How to Pay Professional Maintainers

The innovation here, which I completely agree with is:

“fund them so that they can dedicate resources to the project, and trust them to direct those resources like you'd trust a senior engineer to execute on a broadly scoped project.”

The basic concept is you pay based on trust in the skill and body of work, not pay for something.

Generally, I find companies are incapable of making this decisions except with 5+ year veterans.

Even then, I question whether or not they are truly paying on that basis or it’s just implicit.

If I’m wrong, and I would very much like to be, who are examples that take the path recommended here with their devs?

>I often read advice along the lines of "if you want to help a project send PRs" and I never understood it. Reviewing and iterating or pushing back on PRs is work!

Implementing the PR yourself can take more much work than just needing to review someone else's work. PRs save you time from having to implement fixes, improvements, or features yourself.

>Designing, building, managing, and growing an Open Source project demostrates all the skills required of a Senior Software Engineer.

These are all things a junior engineer can do. Anyone can make an open source project and run it. You are overstating how hard it is toto make an open source project.

This is a nice idea. Perhaps someone will decide to do it someday.