>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
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.
"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.
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.
There probably is more, but not going to speculate.
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.
> - 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?
>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?