Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmsbrg | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but as someone who doesn't live in the USA, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone for not being able to earn "$11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source."

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.

View on HN

132k is not that much for a US salary. And besides, I'd rather see the engineers of such an important project be well paid.

The median salary for a senior software engineer in the US is $133k.

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.

> And that'll be heavily skewed upwards by SV

That's highly unlikely given how a median is calculated.

I wouldn't consider it a "charity-type job" though. It's a tool that companies are literally using to make money; that's not the same as helping homeless people or working for Oxfam or whatnot.

It depends on where you live though, right.

This is not about donations to help someone make ends meet, it's about donations to maintain a very important library.

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.

Yeah, it's a little galling. If he can earn more than that in industry, then great! He should totally go and do that. Let Babel die and other people will have to either step up with their time or with money or replace it with something else.

Of course none of the solutions involve you. You just want the product for little to no cost. A product that increases your productivity and helps you earn more. Pay for it? Phshhh... let someone else step in and work for less. I'd rather sit here and ensure that the developers of an extremely popular tool earn less than a great engineering salary. They should work hard because they are passionate. It should not be rewarded monetarily. Seriously....

We’re talking here about a project I don’t use and have no need for.

The ‘great engineering salary’ is a matter of perspective and location…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com