Babel has no money because someone took a $130K salary and didn't work

But it is useful for general signs of activity. So I think it’s stupid to say stuff like “foo has 120 commits and bar has 119; therefore foo is more productive”

But I think it’s a good starting point to think something like “Hrm, Bar only has 21 commits in a year and the rest of the team has 120. Let’s look into that.”

Sometimes there’s a good explanation (eg, “Foo makes a huge commit every two weeks, let’s talk to them about the benefit of daily check ins and branches”) but it also helps identify real problems.

I once worked with a company that was wrapping up a project. They have contractors 30 days notice to finish their work at the end of the release and go. One contractor went from regular activity to zero commits during the last month. Since I was supposed to integrate and code review his stuff, I asked if he would check in and he just said “yeah sure.” He left with no commits during the month. Not that there’s a specific number of commits that was good and he was obviously mentally checked out, but zero indicates something worth investigating.

"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."

"Sorry but that's DEFINITELY not $132k worth of work. Especially when there are other contributors who are working for free doing much more. Obviously everything isn't on GitHub, there's work in private but it is representative."

Sebastian makes himself look bad here, and added to it that he is leaving babel, to start a competing product with VC funding, makes his public take-down of babel even worse.

> 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.

> I am sitting on an ivory tower so I know this is a terrible look. The elephant in the room is being ignored and it's hard to see so much sympathy for a self-inflicted problem that isn't being honestly publicly addressed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210511084825/https://twitter.c...

And seriously, it takes a lot of hours to drive over 100.000 in donations and sponsorship home every year.

Somebody has to do it. If it’s that guy, I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

I get paid well over $130K a year, and if I manage to get 12 issues, 25 comments, and 29 pull requests to open source projects, that's a good year. Where does my salary come from? What do I actually do with the rest of my time? The world has no visibility into that. (The answer is - a hedge fund. Turns out there is no hedge fund software engineer funding crisis.)

There's nothing wrong with getting paid $130K a year to not work on open source. There's specifically nothing wrong with getting paid $130K a year from the organizations who you want to be funding open source. Babel's highest sponsorship tier (https://opencollective.com/babel), at $24K a year each, comes from Airbnb, AMP (Google), Trivago, and Adobe. Other top contributors listed on that page include Salesforce and Facebook. Do we complain when those organizations spend well over $130K a year on not-open-source? Do we complain when those organizations spend well over $130K on internal projects that just completely fail?

I'm starting to think the answer is that we should, in fact, complain. As the linked Twitter thread points out, Babel isn't running out of money because $130K is too high a salary - it's running out of money because the lack of visible results endangers their ability to get future funding. But the amount of funding they're getting is scraps from any of these organizations that, I'm sure, get way more than $24K/year value from Babel. If you have a thousand software engineers, and a piece of software makes them all just 1% more productive, its value to you is ten full-time developer salaries.

And all these companies are more than happy to employ thousands of software engineers, plus hundreds of managers and other human infrastructure to support those engineers. And they understand that sometimes those engineers don't deliver value - usually because they were told to work on the wrong thing - and that's a correctable problem and you keep paying those engineers while you correct it. If they have a question about whether someone is doing the right work (maybe they're doing good work, but it's not what was agreed on paper - it certainly seems like Henry is doing a lot of code reviews and publicity work?), having skilled managers is how you figure out whether that work is nonetheless worthwhile, or the engineer needs to be told to shift their focus. We understand that having managers, who are also paid more than $130K/year, is important to a functioning engineering organization. (Usually they're traditional line managers, but even at organizations that reject traditional managers, you still have senior contributors whose value is primarily in how they guide and advise other people's work and not so much in their own work.)

It may be true that an open-source project's future is in danger because they've employed one person and that one person isn't visibly productive, but the mistake here is on the expectation that this could ever work. Imagine if Adobe employed one engineer to work on Photoshop, discovered they were not terribly productive in terms of new features implemented in Photoshop, and then worried because they'd have trouble begging the CFO for funds for a second engineer. We would see this as ridiculous. If you want to see continued development on Photoshop, you need a team. If the senior management of a tech-driven organization refuses to proactively staff an engineering team with more people than strictly needed, no one would think to beg. We'd just know this management is incompetent and short-sighted and not worth bargaining with.

(And, like Babel, Photoshop has been around for many years and does its job just fine. In a sense it doesn't need new features. But I'm sure that Adobe has way more than one engineer on the project, nonetheless.)

We need to figure out how to stop begging for scraps from companies that regularly fund hundreds of millions of dollars in development for code that only benefits themselves, and start saying, look, this open-source project brings you millions of dollars in business value per year. $24K is a joke. We're not going to try to justify the additional value of a second contributor, when you've got ten highly-paid people on the committee deciding whether to give $12K or $24K. Give us millions of dollars, then you might see some results.