is actually paying (for) you, as there are some taxes that are added _on top_ of that figure, effectively making them taxes for taxes. :/
I'm not saying that good software engineers are a commodity, only that SF/NY salaries are too high compared to the rest of the world.
Engineers with 1-2 years of experience in SV can make more than most seniors with 20+ years in Europe. Would you say that's because all these junior engineers in SV are worth more to a company than seniors in Europe?
Just my 3 cents.
A lot of people write comments such as yours. 11000USD/mth is a very decent salary if you are an employee. What most regular employees completely discount when doing back of the envelope calculations about the salary of other people are the amount of additional contributions that are made by your employer that regular employees might never see, but that are paid for you all the same.
Here is the math for me as a freelancer in Germany, with a similar salary as the one you are claiming is outrageous.
I bill roughly the equivalent per month from Berlin in Germany. I am not sure where the Babel developers are based, so their circumstances might differ, but all the same, here goes:
Of the 9000EUR (11000USD in EUR) I have to pay: - 19% VAT = 1750 - 950/mth in health insurance - Put aside 1000/mth for retirement (which is less than I previously had from my employer) - Set aside money for vacation (as a regular employee in Germany I would have 30 days paid vacation, as a freelancer I had to set aside roughly 600/mth to compensate for this) - Set aside money in case I get sick (as a regular employee I still get my salary when I am sick, as a freelancer I get paid from day 45). I set aside roughly 450/mth for this. - Then there are miscellaneous freelancer related expenses and having to buy hardware (which your employer would cover too). Let's make that 300/mth. - Then there's income taxes on the rest. This differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's make it an even 30% (which is below what I pay).
This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?
Even if the Babel guys aren't working as freelancer but pay themselves through a company, the math works out roughly the same (at least from what I have seen in my own business over the last 9 years). The only difference is that the company needs the equivalent monthly budget instead of the individuals.
"950/mth in health insurance", wow....... not sure what an insurance you have, but you will probably get 1000 € if you accidentially have a small wound... for 1000 € a month you get the all inclusive package probably. I never heard of somebody that pays a private health insurance 1000€/mth.
sorry to say it, but your entitlement mentality is insane. I can tell you what, in germany with over 9000€ you start to be in the high class.
just some real numbers, not a developer but a normal muncipial employee (no civil servant) with an age of 35 years will make +-3500€ brutto, which is already way more than many people will do (more than 50%)
Am I missing something? That's €33,000 disposable cash per annum, right? That would actually be pretty damn amazing for plenty of people, including many here.
And let's just put aside the fact that much of what you've listed is not "taxes".
It's still an order of magnitude or two more than what other people in other parts of the world make, so the point about it being a sweet income remains valid but on a broader, societal level.
(Also, the health insurance is up in the "what? is that serious" league and the provisions for retirement and sick leave also too high to sound reasonable, but I won't question the OP's sincerity or financial choices.)
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.
There are many cities in the USA where $11k/month is not at all outrageous: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, DC, NYC, etc.
It's hard for me to feel sympathetic for people who deliberately sign up for a model that encourages free-riding and then complain about it.
Earning money with "do whatever"-style licenses like BSD or MIT is bound to fail. Use GPL and sell commercial licenses on the side.
This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it. The team handling the economy of Babel right now, does not, hence Babel is not sustainable.
But, if you'd make the salaries a bit more realistic, Babel would have money over each year. But that's based on them not giving themselves one of the highest salary in the world. Let's see what they'll do.
> Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence.
"merely guarantees subsistence", what the hell? Maybe if you live in SF, but any other place in the world, this kind of salary is not even what seniors pull in yearly. My own anecdote:
> Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
> My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
Are all those people capable of managing Babel?
I think the real question is: do you need top talent for important open source projects, or are average developers fine?
> $11k/mo is realistic. It's already a large pay cut.
Yes, sure, in Silicon Valley anything is possible but for the 99% rest of the world, 11K USD per month is ridiculously high and even people with decades of experience won't collect that unless there is a specific situation. It's definitely not normal outside of Silicon Valley companies.
> Are all those people capable of managing Babel?
Yes, I know of at least 10 JS developers with decades of experience who could handle maintaining Babel if it was up to them, and they don't earn close to 11K USD per month today. I'm sure they'd be happy to work on Open Source and effectively earning more, but many be happy just working on Open Source full time.
> It's definitely not normal outside of Silicon Valley companies
How many companies do you class as SV companies?
It seems like in the US in general there are salaries at that level and higher, not just SV.
I have also seen people talk about salaries in Europe at that level, though I suspect they are rarer than in the US.
But $11K/month * 12 == $132K. To roughy back-of-napkin equalize for higher self-employment taxes, let's say that's equivalent to $100K salary if you were an ordinary employee. (I just made that up, I don't know how accurate it is).
$100K is still 84th percentile income for US, you are making more than 84% of people in the US. It's not "peanuts" or "subsistence".
($132K is 91st percentile income).
Is 85% of the USA living on subsistence peanuts, not even enough to survive? Possibly.
It’s not luxury yacht money, but calling it “peanuts” is ridiculous.
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’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.
An active tips in order to get to know these people in the future: attend developer events and mingle with people, build rapport and a network. If you're moderately social and generally a good person, you'll find yourself in their circles in no time.
Isn't this a restatement of the problem? My (uninformed) impression is that there are structural issues that make it hard to effectively run crowdfunded open-source projects. As you say, the secret sauce appears to be a question of managing the organization.
Do you have any thoughts on how to reproducibly run such a projects?
In the blog post, they said they’re going to have each person make $6k per month (excluding benefits). Subtracting 30% for benefits, it works out to $50k a year base salary. For software developers in the US, that’s a pittance at any level.
No, OSS devs shouldn’t be forced to take that little to work on important projects like Babel. If we want talented devs working in a certain area, we need to make it financially attractive.
I don’t think this is true. The mode works phenomenally well (eg, Apache, Linux, Postgres, etc).
But it doesn’t work for all projects and isn’t the same as commercial software. If I create a project with the goal to make lots of money, then I probably won’t succeed.
Conflating “doesn’t work for me” with “broken” is not using all the available evidence.
So why it is not ridiculous that I'm not working for twice that or more at some larger tech outfit?
Because one of the benefits of working in the open source domain is that the entire structure of the work is completely different. No marketing. No bullshit. No corporate structures to satisfy. I can't speak for anyone else (within OSS or not), but to me those benefits are worth at least $80k/yr, if not much more.
To be fair, perhaps my attitude would be different if I had not previously been involved in starting up a certain well known e-commerce company which, while not allowing me to never work again, let me get the financial aspects of life into pretty good shape.
But I think I know plenty of younger people who want to be in software and are willing to earn less in exchange for more interesting work, less bullshit, more freedom and maybe even a sense of purpose beyond "we're going to make boatloads of cash".
So, you know, thanks. You made the world a better place.
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 software be downloaded using an API using a key you have to pay for or something?
To mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks, on the other hand...
I don't know how you could possibly measure this except by years of training, which would put both doctors and lawyers ahead of software developers. But really, it's apples and oranges.
On the other hand, software design is probably the single best domain for humans to build new skills, with its fast feedback loop, transparency, ease of measuring results, and the fact that the whole system is more or less documented and obeys human intuitions.
I can and do make the case for spending a lot of money on SaaS products and hiring people. But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of company leadership and ask for money to spend on something that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with the realities of running a business and the request would be roundly shouted down.
If there's some value I can get then it's a much easier sell. For example, if there is a Babel job board then I can choose to use that over alternatives when I next hire. Jed Watson proposed https://budgetforopensource.org/, which puts this type of thing in the employee perk category so that I can justify it using hiring as a goal. These are things where I can make a business case for spending real dollars, rather than a philosophical argument.
I agree, at minimum, the its free but seeking sponsorship model is making it hard.
Looking at their Sponsorship options on GitHub [1] I see there's a useful perk at the $2,000/month price point, a Support Tier.
It would be interesting to investigate offering "Paid support" for $50-100/month (something easier to put on a development team's corporate credit card), that gives you "priority" in response to GitHub Issues.
Something tangible that the company gets back.
$500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
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.
Just paid three days ago too.
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?
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.
You're right is very difficult. It feels like there needs to be a product version of these tools, I can definitely explain to my partners that we need this tool and it costs £xxx. But to explain that we should pay for free tools when we might be one of a very few that are is going to be a hard sell.
Essentially what you're saying is that the realities of running a business is the equivalent of a millionaire going to the local soup kitchen/food bank and taking as much food as possible and then complaining about the food.
Publicly accusing Henry of not actually working on the project seems short sighted. Only looking at a one year slice of contribution rather than the lifetime of the project masks the full picture of Henry's contributions. Also in Henry's defense, the past year has been a terribly difficult one for most all of us to get through this pandemic.
Not a good look for you Sebastian. Feels like you are looking for a place to point blame and unfortunately decided to direct that blame in Henry's direction. Henry Zhu is a great developer and contributor. Really deserves better than this.
How much code does Torvalds write nowadays? Really not a lot. I guess he's useless eh? /s
(And yes, Torvalds works at a totally different scale. I'm simply arguing that the metric makes zero sense)
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.
>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.
>The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
- So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
There probably is more, but not going to speculate.
7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202...
$110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0]
(I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.)
According to the original tweets by @sebmck there were only 25 comments in PRs by said contributor in the last year, so even that didn't happen, apparently.
> I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12
> issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests.
> This is across all Babel orgs.
>
> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
It seems like a gravy train. Open-source contributors of other projects are currently carrying the torch of uncompensated work.
If they want to get paid, they need to think about how they currently fit into the ecosystem.
Activity graphs can be deceiving, it’s extremely easy to look busy. Actually drill down and you’ll notice a lot of the activity earlier in this year was just pull request approvals, without comment, mostly done after someone else had already approved.
That's the problem with software, it's hard to measure productivity.
https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo...
Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo has been, for about the last year, the most active contributor on Github, but as recently as March 2021 was only being allocated $24,000 (annualised) from the collective.
Another interesting thing I found digging around is that the creator of Babel (https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of:
With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
Having said that, the salary looks excessive and the commit history isn't a good look without clarification.
But assumptions aren't always the best guide to what is actually going on.
So, he fundraised money to have time to further fundraise, and he did it so well that they have to decrease his salary?
Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.
The original article notes that funding took a hit in 2020. 2020 was an unprecedented year for any number of reasons. To simply say someone did a poor job fundraising in a year beset by constant challenges everywhere lacks proper context.
That's not to say more could have been done; I don't feel, however, that I'm in a position to say. Making money on open source is a difficult enough prospect regardless how one does it without also considering other factors that increase that difficulty.
But what you wouldn't see are the hundreds of problems I debugged and analysed for other programmers , down to the level of "make this change on line 530".
So thanks for being that guy for a lot of other devs that learned from you.
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.
Few commits? Well, OK, lots of reviews and PR handling.
Not too much of that either? Ah, issue triage!
Oh, not that either. Well, they're the most senior dev. Strong technical direction and forward-thinking research! Maybe mailing lists instead of the issue tracker or wiki.
... but Babel's usefulness is at an all-time low as browsers adopt new features regularly, core-js now handles all the polyfills, and non-Babel transpilers and non-JS languages add all the interesting features and performance improvements?
Well, obviously advertising the project, helping with fundraising... for what's majority their own salary... Hrm. Mitchell Baker, is that you?
Maybe some donors will donate to other projects
So many other OSS projects barely getting even 100 USD a month and Babel is complaining they're unable to work with over 300k a year and a number of corporate sponsors which have been supporting the project for a long time.
And the nodejs ecosystem already seems like an outlier getting more funding than most other languages/systems/projects.
For some reason I believe donating to The Blender Foundation actually pays for devs to work on blender (and I donate).
I have a friend working on an open source project. I know he works full time on it. I donated because I knew he was working full time and because I like the project and want to see it succeed.
I have no reason to believe sponsoring random npm package asking for funding does anything other then maybe make some person feel good that they decided to post some code on npm and/or github.
"Working on a project" doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of "I'm responsible for this".
2. He said lots of circumstantial things about the matter. Namely: 130K isn't high for NYC; he could have and probably had better offer easily; he didn't need to maintain Babel but did, etc. All these are good but didn't answer the direct question, is he worth 130K for his work in the project. Even with the understanding that lots of work is in private, his public contribution in recent years seems to be way too low to not make people raise eyebrows.
3. Also, it's funny he said "is 130k too much for someone to maintain Babel" to the creator, who probably earned way less for creating Babel from scratch.
That said, a statement from the current most active paid contributor to Babel is probably more convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357
Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y
Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6].
Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everything, but they speak on a macro-scale. It's not an unreasonable expectation to review a PR a day.
[0] https://github.com/yyx990803 (2,979 contributions)
[1] https://github.com/hzoo (771 contributions)
[2] https://github.com/existentialism (2,608 contributions)
[3] https://github.com/JLHwung (1,849 contributions)
[4] https://github.com/loganfsmyth (130 contributions)
[5] https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo (2,329 contributions)
[6] https://github.com/xtuc (1,614 contributions)
What about long running feature branches that get squashed before merging?
One can bring the messages up with these filters:
"from:@Henry before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11" and "from:@nicolo-ribaudo before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11"
Someone on vue core team (perhaps evan himself) said internal group co-ordination and management is handled by other team members, most prominent among them being Chris Fritz[1] (before he stepped down) and Sarah Drasner[2].
This reduces managerial burden on Evan and gives him more energy & time to focus on technical challenges
While Henry is the senior most member in babel team, so most of the management work is on him. which eats his time a lot more.
[1] https://twitter.com/chrisvfritz [2] https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/
I've worked with a lot of teams where no sort of solid leadership existed. Filling that gap is often difficult to justify because there's a tremendous amount of thought involved and it's a thankless task. Sure you can take the existing structure and direction and just plug away but ultimately, most efforts that do this fail. You need to look ahead and think about future adaptability if you want success. People often act like software development is as straightforward as data entry. You should have X entries per day. If you didn't add X entries then you must be slacking. Development requires not only technical prowess which is difficult to maintain in-and-of-itself but creativity, vision, and strategy. If you ignore the rest your project will fail or at least become an artifact of times past at some point.
I.e. we'd rather them take a late lunch or go home early than push a sub par PR nobody wants to criticise.
You can send PRs updating typos in documentation, or PRs affecting the core aspects of a project.
You can send 100 PRs full of tech debt or 1 that makes the thing run 100x faster.
PR counts suck as a way to measure work.
All this does is encourage bad behavior. Not squashing commits, throwing up tons of one line changes. Remember that contest Digital Ocean did for Hacktoberfest? Remember what a total shitshow they caused on Github? People were making egregious commits for a fucking t-shirt. Now imagine real money on the line.
>I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12 issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests. This is across all Babel orgs.
100k+ for a year of that sounds pretty cushy. he didn't say that he did "only" 1 or 2 PRs a week or something. where are these hyperbolic comments in response coming from? what other kind of work could have possibly been done in addition to this meager amount of code work to justify such a salary?
If anything, it's not fair at all for the other two who did the substantial work and only earn 2k per month.
(To be fair they have changed the distribution this year.)
"My job is to manage a team of employees who code." vs "my job is to manage a team of unpaid volunteers who code, while I earn a proper salary".
> In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a salary for over a year, we expanded our goal to also support three additional maintainers: Jùnliàng, Kai, and Nicolò.
They started with one paid salary. Tried to expand that. Didn't get enough money to do so; now they're asking (fairly, IMO) for the community that treats them as critical infrastructure to pony up.
Imagine if you had 3 employees and 2 of them were HR. That is not a good allocation of labor.
It does seem odd that so much of the work would go towards paying to keep looking for more money (fundraising for fundraising), but there are plenty of sales oriented organisations out there who don't make anything. It's just odd in this case that an OSS project seems to have gone on that direction.
I suspect nobody should be earning such a salary working on a project like that.
I sort of get the idea of spending your money trying to sale an existing product but it doesn't seem to have worked in this case. That doesn't mean allocating the money differently would have worked either (arguably it would have been better for current patrons though).
We can change the analogy to also look at how many pieces of furniture produced, or whatever, but it starts to just be a pointless tangent.
If what they said is true:
1) Management hired a developer
2) Paid him for years
3) Gained millions of users
4) Became bankrupt
5) Publicly named the developer as a slacker and the reason the business is failing.
More comments from the founder. Nowhere does he take any responsibility for this mess, just blame blame blame.
"The salary amount isn't unreasonable or excessive. It's the lack of material output that makes it unjustified."
- So, don't pay him for years while bankrupting your project?
"I'm being explicit now since vague tweeting allegations isn't productive."
- Explicitly tweeting allegations isn't productive either. It just makes you and your project look bad. There's no way I'm donating to you now.
"The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project."
- And was allowed to do so for a long time. Also, that's only one part of the equation, was this developer also responsible for fundraising? Or other spending?
"I raised this in March when I looked into it and noticed that for the first two months of the year he had left only two brief comments and created no comments."
- You didn't notice your employees had shipped nothing for two months? Or you were OK with this at the time and are now retroactively blaming them?
The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situation earlier this year, and so the babel team have made changes to make the situation fairer in their eyes. This apparently doesn't go far enough for Sebastian's tastes, so he has publicly called out by name one of the contributors who he feels doesn't do enough to justify their salary. The metric he uses for determining this is the number of github commits and comments that are shown on that person's profile. This is not a fair measure of someone's contribution to a project, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour that Sebastian would criticise if any other company was evaluating people in this way.
In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.
The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
edit: so... they don't have to pay him + they get the benefit
> The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
I had no idea he had started a competing project. This really stinks, almost like he is sabotaging his competitor.
Folks should just develop their own shims where necessary and TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS.
Sure no one likes doing that, but it’s important to follow the fast-pace ECMAScript adoption.
I mean, how does that not just push all of this towards companies and open source solutions that provide access to old browsers and what not? I mean no matter what direction you push, it's going to be someone else's open source code that needs money.
I guess what I’m getting at is that most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway. And instead of adding yet another layer between our code and the browser—embrace the current generation of (at this point very robust) language features available.
And if that’s not good enough use something like TypeScript!
Maybe that's true for users in the western world. However, if you are in the asian market, there are popular browsers you've nerver heard of (some localized fork of chromium that's way behind). That is not to mention the poorer populace of the world still uses whatever that runs on WinXP or something, if they have Internet at all.
As software engineers it's not our job to use technology to dictate (control) how people access information, telling them to use newer browsers and newer hardware and what not, our job is to support as many people out there as we can.
In any case, for the plethora of down voters: Babel states: “Use next generation JavaScript, today”
At some point next gen == current gen, and therefor given enough stability, Babel becomes obsolete.
Folks, donate to Mozilla instead they actually move things forward not backward.
My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.
It is one thing to raise the issue in private with "Project A", another thing is to tweet this to thousands of followers. Especially after "Project A" already had resolved the issue on its own.
At that point, a huge amount of someone's time is spent managing bug tickets, attempting to isolate debug, etc.
Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool.
Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money.
Out-of-touch, know-it-all.
Edit: I reread this. Adding that no one is perfect, everyone slips up, loses perspective, pouts/whines, etc... We are all human and remember a single angry tweet thread does not define a person. Twitter is toxic signal-fest that brings out the worst in people right or wrong. Cheers!
- A joint decision was made how to split and pay maintainers.
- A disagreement about performance / results has come from that.
- Tweeting to rally the homies is immature (and quite embarrassing) way of solving a problem.
I am not saying funds could not be reallocated differently. I’m saying the people involved with this are acting unprofessional / like children.
Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?
It would have been better to see this discussion in a forum or mailing list or anywhere that is designed for an actual longform discussion. Even if in public longer more detailed discussions can capture the nuance.
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 airing it out on Twitter, you put the other person on the defensive and they're less inclined to actually help you to resolve the original complaint.
Airing it out on Twitter is an escalation, and a decent outlet for escalating issues that are systematic and/or can't be resolved through other communication channels.
No, this is after the issue has been corrected, which is even worse
It's tough because I think the "optics of productivity" are somewhat important because money is involved. If I was concerned about things, I would have pinged someone in private months ago. Taking this to a public forum, leading with an accusation isn't the right thing to do regardless of how Babel.js was handling these things.
- premium support
- custom features / enterprise product offerings
- commercial licensing
- professional services/consultancy
An important difference is Rome Tools employees are being paid with VC money and not money from the community.
You are out of touch my friend.
I think you can cool it on the anger here too. It’s not helpful.
$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.
Right, hence my out of touch comment. This just doubles down.
$130k is barely over the median pay for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States. A lot of the people stewarding and maintaining these projects are talented enough to be earning wages that are much further into the outliers (i.e. FANG compensation of 300-400k+/year).
That's all I'm saying. What's much more likely to be happening here is that the maintainer of Babel took a much harder job that cannot be summarized by output metrics like GitHub activity tracking.
Attacking him and essentially tossing around accusations of embezzlement when you've just received VC funding for a competitor is just wrong.
I prefer to think that we are riding in a bubble that can pop any minute now. This line of thinking allows me to be more responsible with spending and save more for rainy days.
E5 engineers at FB are making an avg 200k base [1]. That is not that far off what you would expect the difference to be between open source maintainer and senior engineer at Facebook.
That is not 3-4x. Even if you include stock, that will put the FB eng around 350k. You may have an argument for the 2-3x range but basically only at the very top level companies and senior roles, not mid level contributors. And by including stock or other forms of TC besides base, you begin inflating the impression of cash flow. Stock grants don’t land in your wallet like paychecks do. Your QoL or vested net worth will take time to be impacted. It’s not like all of a sudden you can now afford X% more in your daily life.
IMO HN likes to exaggerate compensation levels.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
The accusations that this person is freeloading off of Babel donations seem absurd (especially when you consider who is making them). The babel maintainer could be coasting at a large engineering organization with a lot less responsibility is what I am getting at it. It's exactly what the creator did...
The accusations are unjust.
I was solely commenting on the SV compensation point, but yes, you’re totally right that he could be doing less work for significantly more money elsewhere. The accusations are unjust for sure. IMO less because of the salary numbers and more because commit count is simply not a good measure of employee performance.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
I can't seem to see this tweet any more. Did it get deleted?
Why not? Do we not want all babel mantainers to be paid atleast 130k?
1: https://mobile.twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
Babel, Rome, Deno, are all transpilers the tech isn't as unique as it once was. Things come and go in JS land, and Babel will go the way of Dodo.js
GH is a platform where people collaborate on developing softwares, so the contribution graph is engineering-biased. But operating an OSS, especially like Babel which is serving millions, is just like running a company. In a company we have different roles, none of roles is more important than the others. In Babel team, Henry spends most time on reaching out to contacts in companies, giving talks, syncing with different projects in the ecosystem, offering mentorship to junior contributors like me. None of these is visible on GH but they are vital to sustain the project, to attract both new company sponsors and contributors.
2020 is a hard time for any reasons. Before we talk about funding with team, Henry has already voluntarily pooled less money ($11k to $8k) and another long-time core contributor Brian (https://github.com/existentialism) stopped taking money. While this helped bumped up our balance, everyone taking less is a dangerous signal to an OSS: maintainers constantly fighting with financial insecurity may burn out or stop maintaining in order to recover from the mental pressure about "I am responsible for this".
I maintained small side projects like (https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui), where the feature set is frozen and most maintenance works can be automated by bots. This is quite unlike Babel: The feature is open-ended because the language is evolving. Various edge cases should be take cared. Tradeoffs between spec compliance and output code size should be made. It is not a side project that I can dedicate part time efforts like 10hrs/week to work on.
Speaking for myself, I spend around 40hrs/week to meet my own productivity requirements. I don't think I deserve more than other paid team members because everyone has different time constraints and we don't track work time meticulously.
To avoid burn-out and not let Babel consume all my energy, I spare some time on encoding Chinese characters in Unicode, which, just like Babel, has profound impacts on ecosystem but long overlooked and underfunded. I helped submitted hundreds on characters in IRGN2487 (https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData...).
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.
Is this something special with Estonia, or are salaries catching up in the rest of Baltics, Poland, etc?
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.
I wouldn’t say I am significantly above average and I’m not in management (architect/principal engineer).
Similar story in Australia. Not quite US levels but decent compensation, I don’t feel taken advantage of.
(edit: spelling/grammar)
UK is cheaper for quite a few things, so a direct currency conversion doesn't work. If I had to guess, probably in the 90-100k GBP ballpark.
Base is 170k. Bonuses are reliably paid out. Based on RSUs, it can also be much higher than 220k.
I've had years where it was 300k, share price dependent.
My peer group are all in the 180-250k range, and many are working for Kiwi companies.
I am 41.
Next step would be management, but I've done that before, and will be staying IC as long as I can make this kind of money for it.
But I have a year left before I am mortgage free anyway, so that will change the risk calculus a lot, probably go contracting for more $$.
Probably laughable comp for the Bay Area at this stage of my career, but I am not in the Bay Area...
All-in-All you get the same value, numbers are hardly comparable.
Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
> Probably not enough for San Francisco though
Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco but still the group somehow want to have SF salaries. Yeah, I wonder why?
I don't how it is in USA. but that's less than your 90k/year figure by a significant amount
- Just doing things part time. I have a few projects like this. It's fun, it's apparently useful for others. I obviously limit time I spent on this. I don't financially benefit from this and I don't mind. Lots of stuff I use falls in this category. I make a living using that stuff; I don't mind returning the favor by putting in some time. IMHO this is the most undervalued part of OSS: people just doing the work because they can and because it needs doing.
- Consulting and charging better rates by virtue of being involved with something your customers care about and thus being well positioned to provide expert advice on that. Nothing wrong with that of course but it does remove development time from your project. But then eating your own dogfood can be instructive as well. Especially for development tools. Understanding your customers is a lot easier if you are working with them and they are paying you.
- Getting hired by a company to work on software. Linus Torvalds is the famous example here. Guido van Rossum is another one. This gets easier the more economically relevant your project becomes. Being involved in and associated with major OSS companies has brand value. Babel is relevant enough that there might be a company or two with some vested interest in using Babel.
- Providing perks to paying sponsors in the form of logos on a website, co-branding, conferences, meetups, access to support, etc. Lots of long lived OSS projects survive like this. Conferences are also financed like this. There is no shortage of VC funded companies that need to cozy up to developers that already spend millions on all sorts of stuff to do that. All you need to do is provide them a way to get recognized for that. It's also a great way to build the relationships that you might eventually level up to employment. Your community of professional users is a valuable resource that companies want access to that you can facilitate.
Are you joking? This blog post is evidence that donations do work, but that doesn't mean you can just throw money around, you still need to allocate them effectively.
They are currently pulling in ~$166K a year, which can fund a team of developers anywhere else than the most expensive places. Since Babel is a open source and supposedly international project, there is no reason to pay the people working on it SF salaries.
They are doing the classic mistake of trying to optimize for getting more funding as well instead of focusing on minimizing costs, which tends to be much easier.
If they really care about being sustainable, they'll eventually realize this. But as put by sebmck both here and on Twitter, seems the group as no interest in actually making sure Babel survives but rather want to extract as much money as they can before it's too late.
but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries?
USA and it's biggest cities are already hugely competitive even for profit making enterprises.
Even a company like Mozilla with real commercial partnerships and solid income every year can struggle, let alone a tool which is barely noticeable by 90% of users.
Why should customers/users of the project have to pay/donate twice or thrice as much for the same result, just because the devs want to live in the US instead of e.g. Paris?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
They need to convince people/corporations to donate, default is that they get nothing.
They need to convice people to stop taking it from the expositor.
Why does the mechanic feel entitled to be paid for their repairs?
They need to convice people to stop driving away.
Why does the .... feel entitled to be paid for their work?
With that said, nothing stopping those people in Berlin from stepping up to other high profile open source projects that are looking for maintainers, raise the same amount of money, and essentially be twice as well off.
FAANG is not on the list, FAANG pays $180k-$190k for entry level (Netflix does not recruit entry level much though).
So total compensation, entry level at some places is $15k higher, or more.
But there are plenty of organizations profiting off of the dev’s labor. Why is it different just because those organizations are users and not their employer?
Because these high profile OSS tools generally have trouble finding core maintainers/contributors.
It's easy enough to find people who will contribute a couple of PRs, it's another to get people to handle the ownership and product/project management responsibilities. Even rarer on a reasonably complex project (not that many people find working on something like Babel "fun". It's not sexy like some of the other high profile OSS projects in the JS ecosystem).
Core-js' maintainer has begged for someone to help forever (dunno if he finally found someone). The JS minifier space was nearly abandoned until significant issues brought them back in the spot light. Webpack was struggling until someone stepped up to be their de facto marketer.
If someone wants to do the work for half the money, go ahead. It's just...rare.
Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.
> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source
The people getting $2,000 per month are part-time:
> a "part-time" rate: we could initially afford $2,000 USD per month.
It is also explained that if possible, they would go full-time and the salary would then be raised to "the full-time rate".
> Our hope was by announcing this plan and continuing our fundraising efforts, we would be able to increase the budget and raise them to the full-time rate.
I think I know why they're running out of money!
Seriously that's an amazing salary in 99% of the world for working on commercial software where you don't get to decide what to do, can't remote work, probably aren't working on your passion project, etc. etc.
Maybe they'd do better operating out of of somewhere cheaper. Many older open source projects including those I contribute to aren't owned by a single company, aren't trying to build a business and still manage to be popular and useful.
US salaries are higher than European ones, but that is mainly because Americans need to account for healthcare and (especially in SV) extremely high cost of living.
I have a ~62 m² 3 room flat in somewhat center of Munich and pay only 1.000€ a month in rent, whereas in the US judging by a quick google you'll end up with 2k for a 1 BR.
My $0 premium health care plan has only a $2000 deductible, $6000 out of pocket max, 20% coinsurance for “big” procedures, $10 copay (regardless of deductible) for primary care, and I actually get PAID a $500 yearly health stipend for going to the gym.
On the other hand, I’m a 22 year old male who goes to the gym several times a week, eats home-cooked nutritious and healthy food, and works a desk job so...
Edited: Copay is deductible-agnostic
I broke my arm and got paid time off since I couldn't do the job while I was healing.
I have no gap in health insurance if I do not work: I don't have to consider such a thing when looking for a new job. You might be healthy, but other people aren't (or their family isn't) - which means they stay at a job they might otherwise not. Fast food workers and children and office workers all get the same level of care.
If things do go wrong, they will send a nurse to my house up to 6 times a day, which helps folks not have to quit their jobs to take care of family. ANd a bunch of little stuff like that. While you might not use this stuff now, your family members probably could use some of this.
Maybe the salary differences really are just $6000 a year?
So, realistically, you have to account and budget for about ~330$ a month of your wages going away additionally for your healthcare during employment term negotiations.
Senior engineers can go for twice that... Of you live in the EU, have a CS degree, make 2k USD/mo, consider relocation to maybe Norway :)
~7.5% extra tax right off the top, versus salaried (employer usually pays that part for salaried employees, and it's not stated as being part of one's salary, ever) in addition to all the usual taxes.
Our version of a "public pension" is terrible, so you'll need some contributions to a 401K if you ever want to retire, and unlike someone salaried the employer won't be chipping in any extra above your salary (typical for salaried employees is some % of "matching" money for your contributions, so you put in 3% of salary and your employer puts in the same amount, above your salary). Then there's the fact that for any competitive goods (say, housing in a decent school district near where jobs exist) you're competing with people who are choosing not to save that money, so there's pressure on prices that wouldn't exist with a better compulsory pension system.
Health care for a family will probably run 1.5-2k/month without an employer chipping in, and still leave you exposed to $20k-$30k of risk per year ("out-of-pocket max") and spending another $500-$1,000/yr even in a good year.
Depending on your arrangement, you may have to deduct pay for any vacation or sick days taken. Take 30 working days out of that (not unusual for sick + vacation in Europe, if we're comparing to European total comp) and that's another ~10% of your annual pay gone.
Be careful when you try to evaluate how much someone is working: even if Babel is open source and almost everything we do is on GitHub, simply looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/commits/main and counting the number of commits for each contributor does *not* tell how much someone is working. One starting point would be to at least check all the activity in the Babel GH organization: for example, you can see that:
- I did about 700 contributions so far in 2021 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...).
- Jùnliàng did about 500 (https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-...)
- Henry did about 160 (https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview&from=2021-01-01&to=2021...)
The number of commits does not reflect the number of contributions, because the "writing code"/"reviewing PRs"/"issues triage"/etc tasks are not equally distributed across the team: for example, I prefer reviewing while others prefer coding. However, even according to these stats Henry is doing less than the other two paid maintainers: again, we cannot just use GH stats to measure how much we do. If you are considering sponsoring us and you want to know what we did or what we'll do, we have a "things we did" page (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/features-timeline) and a roadmap (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/roadmap), but feel free to directly reach out to us and ask what we are working on or what we plan to do.
Henry is the one who contacts companies trying to explain to them why they should support us, the one who gives most talks at their internal events: he's the one working on fundraising for the team. Even without him, many companies would probably donate, but I don't think we would have ever reached the current levels that enabled us to pay a small team.
That said, there was a big problem that no one in the team was talking about: whilst we all knew that Henry was not "doing nothing", I felt that I deserved more than just one fifth (or more than one fourth, since Henry decreased what he was taking) of Henry's salary. What I was doing wasn't _less valuable_ than what Henry was doing. When some people reached out to me about it, I realized that this feeling was shared by other people in the OSS community.
I thus decided to talk with the team about it: it was hard for me to do so, because I consider everyone in the team a friend and it's hard to tell a friend "you should earn less because I want to earn more". However, everyone in the team was receptive to my arguments and everyone agreed that we should have re-assessed our salaries. The main reason that Henry was earning more was that initially he was the only paid contributor, and when the remainder of us wanted to be paid, we just divided the remaining incoming money.
We have now rebalanced how funds are distributed, and we will keep communicating between us how we divide the funds, so that no one in the team will feel like there is some kind of injustice in future.
When we settled on $6k/month I was asked by a team member: "Do you think this is the right amount of money for you, or you might still not be happy about it in the future?". I can't speak for the future me, but for now I don't think I "need", "deserve" or "want" to earn more than the other paid team members. If we get enough money to pay the three of us $6k/month, my next goal would be to expand the number of paid people rather than paying ourselves more (but that's a discussion we'll have as a team when we'll have more money).
---
Also, to address the comments about "earning X is too much" and "earning X is too low". I don't have a universal answer for "what is the right salary for working on OSS?", and I see that there are people arguing for both sides.
If it helps to put things in perspective: this isn't a "side project" for any of the paid maintainers. We don't work 40 hours/week, but we still dedicate a big amount of time to the project. I can only speak for me, but:
- I'm a student, and I'll graduate this summer. I currently have 12 hours of classes per week, + some time to study and to work on my final project.
- I dedicate about 20-30 hours per week to Babel. It's not always the same: sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more. It depends on what I'm working on for Babel, and on how much I have to do for university each week.
- I don't know if it's the same all over the world, but (at least in the few countries in which I know how it works) if a company hires you for $6k/month gross, the actual cost for the company is more. Since from a legal perspective we are self-employed, $6k/month is the actual cost taken from our balance.
The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience.
But then I don't live in Silicon Valley either, where these salaries seems to be judged from.
Seems extreme weird to hire people who live in Silicon Valley though for a supposedly global project. Hire people so you can make it sustainable without having to pay extreme salaries. The rest of the open source ecosystem already figured out that you need a nimble operation, wonder why it's hard for team Babel to understand?
You should compare this with a self-employed consultant-style job, not with a normal employee.
In the US, all kinds of expenses are pushed off of the government/employer and onto the employee. Salaries have to be way higher.
Median pay for a software engineer in the US in 2020 was over $110k per the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/...
You can check it using a "taxes calculator" website: https://it.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=45000&from=year&... (it's in Italian, sorry). On top of those 45k EUR gross the employer pays 13.5k, so it's 58.5k EUR.
As of now, $72k USD is 59k EUR.
I don't have many data points, but so far I have been offered only one 20 hours/week job (at a salary that was way lower than 45k) and a full-time job which paid for more than 45k (but since I was studying, I didn't accept it).
I wonder how these salaries where determined, if it is like you said that it was just devided by 4, or if there was some outside governance/input for it.
I still feel like if you would place a job ad for a babel engineer for an amount like that it would be filled instantly.
Most people in the software industry (including senior engineers) are doing CRUD work, you got a web dashboard that calls an API that then insert or retrieve content from the database, you got a simple `if` condition or a `for` loop here and there, and that's it. Compare this to creating a compiler, the difficulty is on another level of magnitude.
There's a lot of complicated, nuanced reasons for this, but it is what it is for now.
I see these salaries in places like Spain, Italy, and even Germany outside of Frankfurt / Berlin, and I'm flabbergasted. I've lived in the EU and travelled quite a bit, too. If anything, the prices for food, electronics, sundries, etc. are MORE expensive than the US because of VAT.
Housing, I'm sure, varies just like in the US, but I wouldn't imagine it's all that different. A small 2BR "condo" (i.e. not a single house with yard) in a mid-tier city in the US can now easily be $300K and probably similar in Italy, Spain, or Germany, at least in urban areas where all the jobs are located.
How do you guys live?
Regardless, in the US net median income is $37k. I think maybe you're living in a bubble if you don't understand how people live on that kind of money. Also, don't be surprised by how big of a factor lifestyle inflation is. Your average Joe in Spain is not dropping $60k on a new truck.
I think the history about previously some people got more and some less and now it's equalized is helpful to be part of the information, and would have been helpful as part of the original post. I am also curious in general about how you are dealing with "decision-making"... who gets to decide how much who gets paid (or who gets hired or let go), how?
Your story makes sense to me, that someone's contribution isn't measured solely by github stats. But the fact that there is not currently a good relationship between the collective who maintains babel and the original babel author is... unfortunate I guess is a word. And makes me curious what happened there.
I've always just known it as "fundraising".
Maybe there's a joke somewhere that flew over my head.
Nobody ever heard oracle scrambling for cash.
You can remove that freedom to the user. After all, the source is available, it can still be tested for malware, but your work won't be open-source.
> All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
The GNU Manifesto arguably concedes OSS won't make money
> In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.
The moment Babel actually has to be sold for $1 is the moment it dies and everyone still using Babel switches to alternate compilers.
The project is surviving on fame, and donation's the easiest way to fund that.
This past year I was mostly unemployed, and wasted countless hours, days and weeks, months doing tech interviews. A complete waste of my time that I'll never get back. I live in London and it's stupidly expensive.
Although all of my problems, I've kept sending my donations to people, projects to show my support, appreciation, and also charities and family in need.
I got some short contract work in-between, luckily, but nothing much.q
I think we should give back, have at least some empathy to others and respect the ones that've been here for longer, that are truly talented.
That‘s the nature of open source.
„I want to work on #specific_thing and get paid for it!“ -that‘s usually not how the world works.
Not usually, no, but I also don't blame people for trying to find a way to make that work. For some people it _does_ work that way.
Is it heresy now to propose that Babel maybe isn't THAT valuable?
The problem is that they are very few. With tools like CRA, vue-cli, angualr cli, babel is even less visible.
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 like a spectacular ROI to me; and 5,000 companies doing this already adds up to $50k/month.
And that's just Babel, not talking about all the other tools and libraries people use for free; people build literally their entire businesses on stuff like Python. Surely Python provides value, no? Yet how much money flows back to Python from the average business?
Still good ROI though.
I’d much rather plunge money into any competing compiler to get it feature compatible.
The obvious solution is to charge a small amount ($10?) for a licence to use on a single site/application. You can't entirely enforce it but with some basic registration process, you could tie a licence to the code so that an internet scanner could potentially find people violating the rules. Minor updates included, major updates cost another $10. If only 500K projects are using it, that is still $5M, which would go some way to helping.
I understand that licences can be a problem if the code is/was open source since people might just fork it and use their own version but that is not a 100% easy workaround and requires time and maintenance to keep it up to date.
You want everyone to have access to the code but you also want to charge businesses. You can't have both. So OSS companies split the code base in to a community and a business edition. The business edition builds on top of the community edition which requires the community edition to either be GPL licensed with a CLA or a permissive license with the risk of competitors building their own business edition.
I can provide an example: NextCloud.
To play the devil's advocate, I would suggest that there is price discovery at play here and people + corporations are willing to pay for what they get value out of. Which is suggesting that many companies don't get much value out of Babel or it is one of many tools utilized in a toolchain. The value proposition is to be able to run new JS in old JS runtime, which may be less valuable now than it was 5 years ago, since evergreen browsers exist and outside of stale corporate environments, most browsers are auto-updating now.
"When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?"
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
Those old iPads and iPhones just won't die... As well as a number of Macbooks that will never go past OS X 10.11.
Babel does have a neat automatic polyfill system typescript doesn't. But both can target real old JS versions. Most JS packages you'll find on NPM are still ES5.
Transpilers are quickly making JS a compiled language where the bytecode format is ES5 :)
But yeah it's slow
For what I do, Babel is the slow part. switching babel to esbuild (still with tsc) divided my build times by 10.
The idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler
With my team we optimized render processes using transpilers/meta language and this totally rocks.
I hope that BabelJS will continue to follow their vision and gets more sponsorship from company-side. For me, they popularized the idea of Compilers in unexpected areas.
How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for webdevs to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all.
Not only the debugging is breaking down because of them, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find.
Framework authors force involuntary decision to use transpilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with transpiler B 1.2.3," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.
Typescript and Flow allow for much higher quality software without having to add complexity to browsers (like Dart initially was intended to).
As time goes on, transpilers may ultimately become slightly less valuable, however for the past decade they have allowed us to grow and improve our javascript without sacrificing portability.
There are very few things a transpiler will do for you today. Some critical langauge features are completely impossible to substitite, or emulate. Given this, what's the point?
The few non-critical features can be more reliably polyfilled manually than relying on transpiler which will mangle the rest of your code which has nothing to do with that function, and with 50/50 chance to introduce own problems.
I have nothing against babel. I think it's great especially in maturing TC39 drafts.
What do you think should happen instead? Should web applications just exclude anyone who's using a browser that doesn't implement all the newest web standards? Or should developers just unnecessarily use old versions of JavaScript?
You might not be aware, but writing in ES5 feels incredibly awkward once you get used to the newer standards. If I can write in a nice language (ES2020) but transpire my code into a more widely supported language (ES5) I don't see why I wouldn't do that.
I lost count to cases when old code is unsalvageable because the tooling combination used to "build" it simply refuses to work with modern nodejs, distro, or some other dependency.
There were very few vital features introduced since ES6, and some of them were in browser earlier than major ES releases. Browser APIs did change, but those have no bearing on the JS/ECMA language support
And the few remaining things are so hard to polyfil, and so hacky that I see myself no point in using them:
1. ES6 Proxy - possible to polyfill, but hacks involved are just terrible. Basically the only way to do it is to re-implement half of Javascript VM inside the your Javascript.
2. Async/await - possible to polyfil, but all polyfills are of extremely low performance, and high memory consumption. They send desktop PCs fans' spinning, and I don't want them.
3. Intl API - what's the point of using a system INTL functionality, if you yourself polyfill it? Just implement the string substitution in the code.
And so on, and on
Not only the debugging is breaking down because of UB, but they often introduce bugs on their own which are very hard to find.
Library authors force involuntary decision to use compilers on people downstream, and everything suffers from that: "feature A breaks with compiler G* 5.0," but because end users simply don't use them, and thus don't file bugs, devs don't know that either.
I think the answer is just make some kind of optional paid service that some of your bigger customers will need. It might be an anathema to open source folks, but having an optional proprietary add-on, or some kind of paid maintenance service or something like that, may well solve the problem.
I had some thought of implementing threading operators (like Clojure), and was happy to see existing proposals. But then I went searching for the implementation of those proposals and subsequent PRs and such. As my ultimately fruitless search dragged on, I kept saying to myself, “Who is in charge of this shit-show?”
Well, I finally have my answer. No one is in charge. It seems to me that Babel’s survival hinges upon one decision at Facebook to either create their own JSX transpiler or to switch from Babel to something else.
Maybe incentivizing people to donate in order to achieve milestones that they can see making their companies more money could work too.
To me, the most successful and efficient models when it comes to building open, capable, stable and friendly software (all those four) seems to be delegating all the work to a team of a few but very experienced developers. I'm thinking Blender, GIMP, Csound, Ardour, many video codecs, etc. It also seems all these projects have in common highly technical fields (3D, audio or video), which implies a far steeper learning curves than your average github project. Maybe we could even infer that one solution to drive contributions up is to make it less easy and less ostensibly accessible. I personally pay for Blender because I want them to improve some features. Plus I'm not sure if getting pull requests from random strangers all the time is a good way to take a software in the serious direction -- I'd wager reducing complexity by lowering the amount of people involved and the extensive need for communication is what keeps the core dev team focused, fast and flexible. Anyway, my 2 cents.
I get that two implementations of the same thing seem suboptimal, but Denis Pushkarev's, ahem, legal situation proved that sometimes you might want to do that.
Also with this move they freed up a lot of resources which previously went into maintaining their own polyfills and still there are problems? Where all that went?
For me, another data point why our current economic system is not optimal, and we need at least more coordination, or maybe a better system.
Maybe it's the disconnect caused by large businesses properly funding some of them, with an erroneous assumption of the level of maintenance others require. If something is core to a major tool chain then I just, sad to say, assume it's well funded, either by larger companies or universities.
Trying to think of an example, LLVM seems integral to a lot of progress on web functionality, just EMSCripten alone makes that case. This in turn is sponsored by most of the major tech companies [1]. Whether the same foundation also funds emscripten, I couldn't find out.
https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/
I think my point is, if anything, if you have a open source project that requires having several full times employees, it might be high time to create a non/profit and work on getting funding. The post they wrote, and the visibility it gets can be an example of a doing just that, albeit maybe just a temporary fix.
You can have the best of both worlds: Intellisense based on types in the editor yet fast transpile in the build.
I’m reasonably confident every economist knows people give stuff away for free but it’s certainly been true since Adam Smith, whose Theory of the Moral Sentiments is chock full of psychological and philosophical insight.
Has anyone tried to design an economic system recently, based on tools from the information age?
The usual example given is a pasture shared by shepherds who are each going to optimize their use of the pasture by getting more sheep even if it means exceeding the sustainable capacity of the pasture, eventually killing it for everyone. Yet the real world shows that communal pastures have existed for centuries in rural communities just fine. The difference is that these pastures aren't used "optimally" and the shepherds aren't economically "rational actors" within the current economic system, though they are increasingly being pressured into that by the dominant system surrounding them.
The tragedy of the commons is not a warning about the unsustainability of a commons, it's a warning about the logical consequence of our dominant economic system.
Also, do you think the indian company was a perfect example of why capitalism should not involve itself with common goods? Unless you think it isnt a capitalist company despite presenting all aspect of it (including regulatory capture and threats of violence against slaves/employees).
IFF all the other shepherds even got a cut in the privatisation, then perhaps.
But there's no guarantee of that. That's certainly not how things went down in the last major privatisation the world has seen, that of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.
I believe that societies develop in lockstep with technology. The industrial revolution was only possible with the beginning civil society and capitalism; capitalism as we know it was only possible at the end of feudalism and absolutism. It is intertwined. New technologies tend to disrupt societies, you can go where the tech leads you (e.g. content can be copied without effort), or you can go the other way and adapt the tech to the society (say, not using machines in order to save jobs). That is why I think we are due for a big change in our political and economic system. What that is going to look like, and how much it will still look like capitalism, I don't know.
(Sorry for derailing the thread...)
It would if there were no open source alternatives. Bear in mind that most of the users are commercial organisations deriving value from it. They need something like it to solve their problems and if it isn't available for free then they will pay.
So each webdev will end up with their own half-baked solution. Tragedy of the lack of commons!
I hear you cry, but that's irrational! Precisely, but so is not caring about the commons and letting them die.
I am not under an illusion that under capitalism, people cannot pass the buck (responsibility for maintenance) away too.
First, the tragedy of the commons - aka the public goods problem - is an argument why a commons can't work, full stop. It's precisely mathematically specified. If the conclusion doesn't hold, that's because the assumptions didn't hold. You can certainly argue that the assumptions don't hold in many places, e.g. among Maine lobster gangs or in the woods around Japanese villages, and indeed that's what various authors have done. They have not argued - and it would make little sense - that a different economic system would magically make public goods games have a different equilibrium.
Second, you're mistaken in assuming that actors in successfully maintained commons are economically irrational. One simple interpretation of these commons is that they are repeated games. In such games it is rational to cooperate to preserve the commons, since defection leads to others defecting in future. That is standard economic rationality. Elinor Ostrom put forward that interpretation sometimes. She also emphasized that communities used things like punishments and fines to sanction uncooperative behaviour - again, these mechanisms work for standard homo economicus reasons.
The tragedy of the commons holds up under laissez-faire capitalism. It can be somewhat mitigated under other forms of capitalism but there are examples for commons that pre-date capitalism itself and also specifically enclosure (the formal privatization of common land), which itself pre-dates capitalism.
I'm not sure why you think you need to defend the concept of homo economicus. You're literally refuting your own first point with the second: a commons can work, but where it has worked it has usually come with constraints that run contrary to laissez-faire/free-market capitalism (or the approximation thereof) and that don't necessarily translate to the dynamics between globe-spanning corporations compared to that between a much smaller set of individuals.
I defend homo economicus to dispel a false impression: that successfully sustained commons refute the idea that humans (a) are self-interested and (b) make optimal choices. You could say that laboratory public goods games do that, but even there you'd have to qualify your argument very carefully.
[1] Guala, Francesco, 2012. Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and brain sciences, 35(1), pp.1-15.
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 agree with). I also said that it is also possible to avoid the tragedy of the commons (at least locally, for a given commons), which is demonstrated by successful commons existing and having existed under different constraints.
None of that seems to be anything you disagree with, yet here we are.
Note that both examples you've given — rentier capitalism in Berlin and New York, and (presumably) Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism — suffer massively from alienation, which demonstrably leads to inefficiency and disregard (e.g. littering). This is well-understood enough that creating a feeling of "ownership" or "autonomy" (without introducing monetary benefits or democratic sharing of actual control over the company) has become a management strategy to motivate employees under capitalism.
As a counter-example to Berlin under capitalism in Germany, consider affluent rural areas where you see barely any littering. These regions however also have a high rate of home ownership and parallel social support networks, which I assume is what you're gesturing at as "repeated interactions" (but in this case often spanning literally generations). But these systems are unstable under laissez-faire capitalism as they present an inefficient resource use in the greater economic system and will over time erode as residents move away for job opportunities and properties are sold off and reused for more space-efficient apartment buildings.
To summarize, I'm not saying a tragedy of the commons can not exist under other economic systems, I'm saying there are systems under which a given tragedy of the commons can be averted and that this is not the case for the current one.
It's not, though. We've literally seen this development happen over and over again and it's a logical consequence of the system as is the increasing monopolization via acquisitions and buyouts.
We're not in purely laissez-faire capitalist system, certainly not globally, but trying to paint present day Berlin as an example of a social market economy in the "Rhine capitalism"[0] spirit shows a complete unfamiliarity with the practical evolution of the German economic system and welfare state during the later part of the 20th century and the early 2000s, which saw a massive shift towards free market capitalism, especially under (ironically) the SPD-led Schröder government.
> Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.
This isn't a counter-example to what I said, this is an example of what I said. Income isn't the determining factor, ownership (and legacy) is. Additionally, even if they don't expect to live there forever because they're comfortable relocating to follow the money, they're surrounded by potential business partners. This again isn't about their level of income but it creates a social mechanism that incentivizes displaying "good behavior".
> Another example is cartels.
An example for something avoided under capitalism? Certainly not. This is like saying Western countries don't have corruption because money is used to exert influence by signing entirely legal backroom deals (campaign financing in the US, promises of zero-effort board positions and highly paid "speaker" engagements in Germany) instead of literally handing wads of cash to police officers.
And this isn't even to cede that cartels can't happen under capitalism, let alone under laissez-faire capitalism: they're not prohibited by the market but by regulations (i.e. laws), and even then there are always loopholes to enable corporations to engage in functionally identical behavior as long as they follow a sufficient number of layers of indirection (or are comfortable to use a pile of NDAs to hide actual illegal behavior). A recent US example widely discussed on HN was the "no poaching" agreements between large industry players to put a cap on the salaries of highly desired employees.
[0]: The term is "Rhine capitalism" not "Rhineland capitalism", btw, and it's a gross oversimplification to use it to refer to the post-WW2 German model, the economy of France in the 1990s and the economy of Germany after the Agenda 2010 reforms as part of the EU-wide Lisbon agenda -- which was one of contributing factors to the EU debt crisis, drastically raised the poverty rate in Germany, drastically cut the income tax rate and wreaked havoc in the welfare system. It was a stretch when Albert popularized the term in the 1990s (after the German reunification) and it's frankly ridiculous to still use it today.
> Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free
Because it's offered for free.
> developer should have to beg for a few crumbs
They shouldn't. Developers unhappy with their financial situation should pick up some contractual work or offer their product as SaaS.
One issue with fixed pricing or licensing is that it can lock out people in developing countries from participating. A few hundred dollars is nothing for a San Francisco based company but it might be a huge amount for someone in Latin America. How many great ideas fail to take off due to insufficient access to funding?
In recent years game engines have been doing an interesting job at exploring this space. You can use stuff like Unity or Unreal and the price depends on how much money you're making. I think something similar is done in the mobile app store ecosystems as well.
At the extreme, this is the opposite of a normal public good, which are characterised by a cost above any individual's marginal utility. Here, there are any number of organisations who probably have marginal utility from Babel above the cost of provision. See the snowdrift dilemma.
Prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of commons has a dominant strategy (defect), but chicken does not - your best strategy is to do the opposite to the other.
I specifically budget a small amount (~$100/mo) of company cash for this purpose. Some of it's donated to OSS, and some if it goes to pay for low-cost freemium products where we don't necessarily need the premium features but want to support the team[1].
I stole this idea from someone else so I know I'm not the only one, but more entrepreneurs really should do it.
1. https://mailsac.com/ is a good example where our usage would fit fine in the free tier but we subscribe anyway.
I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them.
And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution.
However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've.
I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them.
Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use.
If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project:
* Nodejs
* Postgres
* Node-Pg
* Rabbit MQ
* Grapesjs
* Esbuild
* Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday)
* Dokku
* Metabase
* MJML
It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all.
The incentives I suggest:
* Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers
* Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever
* Badges on Github profiles for backers
An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.
Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds?
All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody.
Some sources:
* "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/
* "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/
* "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...
Most of the project's I'd support have central figures that can use the money and don't have such difficulties. Babel could've used my $5/m donations. Debian's theoretical and moral dilemmas are not universal.
I used to be involved in a similar project for KDE [0] and it was KDE e.V that received the money. How they allocated their money is an entirely different question that depends on each one.
This can be a slippery slope. It could easily be mis-interpreted as "Hey, I payed $3 last month so I want you to prioritize my bugs". Generally I think for these kind of sums it should be clear that you donate and pay as a thank-you for what's already there, not for what (in your opinion) should come. Using it to highlight issues would work against that IMHO.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...
I am a solo entrepreneur with a self-funded business and I set aside a percentage of revenue to be paid in developer sponsorships, through Github sponsors, Clojurists Together, and directly. I sort the libraries that my code uses by "indispensability" and fund the top 8 or so. It's not much, but if everybody did this, the ecosystem would be healthy.
I'm happy to see that at least the Clojure community is very mature and this approach is rather common.
It is in my best interest and it does make sense: I rely on those libraries, I want them to be maintained. And if they get abandoned, I will bear the very significant cost of rewrites.
Bear in mind I do agree with you, it would be better if we supported these libraries properly. But it seems like the majority are willing to allow a few to carry them. It makes the idea of running these projects on sponsorships seem unsustainable.
And second, seriously? I should worry that my competitors will be meaningfully boosted ahead (to the point of having a better shot a beating me) by me supporting a bunch of libraries that I use?
The world would be so much better if we all just did the right thing. It really isn't difficult to know what the right thing is at any given moment.
I give what I can, because contributing any amount to any libs is better than just talking and contributing zero.
I wonder how virtual employees would work for taxes. Maybe the government could offer a discount for them. It would be cheaper for a company than a "real" employee. No health care, no social security, no office or equipment; just a salary.
Want to comment on it? This will be $10. An upvote? $1. A downvote? $50. A snarky comment could cost $100 to be overlooked by the moderators.
Not sure if anyone has any data on this...
Am I reading correctly? 6K USD per month for a single developer? With that amount of salary, you could build a house within 3 months in my place.
Should developers anywhere in the world be paid more than what can build a house in 3 months "at your place"?
I'd say it's the exact same reason why almost nobody can make a living wage off self-publishing app store apps. There's always an endless stream of volunteers who will clone your idea for next to nothing.
Plus the homepage doesn't explain at all WHY one would want to use this. So from a marketing point of view, you need to better demonstrate your value, i.e. what makes Babel useful and unique.
[1] for example Google's Traceur: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
I'm not a JS guy and familiar with Babel, but I find it hard to believe that the amount of investment required to replace Babel is less than $10/month? You can fund Babel for ~40 years for the same costs as one month of developer time.
It's completely unsustainable for OSS to depend on volunteers
I'm curious, not incredulous. I haven't worked on JS/used Babel in more than a year.
Really, my advice is to start holding the node ecosystem hostage until you get properly compensated. Leftpad 'em.
Isn't this about Daniel, the Curl project maintainer? Don't think curl is used heavily in Node.
I think Daniel started Curl in 1997, but if there is one person who thanklessly held a large part of software industry like this, that is Daniel.
Such a brilliant and humble person!
And I agree - we all owe him a lot. I'm sending him $5 every month via github sponsorship. That itself will not make him rich, but if all users of cURL did.. ;-)
I think I spot the problem.
If we want to create a sustainable OSS infrastructure, we definitely want that developers make a good living from it. But it seems the dominant notion is that developers should donate their time/money and live close to the poverty line, so that companies can rake in billions in profits, without paying for the tools they use.
(But also no, his salary is not what bankrupts Babel. It is too low for that.)
And you're forgetting equity.
As contractors, you could theoretically in any country, the more eastern, the more luck you need to have, but it's doable.
Source: I've asked ex-colleagues, recruiters, and people at meetups.
A couple of Russian enterprise companies have been sucking up all available Java talent in the last couple of years, with top salaries coming up to a million roubles for non-managers. Salaries in Russia are calculated per month and post-tax (people don't even know how much tax they pay), so it's about $13k per month after tax, and $20k per month before tax. I have also seen a couple of openings for Rust engineers in financial sector promising up to $10k a month (after tax).
Of course, this is a very far outlier from the average rates: senior engineer in Moscow typically takes home $3-5k (after tax, monthly). But it's not 'never'.
They should probably change the business model to make more money from consulting or lecturing. Many companies pay well to get "famous-project" devs for consulting or talks. Donations is usually a different budget than training or short term staff.
Of course, the drawback is that the project would need even more devs to compensate for the time giving workshops, so IDK whether it would work out in the end.
The salary is high for Europe, but not outlandish. I come within 15% working in IT in old industry but without leading a huge project and managing people, cooperation and giving talks. So, no, they should not pay much less even if the contributors probably have their dream job in contrast to me.
FANG has lots of offices in Europe.. I work at one of those at around 20-35k USD / month, depending on stonk prices :)
Making 11k USD is not uncommon for contractors in northern Europe, Switzerland or Germany.
Sure, you can find many who are paid less. But talent is expensive.
Check freelancing sites to get some idea. Plenty of guys getting long term work at $60-$80 an hour.
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.
If you are receiving money as a freelancer you need to earn at least 50% more to get a similar net salary as an employee therefore a employee salary of 78k gross is roughly equal to a freelancer making 120k a year.
You have to compare net income as everything else does not make sense.
That's just the average!
lolnope
You can go very very far with that money in western Europe too. Maybe places like Paris or London may be much more expensive, though.
Definitely. In my experience (lead dev in the UK), salaries for senior positions in London are at least 1.5-2x the amount elsewhere in the UK - but living costs are also much higher.
Not true, basic junior devs in Poland start even from $15K per year(invoice equivalent without VAT).
Good devs in Ukraine get $50K/year+ but AFAIK they have 5% taxes only. Good = hireable by S&P500 companies for example. Anyway most of them prefer to move to Poland for example due to better government/QoL.
The effective amount will of course differ greatly between the countries, but please don't forget that the expenses vary as well. (15k a month in Switzerland isn't as much as 15k a month in Germany)
I know a couple of senior (non lead) developers who earn this much.
https://teleport.org/cities/prague/salaries/
Quite obvious.
I just had a look at the median salary for median salary for a physician in Gothenburg and it comes up with $43k annual. I know for a fact that a full time general practitioner earns ~7k euro a month after working for a year and general practitioners are on the low end payscale of doctors. There is also not a lot of variation, because health is predominantly provided by the regional government. If people work in private practices they actually would earn more. Looking at some of the other numbers all the ones I know about are around a factor of 1.5-2 too low.
However, during the last year there's been more and more american companies that offer these kind of rates remotely. So, a good developer could make this, and even more, while living in Europe, although you might have not consider him "working" here (whatever this means in terms of remote work anyway).
He is already working with a discount
LOL you're saying someone, in a rank and file (even if senior) developer position would be paid 'significantly above' $11k per month anywhere in Europe? This is a serious case of "citation needed".
I'm not sure many strong/passionate people outside MSFT feel motivated to contribute to MSFT open source. Especially to do work that someone already gets paid for, and might get a huge bonus from their boss if the project is a success. I would argue non-corp-backed projects are the ones which get the passionate contributors and community.
They use their work time paid for by their employer to report or fix bugs that they encountered while using them in development.
That's pretty high compared to "average" for the rest of the world yes, but you can get that or more if you have a strong referral with the hiring manager, even in a lower cost of living area. Strong referrals are the key to getting this kind of money outside of California and outside of a FAANG offer.
Sure, it's nice to be able to make a living from open source based on donations. That doesn't have to be comparable to Silicon Valley salaries that are fueled by huge ad money and other dubious sources. I know many people here are from Silicon Valley so they might even think it's a low salary, but I'd ask you guys to get some perspective.
If I know my donation would be used to fund someone's (in my eyes) incredibly high salary, I'd prefer spending it on somewhere where it would have more impact. You know, people who are actually struggling to make ends meet.
And that'll be heavily skewed upwards by SV, so yes, it is actually quite a big figure, given that it's a charity-type job which generally pay less.
That's highly unlikely given how a median is calculated.
The people who are maintaining the library can probably command far more than $11k/mo. If their salary isn't high enough, it doesn't make financial sense to work on the library instead of taking a high paying job.
The ‘great engineering salary’ is a matter of perspective and location…
Also crab-ass Hacker News commenters: how dare those commies make more than minimum wage writing open source software!?!?!?
Most of the people getting outraged about $130k are the same people ready to defend Musk and Bezo’s billions.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
This is ridiculous. Great engineers should be incentivized to work on open source projects. Would you rather the engineer and project get absorbed into a company like google? Because that's what will eventually happen if the developers don't feel like they are being rewarded for their work. They'd rather go somewhere where they feel more valued.
- I don't hold any opinion on how to solve this problem or if they should get paid or not... consider this, 11K is the Yearly / Half yearly salary of a mid-level developers in most parts of Asia, double it and you can hire a decent senior developer for that price..
I can understand the dilemma the person is in, but, making 11k a month, this person is part of the top 10% of the richest people worldwide.. little hard to care too much.
I'm also unconvinced by the "most popular tool" argument. Sure a huge amount of people make use of babel, but it's only a (very) small part of the complete tech stack an average company would need. I.e. database, frameworks, other programming languages, nodejs, deployment and management tools, the underlying OS; there are dozens of dependencies that are critical nowadays, all which need to share the available donation pool.
I really need to finish my site which visualizes this ... But here's some data on ElasticSearch I did a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...
Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work.
It's not unreasonable for the developers of a real, currently-existing product to want to be paid for the work that they're doing on it, rather than for some pie-in-the-sky business proposition.
You contradict yourself there. If no one wants to pay for said product, how would a product bring in more money?
Tools is what makes us 10x more productive; its ridiculous companies cant spare 1% of their IT budgets to pay for them.
They spare their budget by having employees contribute to OSS on the clock.
I'm beginning to doubt this, at least from the consumers perspective. I'm willing to bet most commercial users of these tools are thinking in terms of free as in not having to raise a purchase requisition. IE free as in beer.
That's a nice goal. But you don't create non-trivial high quality software in 2021 by random people chipping in a handfull of hours a week. (Yes I'm sure that are exceptions)
You can't have that kind of thing happening for years and just "don't notice" nor "do anything about it". IMO, it's quite obvious that not only did he knew, but he was also complicit in the whole thing. The only reason they're venting this now is because they ran out of money, if some wealthy sponsor had come and gave them a few million, their sudden spark of morality wouldn't have realized.
Reminds me of Ruth Madoff stating that she "had no idea" [2] that her husband was running a multibillion dollar scam business for decades.
Like, come on, who is going to believe that.
1: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
2: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/madoff-s-w...
Kind of like many ideas which are forced onto people (in this case riding on top of Facebook's monopolistic network effects), they sound great at first, but they end up making things worse.
There are definitely many CI pipelines that download all packages every time they're triggered. For those pipelines you'd be looking at tens of installs per day (or more).
With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
So even from a development point of view, not an end user, I don't think its a far stretch to 'being used by millions of developers, and they know it is being used'.
So while it can be argued that a percentage of those 117M/month are on automated scripts, even with a very conservative number saying of 1% of them being genuine installs this still leaves them at millions of installs per year. So yes, it's definitely not disingenuous to say it's used by millions.