> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source.
> 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.
On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low.
My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.
> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.
I am from germany, and the avg. salary for a decent senior dev here would be between 60 and 80k€ depending on the town you are living in.
Babel is a very complicated piece of software. Even as a senior dev I wouln't feel comfortable to lead-maintain it.
You wouldn't find more than a couple of ppl. in Germany who have the skillset and mental strength to maintain a project like that. And those few people would easily be making 150-250k€ as freelance consultants.
I think that 11k$ for maintaining one of the most important OSS projects in the webdev world is more than fair.
That's valid too, but and big but, I'd argue your engineers aren't being paid their value though and that's largely down to what I feel is Europe not valuing engineers relative to what they accomplish enough. Don't drive our wages down, drive yours up.
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.
Comparing salaries isn't easy. Europeans get more vacation, more sick days, other (better?) Health care, retirement funds, unemployment insurance ... also they eventually pay less rent etc.
What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes).
$11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)
> Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax
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.
An open source project funded by donations is not the vehicle to use to try to hike developer wages. Especially when that project is already underfunded.
The concerns about the project not making efficient use of the donations it recieves seem spot on.
I think you've misread this chain, the poster above me wasn't talking about OpenSource, just hiring in general, and my initial comment was saying 132k isn't going to get you very far.
I was responding to that poster's general comment about hiring quality engineers.
> Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year.
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.
It’s the same here in Sweden, about 3k€ net/mo will cost the employer at least 7k€/mo, and then there’s other costs associated such as paying for book-keeping, business insurance, pension etc. Billing 11k€/mo would barely cover the costs of a single employed developer with a medium salary here in Sweden.
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.
> making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year
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. :/
In my particular country people do indeed talk post-taxes. Personally, I negociate my contracts, with employer and / or collaborators, on the pre-tax sums, which is the brut.
Have you considered the possibility that your high salary is not entirely due to a shortage of people with the same skill level, but rather because SF/NY companies have too much investor money to spend?
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?
Two of the most expensive regions in the US are not representative of talent. The world is a big place with some brilliant engineers at very different pay scales.
Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
$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
I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic.
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?
> 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.
> Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously
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?
I suppose you can just summon such a person without effort? Recruiters get paid for a reason and we're talking about a situation where they don't even have the money for devs.
> Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
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.
> 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.
That seems unlikely, since it's a nice city in a temperate climate. Absent any discussion of the job market, I'd like 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.
There are things that suck about SV, but there are great things too: the weather is extremely nice, lots of cultural diversity, good food scene, and there's so much tech that you have lots of opportunities and security.
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.
I think you should entertain the possibility that not all that salary gap is explained by geography. I suspect that one of three things would have to be true of either you or the two hypothetical devs:
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.
Not at all. FAANG is just a convenient and geographically comparable reference point. I have no trouble finding non-FAANG UK developer jobs online that pay more than ~$65k/year and neither should you. I'm not deeply familiar with babel, but I'm pretty sure that if you can lead that project (which should involve a fair amount of in-depth knowledge about JS, coding chops and CS knowledge) you will have many options to earn in excess of $65k anually.
OP wouldn't be wrong to do so. Detroit (the city) suffered through the changes of suburbanization and racial tensions during the 50s/60s...but Detroit (the industry) also suffered a steady decline in automotive market share starting around then as well. This had equally devastating effects to the region. Just look at Flint.
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.
What’s less clear to me is whether or not the tech industry is like the car. Will the rate of innovation drop as we slowly approach an asymptotically perfect product, or will it accelerate as access to concentrated labor and knowledge drives up the rate of change?
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.
>Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
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?
Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?
Presumably because that is the alternative, requiring sufficient incentive to stay away from the alternative? It is not like you need to live in SV to work in SV.
There are many cities in the USA, outside of the Bay Area, in which $132k would be a reasonable salary for that job. Just west of the Mississippi: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, possibly even Salt Lake City, Phoenix, probably Minneapolis, Honolulu, etc.
> $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
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.
Babel is an complex perpetual maintenance solution to bad engineering in the first place. I'd rather be a "ossified tech lagger" then having to deal with that.
could you elaborate what is bad engineering? It's one thing to say babel is no longer a critical tool, it's another thing to say that it's "bad engineering"
It probably is true but as with all cost/currency comparisons you can't really look at the raw pre-tax figures in isolation to know if someone has more buying power doing the same job in one country or another.
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
Just to give one data point I'm in Poland and I'm earning around 3500€ in a fully remote senior developer/engineer position working on AI tech in a company of around 1k employees. I'm one of the best paid people among my colleagues. The absolute top range job offers in this field in my country would be somewhere around 5000€ but that may be available only to a few developers in the entire 40 million country. I'm sure one could argue that one US engineer is worth 2+ polish engineers but I'm doubtful it's such a large difference. Quite the opposite in fact, I heard rumours that our engineers are quite valued internationally, once you get past the language barrier of course.
I am not sure what your background is, or whether you are, or have worked as, a freelancer. What I am writing might therefore be old news to you, in which case it would still be interesting to hear how you are thinking about the numbers I'll present.
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.
dude are you insane? in germany your 9000 EUR salary would be huge. and saying you put 1000€/mth away before you calculate is even more insane...
You would get a Netto of around ~4.800 €, which would be more than 80% of all germans will make. Also you could easily make more by reducing social payments (which you can do if you get over 6000 € brutto).
"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%)
> This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?
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".
I guess that's not including mortgage/rent, food, automobiles, etc. If that's the only source of income for the household and there are children involved it rapidly downgrades to sufficient but not wow, insane profit.
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.)
I get paid about 10k shy of this for primarily javascript and knowing AWS. If you don't think people who work on something so foundational are worth it, then you are what is bananas.
Not pleasant, but from then on you'd save $100k/month (according to user varispeed). If it's really that amount (which I doubt), every larger web company would spend it.
This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some of their maintainers have, which pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors, it's frankly ridiculous that they are expected to work for significantly less money. Not to mention that the abstractions some of these people wrote basically allow a significant number of people to enter the industry in the first place.
I'm the lead dev of Ardour, paid entirely by voluntarily payments for the software, and I make about $100k/year from the software itself. That's after nearly 35 years as a C++ software developer. Some people think I'm a brilliant programmer, I'd settle for "probably about as good as anyone you're likely to be able to hire".
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".
You are a tremendous contributor to open source software. My visually impaired friend appreciates the keyboard controls of ardour and as a result of your hard work (and his) creates and masters a lot of music without too much difficulty.
So, you know, thanks. You made the world a better place.
> This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken
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?
You somehow seem to think that amount someone earns is somehow related to how good they are.
> $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.
I think there is a correlation between income and skill. More specifically, I think it's likely that highly skilled people have higher than average incomes.
> 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.
Mind introducing me to some of these people? My company is actively hiring experienced JS devs and I’ve yet to find any senior enough to maintain Babel for under $200k
Sure thing, what the company does exactly? Just so I don't waste their time with stuff I know they are not interested in.
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.
I think it's somewhere in between. Taxes, healthcare, and retirement are big in the US. And keep in mind that self-employment taxes (operative here) are more than the taxes taken out as an employee.
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".
Back of the napkin to me: say $25.5k pre-tax retirement / college savings for child, 30% federal, 15% state, $3200/mn to rent an apartment in a mid sized city in the US, $400 month for car and gas, $1k for food, $1k for healthcare, $160 for utilities, leaves them with $288/mn. Not enough to ever own a home, build wealth, travel; better hope they have a spouse that is employed & has employer subsidized healthcare.
Most folk in the US are on poverty wages, one surprise bill away from bankruptcy or homelessness; we shouldn’t expect OSS maintainers to fall on the sword and rely on inter generational wealth or live in poverty when their colleagues, using their software, at big companies are making (what used to be considered) middle class wages.
I am a SWE with ~10yr experience (and no degree) and can't seem to find any of these jobs. For most of the country this is far above average.
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.
Everywhere… IDK? FWIW most of my career has been remote in northern New England, working with companies in Boston or SF. Seriously, I’ve only received a single (non-founder) offer below 6 figures since I dropped out of college, at a non-tech company. I walked out cold when it got to negotiations because they were so far off base. A bit rude, yes, but I was genuinely insulted. It was three times lower than the next lowest offer I have received at that point.
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.
I suggest https://www.levels.fyi/ as a starting point in setting your expectations. Make friends with a recruiter, helps to see the world from their perspective & learn what the bands are / who’s hiring.
I mean, it’s also important to recognize that the average salary most people in the US gets paid does not include benefits. Let’s say the salary for a senior engineer is $100k. (This is super low in reality, especially in the tech world. Maybe not when including other types of companies.) Let’s say the typical cost of benefits is 30%. That works out to $130k total. That’s around $10.8k a month. And remember, this is the low end.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
It shouldn't be about making lots of money, personally I find it great that most good software engineers aren't primarily driven by money, but that mindset shouldn't imply exploitation. It's just a fact that large corporations and companies in general benefit disproportionally from OSS. The value that open source software creates stands in no relation to the price that companies pay for it, even if the maintainers of some projects are perfectly happy with the compensation they receive. If you don't need a large part of the money that your work justifies, then just give it to charity, but don't allow companies to take it.
> pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors
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.
Doctors, for one, work to fiddle essentially a blackbox, under intensive regulation, and the results of their work is very hard to measure. This has led to a model where artificial processes are introduced that select for the privileged and the smart to become doctors. The artificial education does not mean these people have more skillsets. Like most education, it just signals conscientiousness and intellect.
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't understand why there are 117 million downloads every month. I doubt there are 117 million programmers using Babel and why download it every month?
I'm sure 99% of all CI systems out there are just blindly doing npm install without any cache or pinned packages. Multiplied with microservices so that every run has to rebuild not just one service.
What exactly would the benefit of licencing a tool like Babel under GPL be? It would be completely moot. Using a GPL transpiler isn't going to confer GPL virally onto the code that you run through it.
they re also incentivized to write OSS that benefits huge conglomerates, but not individuals so they can attract the big donors. It's broken many years now. Copyleft licenses can at least salvage some of the wreck
I work for a startup that benefits from open source.
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.
The irony about this is that it's the same companies then complaining that development is not being continued or not going in the direction they want.
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.
> 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. The request would be > roundly shouted down.
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.
Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer.
$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.
> suspect the average enterprise Java engineer has more discretionary spending
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.
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.
It's €650 for the all-products pack for an organisation, or €250 for an individual, dropping to €199 in the second year, and €150 in the third+ year, which probably explains it.
It’s a smart model I have to say. I continue to use JetBrains no matter where I work and I take the cost of the sub as a business expense on my taxes and get a deduction, so it in the long run costs even less
> 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.
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.
Corps I worked for usually seek to create some kind of contractual obligation between the authors and the company. Of course they pay to get the authors to accept the obligations.
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.
He is levying accusations that money is, effectively, being stolen. That is not polite but if he genuinely believes it to be true, you are suggesting he remain quiet instead?
He is welcome to open a channel with Babel privately and, if unaddressed, make a proper statement about it. Blasting someone by using GitHub contributions as KPI on Twitter is highly unprofessional and awful behaviour
It seems it has gone past that. If it is an accusation of theft (or what he perceives to be theft) he is surely allowed to say it publicly. You can still give them both the benefit of the doubt.
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.
I think this is a really bad look for Sebastian. He started babel and made the most contributions overall, but he hasn't been involved in the project for 5 years at this point. He left to join Facebook and babel would have died if it weren't for the efforts of Logan, Henry, Nicolo and the other contributors.
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?
Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
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!
> Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?
Going to Twitter is akin to having a disagreement at work, standing up and shouting across the whole office at the person you disagree with. I haven't been in an office in awhile, is that what people do nowadays?
Twitter is also (but isn't the only) tabloid social media. It promotes the sharing of sensational and one-sided content that is scant on details. I know we're supposed to be critical about what we read, but my first instinct was to assume Henry was a bad guy.
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.
A disagreement between two individuals should be initially communicated between those two and ideally resolved privately. Hopefully both sides have enough empathy to understand the other's perspective to reach an amicable conclusion.
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.
If I:
- built Project A
- left Project A and started the competitor Project B
- contributed a lot of PRs to Project B each week, and
- saw that a guy in a similar role at Project A, has relatively few weekly contributions to Project A
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.
The problem with that mindset is that there is a huge difference between leading a greenfield project with very few users and leading an established project that's a major piece of the infrastructure in basically every front-end app. In the former case, the bulk of the work is actually building the functionality, so looking at PRs / commits can make some sense. In the latter case, there are more constraints to consider and a lot of the work is in determining _what_ needs to be worked on, as opposed to actually writing new code. Also in things like project management, fundraising, etc., which don't show up as GH commits.
> 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.
Why? Once Project A gets to feature complete, does it need to be worked on at anywhere near the same rate? Other than fixing bugs/upgrading because of APIs they are using upgrading, the number of commits should be really small. Or should people change CSS constantly to have a string of useless PRs?
At that point, a huge amount of someone's time is spent managing bug tickets, attempting to isolate debug, etc.
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!
> most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway
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.
Well put... However, the unfortunate thing about web technology is that websites no longer support NOSCRIPT. If we want true global compatibility, it’s HTML + CSS and ZERO JavaScript. That has immense privacy benefits too.
God I hate this word, it's like in bad OOP where you classify things just for the sake of having more classes. This belongs to a class called compiler, just call it compiler.
Actually, it assumes only that evolution of new features slows down. Once things are _slow enough_ the value of an extra dependency is dramatically reduced.
This is where anecdotal evidence is difficult - hard evidence that we can reference points to the contrary and supports my reply. I have further anecdotal evidence I could cite, but it's not trustworthy.
while I don't agree with public bashing, he is right about yarn 2 being a disaster.
After a 18months since GA, migrating to v2 is still a pain and not the default version, while v1 does not receive update anymore smh...
Yeah you just don't publically call out one of your employees. That's just a dick move at that point. Solve this problem internally and don't throw your developer under the bus because you didn't manage them better.
Just as an FYI: Rome was started under the react-native team at Facebook and has been in development for well over 2 years, Facebook let him take it with him when he left.
There is a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't say it's 1-to-1.
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.
Neither is people piling on the maintainer of Babel based on GitHub activity and someone essentially accusing them of embezzlement. Sorry if that makes me upset.
$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.
open source maintainer salary !== FAANG total comp package
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.
I agree that 2-3x is more appropriate. Either way, don't you think the maintainer of Babel could easily be making more money and doing easier work (individual contributor at some large org)?
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...
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.
It seems a common trend that software engineers think their high salaries are something they can take for granted forever.
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.
Good thinking - those of us with some grey in our hair remember when coming out of college with a CS degree into a $45-50k government contracting gig was cause for celebration rather than disappointment, after watching our slightly older friends take loans for Porsches on their snazzy dot-com salaries... and then struggle with the fallout a year or two later when said dot-coms drastically cut staff or disappeared entirely.
Of course, it's not a joke of a salary in the United States. Is $130k a joke of a salary for an NBA player even though it's 90th percentile? Context matters.
$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.
yes, context does matter. So why are you comparing a full time OSS developer with FANG? ridiculous. I don't have any opinion on the babel drama, but 130K isn't a "joke" even for a OSS developer who is "senior".
I'm comparing the salaries because the person is qualified to do either job. Someone turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain OSS, and then is accused of embezzlement by someone who left for FANG salaries and VC-backing.
Yea, tbh this is 100% my read on this situation. Wouldn't go near the dude or his work after this. Spent way too long at Facebook where no one ever has to sell a product and now doesn't understand at all how money works.
Yeah, I'm admittedly just learning about this whole situation, but I fail to see how this isn't him just trying to take down the competition of his new project
Sounds like an effort to take down a competitor. If Rome tools is to replace Babel, people need to lose faith in Babel. Seems like a transparent conflict of interest.
"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".
Evan You[0] has over 4x more contributions than Henry Zhu[1] this year.
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.
Evan's metric and henry's are not directly comparable.
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.
The necessary "glue" work that often doesn't get tracked but eats a lot of time, energy, and cognitive capacity is very often overlooked. I'm not saying that is or isn't what happened here.
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.
We actively discourage team leads from trying to be the "team lead that still codes a bit here and there", they mostly just get in the way and don't focus on the team's real needs.
I.e. we'd rather them take a late lunch or go home early than push a sub par PR nobody wants to criticise.
To add another data point, on the BabelJS Slack, in the last 12 months, @Henry (hzoo, based on the matching profile pictures) has posted 96 messages, and @nicolo-ribaudo 251.
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"
it's insane Github reports PR stats. I always knew this would happen. But never so publicly. You just assume that your management is looking at it constantly and basing their decisions on it. Because why wouldn't they. Their entire philosophy is "never let a metric go to waste."
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.
Technically you can do and undo the same thing a trillion times and have a trillion commits. In the end your net impact in the code will be zero, yet you will be the PR champ.
1. His language sounds like he knew Henry personally. I will take it with a grain of salt. But same applied to creator of the Babel, since he could have beef with Henry.
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.
I do know Henry personally and Henry actually consulted me when he was debating whether he should quit his job to work on Babel full time. We also occasionally talk about the burdens of OSS maintenance so I know first hand how hard he's been trying to keep Babel afloat.
The linked comment above is one that people interested should read. Especially people who only read the relatively inflammatory and context free initial tweet.
I agree that there are a ton of non-code related things that a project leader should be doing, but the vast majority should be visible in some way. Mailing list discussions, roadmaps, code reviews, creating/triaging issues, etc. It should be pretty easy to get a representative picture of what a project leader did over a whole year.
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)
Depends entirely on their contract and what is expected of them. Coding is just one possible duty of a lead in this sort of project - the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.
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.
>the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.
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.
> 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.
I know almost nothing about this situation, but if I was hired to raise money and did a bad job, I'd expect to be fired. I wouldn't expect to have a blog post written about me.
Back when I was a senior programmer I would probably have had as few credited code changes as that.
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".
The most productive team lead I worked with didn't do a lot of story work. He was constantly checking in on everyone else to ensure that no individual contributed was blocked on anything. A problem that would have taken me 3 hrs to figure out, was solved during pairing in 15 minutes.
So thanks for being that guy for a lot of other devs that learned from you.
Why? Maybe they talked on video chat or a screenshare, or a messenger like slack. Forcing people to use a possibly less efficient communication method just to have a hard record of their contributions seems like the hallmark of an extremely dysfunctional and distrustful development organization.
They’d use something visible or their process is borked and not transparent and not welcoming to new users.
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.
irony really is dead. The creator of git still uses the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Though I can certainly think of a dozen other ways to communicate that aren't GitHub or Slack.
Are FOSS "donations" for on-going or past work, though? I'd lean towards a mixture of both.
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.)
> 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
There has been a lot of innovation within the tooling ecosytem over the last year (esbuild, vite, snowpack, bundless, swc, whatever Jarred Sumner is working on). None of this innovation is coming from Babel.
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.
I explicitly state 2020. Activity picked up in March. Use GitHub search filters and it’s more apparent.
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.
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 would expect an outrage here if someone suggested evaluating someone's work performance based on the number of commits the same way we consistently criticize evaluation based on number of lines of code or hours spent in the office.
Still, it's difficult to do even 'soft' work on a GitHub project without producing some kind of trail.
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?
That's the wrong way to look at it.
He has a lot more contributions, including code reviews of pull requests.
https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview
Not to mention other behind the scene tasks such as fund-raising, etc.
That doesn't seem to mean much nowadays. (Or maybe ever.) It's an old popular complex project, there are a lot of ongoing discussions. For example the TypeScript repo has 5K issues. And it's a flagship MS project, so it's not about funding, quality, etc.
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.
Open source projects funded by donations need accountability. Regular reports about how much money is available, how it's being spent, and what the results are. If I saw that this guy, getting a full-time salary, creating fewer PRs in a year than me in a week, I'd be pissed, and the project certainly wouldn't get my donations.
I think this is an important point. How do I know donating money will end up actually going to the project.
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.
In the US, any donation to a nonprofit can be earmarked by the donor for a particular purpose. They're legally bound to use your money only for that purpose.
> - 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, ...
Management blaming individuals by name (in public no less) shows severe incompetence at the top. I don't doubt he hired a slacker, but that's on management for hiring and retaining that... to the point of demise? Stupid.
I would have a problem with a manager if they did this "publicly" within the team/company. Airing it out on twitter is even more egregious. "Severe incompetence" is somehow understating it IMO, although i can't think of a better description.
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?
Seb is a well-known narcissist, suffering from ego created by his own Twitter myth. I cannot name a single peer among the many circles I converse in which respects the person (another matter for the technical ability). Seb has only to look in a mirror to identify the issues with the current state of the Babel project management.
This is a bit ridiculous on the other direction. It's like your main job is putting nails, and at the end of the year you have only put 29 nails. Sure, nails per day is not the best metric, but if in one year building furniture you only put 29 nails in total it's definitely not a good outlook for your productivity.
But his job wasn't putting nails. In this metaphor, his job would have been increasing the furniture company's output and profits; maybe he found another of doing it. Perhaps for instance, he figured out that instead of nails, he could utilize another joinery approach, like dovetails.
Sure, that's a fair point. I don't know enough about the exact job, internals, etc, just commenting that while commits/day or /week or even /month might not be the best metric, if you are (which I'm unsure here) hired to do that then if you only do 29/year, yeah you are probably not doing your job.
When that “carpenter” is also answering the phone and doing quotes for work, apparently. If Henry is also the community manager and main fundraiser (which from the sounds of other posts he is), I’d argue that the last thing you’d want him spending time on would be code.
If he was a smaller fraction of the work force, that would make sense. But if you have a single full-time worker who is receiving about 2/3 of the payroll budget, I'd argue that you can't afford for them to spend most of their hours on business stuff.
Business stuff is what pays the bills. You can't have 2/3 of the work force just merging PRs and find out 6 months later that nobody paid the taxes and you won't be bringing in enough money to make payroll next month.
I wasn't saying not to do administrative tasks, but that they shouldn't be over half your entire company's work-hour allocation. Even with fundraising in there too.
Imagine if you had 3 employees and 2 of them were HR. That is not a good allocation of labor.
If you're including sales in the bucket of administrative tasks (and fundraising is very much equivalent to sales), many successful companies are at or near 100% administrative tasks.
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.
It's like having a startup with 1 full-time salesperson and 3 part-time engineers. It would never work unless you already have a product (which Babel does).
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).
I have no horse in this race but where are comments like this coming from, in response to this:
>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?
That makes sense for a normal size organization but they literally only have three employees. And the majority of the fund raised was used for his 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.)
I'm not doubting it's real work; just that why other people in the same team have to volunteer (or being underpaid in case of the other two employees), while a single person is paid "properly"?
> 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.
If you have a problem paying a high salary then don't base the company in a high salary area. Any other place would be just as good and way cheaper. Also the origial author says someone is misappropriating money[1] on top of this! They definitely don't deserve more funding before they fix those two problems.
Technically Deno supports TS and I assume that is a transpilation step to JS. Not sure if they use TSC or their own “compiler” however. But it is baked into Deno at some point.
Relevant:
> 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.
I am Jùnliàng, a Babel contributor since 2019. I would like to share my perspective here.
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...).
Can someone explain to me what I'm missing with regards to how much they're currently earning? Looking at their base support sponsors (of which there are 4), they are each paying a minimum of $24,000 each ($96,000/year). There are 5 gold sponsors of at least $1000/month ($60,000/year) and 24 silver sponsors of at least $500/month ($120,000/year). That's already $276K without including the bronze/backer tiers.
> that's more 90k/year which allows for a decent living in most places
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?
$90k/year is between a good and outrageously good salary for Europe, depending on the country. So yeah, plenty of talent available for cheaper than $90k/year.
I don’t understand why salaries are so low in Europe.
I work in New Zealand, not exactly a tech hub, and I’m on $220k p.a. (mid career). $160k US, 130k EUR. 39% top tax.
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.
Really? Maybe that sort of money is available in Sydney. I never saw anything close to that level in Melbourne, particularly for a mid level developer. I've had to move to the US to make a decent wage.
I can only speak about a France here, but the salaries seems low because it's after most taxes.
When you get 200k in US, you have to pay for your healthcare, pension, etc...
In France when you get 80k, which is a very high-end salary (~94% of the french are paid less than that), you still pay some taxes on it but the company already payed the healthcare, pension, 25 days of mandatory vacation, etc...
All-in-All you get the same value, numbers are hardly comparable.
Yeh I'm sure 220k is a great salary for NZ. But in terms of purchasing power, how does it compare to $70k-£80k in the UK (I don't know, as I said haven't lived in NZ for 6 years)? I'd also be interested to know how common it is to be on 200k+ as a dev in NZ
Not sure about purchasing power, but from a salary perspective I thought that kind of money simply didn't exist at NZ companies. Maybe at Amazon or Microsoft in NZ you can get paid that much though.
I don't think that's fair: Software Engineer salaries in London are also relatively low compared to non-SV-major-city-US. And it's not across the board since Finance jobs in the same area pay better, so it seems that there's something specifically about how that one role is valued.
Keep in mind that most taxes and benefits are missing there, so it's better to consider US salaries as payroll costs in Europe.
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.
75K EUR / year is a legit salary in Estonia now? Wow, you guys are really catching up fast. I would have assumed former Soviet bloc countries were still down there at $30K or so (even less in Ukraine, Moldova, etc.).
Is this something special with Estonia, or are salaries catching up in the rest of Baltics, Poland, etc?
Depending on where you work, if you're a great developer then the income can be around 2500-4500€ a month take home, which is 40k - 90k eur (gross, not payroll) a year. Considering the average (and very liveable) salary is 1100€ take home a month, it's really great living costs wise.
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.
Payroll cost is higher than that. Those numbers don’t include the other costs paid by the employer
- payroll taxes (as and Medicare)
- unemployment insurance (SUTA/FUTA)
- workers comp
- health insurance (most Americans have the large percentage paid by their employer).
That's still far from "not that much". You're not gonna be buying a jet anytime soon, but it's far and above the 20-30k many developers outside of city centres get stuck on.
Donations are nice but not really scalable as a revenue model. Planning to live of that is not a plan. There are a couple of revenue models that do work in the OSS community:
- 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.
> Donations are nice but not really scalable as a revenue model
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.
I know HN isnt a single hive mind, but its funny seeing these responses all in contrast to "devs shouldnt take a pay cut if they move to a cheaper state/country"
Working for a for-profit company is a completely different labor relationship than working for an OSS org or other non-profit. You absolutely should fight to prevent management from extracting more of the value you generated just because you cut your personal costs, but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor. One is adversarial theft, the other is the willing donation of your time to a cause.
> but you may be able and willing to accept less income in order to contribute to an organization that you believe in that isn't profiting off your labor.
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?
If babel was a commercial product it wouldn't have trouble getting enough funding to pay these salaries. 10000 users paying $100 would get you $1 million revenue.
> but why does an OSS tool have to be supported by Silicon Valley salaries?
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.
Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development. Why should its developers and maintainers not make at least as much money as entry-level Silicon Valley developers?
Why should they make more than senior engineers with decades of experience in Berlin?
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?
A handful of people doing highly technical compiler work relied upon by much of the industry, while also being experts in JS probably do deserve to be paid more than the average senior in Berlin. These aren't cheap skills, the people who are this good can probably get remote work at well-paying US companies wherever they live.
Because one of the primary "competing" project (TypeScript) is developed on payroll of a FAAMG.
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.
What entry level SV dev makes 11,000 x 12 = 132,000 x 1.25 (tax) = $165k/year pre-tax? I know the salaries here are high but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If they are that high for entry level then I’m being seriously underpaid :/
I am assuming that in the article the $11k/month figure is pre-tax. It is higher than Silicon Valley entry-level, I think, but I had thought that it is not higher by much. However, I just did a bit of Googling that made me realize that maybe I am significantly overestimating entry-level Silicon Valley salaries.
A little off-topic I suppose but TC being nearly $200k but salary being $130k always feels disappointing to me, especially since RSUs rarely vest within year 1.
I was horrified and humbled to see that the people making this amazing stuff are making considerably less ($2k/month) than I do... or frankly, than most of us here on HN do.
Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.
I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures. They do quote $11k for a full-time position as others have pointed out. What I make is much nearer to the $2k figure but I am in Europe.
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.
It's wild. I moved from Belgium (generic company) to Dublin (Facebook, 2018) to Seattle (still Facebook, 2020) and my net income more than doubled with every move. And that's as a software engineer without a degree (dropped out of college).
not at all just FAANG. the US tech scene is just that competitive. most decent Series A-B startups in the US can easily pay six figures. fwiw i got 150k at netlify, about 1.5 years after graduating from bootcamp. of course, i have had an atypical career, but i dont think i have an atypical salary story.
$11k/month contracting in the US is very different from $11k salary in the US, let alone Europe.
~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.
It gets really annoying when people talk about $200k and well above because most of them are not "senior engineers" they are in some sort of technical management role and if they are engineers they are in a FAANG company where they get stock compensation.
> I'm always shocked at how high these US salaries quoted on here are. I don't know if that's just FAANG companies or people inflating figures.
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.
All FAANG companies pay 100% of the employee's health care in addition to the salary. When people talk about total comp for these FAANG companies they mean base pay + stock the 100% health coverage is just assumed. I will say coverage for the full family often isn't free but it's still pretty cheap.
I'm pretty sure they just pay for health insurance premiums instead of the health care. Deductible followed by a percentage of everything until you reach your out of pocket coupled with poor paid leave if you get paid leave at all is a significant cost to health care. This is combined with a culture that glorifies not missing a day of work for any reason, which can't help folks use the health care provided.
While I agree about the culture glorifying overwork (recent post on HN) and the difficulty of using health care / PTO at times, numerically my employer-backed health care plan is actually quite generous.
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...
My tax rate here in Norway is less than my federal tax, state tax, and insurance premiums were in the states. I now pay about $300 a year out of pocket and have no deductible. The wait times aren't really worse than they were in the US, and when folks do have to wait (for non-life-threatening things)... paid time off if you need it.
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.
People in this thread aren't bragging up the US healthcare system, they are saying that high salary employees of large companies don't really face significant costs from it.
Maybe the salary differences really are just $6000 a year?
> My $0 premium health care plan has only a $2000 deductible, $6000 out of pocket max
So, realistically, you have to account and budget for about ~330$ a month of your wages going away additionally for your healthcare during employment term negotiations.
$2k is a part time salary, for an unknown amount of hours. The full time salary that they are going to get going forward is $6k. Still not close to competitive, but enough to make a decent living.
Facebook and Twitter are implementing features that warn you when you're about to share an article sight unseen. HN should do the same if you're about to comment without having skimmed the article.
The one person who is full-time has a very different salary:
> 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.
There’s something to be said for those salaries being too “Valley”. $121k per year is a lot of money; you’d likely be able to find good JS developers in the UK for half that and in continental Europe for even less (in Eastern Europe you could probably get away with $30k…).
$121k is not a lot of money for someone writing compilers. And I would seriously doubt that you could just take your average developer and expect them to be able to contribute to a project like Babel in an equally productive way.
120k is a wildly high salary in Europe, and contrary to popular belief Europeans don’t just cut ties to their homeland and move to Silicon Valley just because the salary is higher. You can find a lot of compiler experts sitting safely in the UK or Italy or Russia.
The requirement for working on Babel is being a Javascript expert and compiler engineer, not a good JS developer. It's 85k GBP, that is very reasonable for those skills.
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.
Don't forget it's not all about money, though. Above a certain level, money doesn't make people happier (see the hedonic treadmill effect). It's not like this developer is anywhere near poverty. In fact, by all accounts, he's rich. Many people find happiness in being useful. Developing tooling that is used by thousands of programmers around the world trumps working on ads or addictive tech.
Babel maintainer here (one of the two contributors going from $2k/month to $6k/month). It's the first time I write on HN. I saw different comments (here and on Twitter) about how Henry was getting $11k/month from our funds but wasn't doing much for the project, and so I want to share my view of the story.
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:
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.
This is very helpful transparency, thank you. I appreciate that it's not just spin, but you are willing to reveal some past challenges too (all projects will have challenges around relationships and decision-making and equity! When we talk about the publicly, we can help each other get better at managing them.).
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.
Soliciting donations is an entire profession unto itself in the non-profit world. Ironically the practice is also called "Development". So, Henry could have the joint titles of Lead Developer and Lead Developer.
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).
Still if you multiply that by 1.5-2 to get to a full fte, it is a high salary.
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.
What your comment and all the others here saying that on country X this is a very good salary for a "median" senior engineer is missing, is that the average senior engineer has no clue on how to maintain Babel.
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.
software engineers in Italy are vastly underpaid, but USD 72k are EUR 60k, and as an employee the company is spending much more in taxes, healthcare, retirement etc.
You should compare this with a self-employed consultant-style job, not with a normal employee.
> The median senior engineer pay in Italy is around EUR 38k - up to EUR 78k if you have around a decade of experience
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.
€38-78k is a high salary in Europe. Net median income in Spain is $27k.
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.
Keep in mind that many other countries have socialized medicine and a better nationalized retirement program. We pay for those and, because of our system, they are very expensive.
Yes its not that large if you work for some enterprise in midwest. I have mid career friends in bay area pulling in 500k tc in the bay area. This is next to impossible in europe and certainly not a possibility for average engineer.
Yup, same in South-West Europe and most places I've worked as a developer and manager. These quoted salaries are extreme for private companies and I don't understand them at all for open source work, even less when they don't even seem to work full-time.
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?
Looking at tech salaries globally is always going to be weird. Technically, they're mostly similar across 1st world countries, except in the US because of the bubble on the west and east coast, where they're absolutely completely wack.
There's a lot of complicated, nuanced reasons for this, but it is what it is for now.
The salary discussion aside. That's what I have always been ad odds with OSS.
Nobody is forcing you to put it up for free.
Put a price tag on it an sell it. If it doesn't sell, lower the price. If it still doesn't sell, good. Stop trying to force adoption on software that cannot sustain itself.
Under the OSIs definition of open-source, and under the definition of free software, anyone can buy your software and redistribute it to others for free. This effectively limits you to earning money only off the labor of your work, not the work itself, and makes your business model effectively useless. This is such a huge difference yet the FSF, as always, confuse people (maybe even intentionally) by saying that free software can be commercial. No, it cannot. The services you provide can be, the labor you provide can be, but the software - no.
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.
How does open source get money? According to the original GNU Manifesto from the 1980s
> 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 OSS/donation model is a reaction to how hard it is to sell libraries and dev tools. Between competing open source projects and piracy, it's a race to zero anyway.
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.
It’s not really a matter of what he “deserves” as the thread is making it about. Point blank: the project cannot sustain that salary and the original developer of Babel said funds were being misappropriated. [^1] Perhaps the lead developer of the project does “deserve” a competitive salary, but the project cannot afford to compete with Silicon Valley salaries, which for an open source project is not surprising. It’s a good first step towards funding, but clearly not ready to support competitive rates. This reminds me in a weird way of Vine’s demise. It was used by millions too, but without a monetization strategy, popularity doesn’t pay the bills (or salary in this case). They should take a look at Linux Foundation for inspiration. If there’s not enough industry support for that, then I think the market has spoken.
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.
For some people, being unemployed (even mostly) means living on the streets and eating scraps of food to get by, so I do not understand what you are trying to signal here when you say can still be generous and donate despite being mostly unemployed. Unless of course, you have a several years worth of savings or a stable source of food and shelter, in which case you being unemployed is irrelevant. I understand the desire and passion to help, but speaking of empathy, some people may have a very different idea of what unemployment means.
If you don‘t enjoy it, stop working on it. Eventually others will step up, one way or another. Either by working on your project or by making a new one. This is not about saving the world, but about some nice to have software we can do without.
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.
If you run a company with a monthly labour costs of $100k, and Babel increases efficiency by just 0.1%, then you get $1k of value from Babel every month.
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?
If I had to choose to pay for a compiler I would pay for Typescript even if it were 3x more expensive and supported less plugins than Babel. Babel is something I really struggle to not use, but find myself forced to use at times.
I’d much rather plunge money into any competing compiler to get it feature compatible.
The dependency chain of modern Node projects is bewildering, and I wouldn't expect most developers to sift through the lockfiles and take note of every single dependency in the tree. (And I acknowledge this is an issue with the ecosystem)
Isn't it an obvious problem that lots of OSS people have? If your project is non-trivial and effective, millions of people want to use it but it takes a lot to maintain it. In most cases, without vetting, it is hard to accept PRs from random people because you pretty much have to review the entire code and in most cases, it would probably take ages to understand enough about something like Babel to be a useful contributor.
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.
The problem is the contradictory nature of commercial open source.
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.
Jesus this is ugly. did any confirm, for instance, that both of Henry's parent's are still alive etc. We just had a fucking global pandemic. Maybe github contribs isn't an awesome metric right now.
Open source is not a business model, and I think the expectation to get paid for open source is a bit disingenuous. There is also the ideological aspect of free as in freedom licensing, while it doesn't exclude monetization, often detracts from the incentive to pay for software.
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.
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 :)
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.
Transpilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary JS tooling.
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.
Being anti-transpiration seems really weird to me? It just lets developers write code using new standards without requiring all users to be on bleeding edge browsers.
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.
First, wringing code which is debuggable, and experience less perturbations will alone add to better code longevity, and maintainability.
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.
Babel has allowed developers to write modern JS without having to worry about older browsers - which, granted and thankfully, is now much less of an issue thanks to evergreen browsers and Microsoft having stopped with IE.
Typescript and Flow allow for much higher quality software without having to add complexity to browsers (like Dart initially was intended to).
Compilers are bad. They add to the already giant mess of unnecessary assembler tooling.
How much of them is really needed, and how much is there just for embedded developers to show their "street cred?" Not a lot at all.
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.
Nonsense. Transpilers have been misused at times in the javascript community, but overall they have played a *massive* role in modernizing javascript and enabling us to write much sounder, more robust, and bug-free code that runs everywhere, including on older devices and runtimes. Society as a whole has benefited immensely from babel and other transpilers.
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 was able to remove babel few weeks ago in one of my projects when webpack started to support class properties natively. The project in question only supports evergreen browsers. So nice to have super simple build config.
I have nothing against babel. I think it's great especially in maturing TC39 drafts.
It seems to be a recurring problem with open-source/pay-what-you-want services that donations are hard to come by. I think that if you don't have to pay, than about 90% of potential customers who would have paid just won't. Sometimes it's because they think "hey, it's free". But I think in some cases there's even a desire to pay, but the organisation isn't geared for it. For example maybe the company's payment process is just too arduous to go through if you don't have to. Or maybe someone proposes it and is countered with "what's the business case?", which is hard to answer if it's free.
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.
Babel has always struck me as the lowest-quality highest-profile tool that exists in the JS ecosystem. Their website and documentation are unorganized and unhelpful beyond the most basic usage — transpiring JSX.
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.
This makes me think about Rails, how successful it was/(is?). Basecamp or formally 37 signals showed how to not only give back to the open source community but also greatly benefit from it. They are funded by their own service and the success of Rails is complimentary. Babel feels like it could live at a big corp with deep pockets or at least a small indie corp with deep pockets. Does it need 3 full time engineers or are there enough volunteers to keep it successful?
Maybe incentivizing people to donate in order to achieve milestones that they can see making their companies more money could work too.
On OSS projects, I think that we need to find a more robust model than what we have in most cases.
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 would have more sympathy for them if they didn't start leaning on core-js two years ago.
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?
This is another case of tragedy of the commons. Individually, it doesn't make sense for a company to donate. I can't even resent them, since it puts the company at a (slight) disadvantage. Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur. But collectively, we would all benefit to fund something like this. (Edit: I like
culturestate's response of budgeting a small amount for this. Wish more people would do that!)
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.
> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur.
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.
The problem is if you're competing with someone else, all things being equal, that invests the money you give away they now have a better shot at beating you. From a purely selfish perspective it's better to allow people like you to fund it while everyone else gets it for free.
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 agree in general with your comment, but even in your example, is donating to exactly the top 8 clearly the right thing? Why not 5, or 13, or numbers 6-15 (figuring that 1-5 are adequately funded by others)?
> Unless I was flush with cash, I probably wouldn't donate from company funds if I were an entrepreneur.
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’d classify it as a public goods problem. The difference is rivalry in consumption. You compete over fishing grounds but you don’t compete over use of Babel. It makes a difference in user strategy too: with the tragedy of the commons, your personal marginal gain is higher than the individual share of the social cost. This leads to overconsumption. In a public goods problem, you fully benefit without contributing. As a result, you maximize utility by not contributing. There is also an incentive to understate the the utility you derive from the public good in order to avoid being forced to pay, making it hard to estimate the utility generated by the public good. It’s also called the freerider problem.
Thanks for your analysis but isn't the share of the social cost the fact that Babel will stop updating when these people can't support themselves? It's just delayed in this case, no?
When something is too obviously a good thing, there is a game of 'chicken' where no one feels the need to contribute because the item is so obviously advantageous they are sure someone else will.
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.
The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics worked on studying systems where the tragedy of the commons does not hold and determining under which conditions[1] such arrangements do work. Adopting open source to that system seems like a very difficult task to me though.
While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it.
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.
> If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...]
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.
Debian's case is so complicated. Many of these complexities and dynamics don't exist in other software projects.
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.
> * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers
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.
Your last sentence is worth emphasizing. Many people misunderstand the tragedy of the commons as an argument why a commons can't work, but the only possible conclusion is that the commons can't work under the current economic system (and specifically the dominant school of economic thought of the past half century).
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.
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 economic system is literally part of the assumptions.
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.
No, the logic of public goods does not require any assumption about the economic system. Any set of actors whose actions create a negative externality, and who cannot enforce agreements to cooperate (either through the courts or via repeated interactions) will overproduce the externality. So, you could say the assumptions include the legal system. There are numerous tragedies of the commons under socialist economic systems, including environmental degradation and the inefficiency of socialist firms. There are plenty under capitalism too. Berlin under Rhineland capitalism has plenty of litter, just as New York does under Anglo-American capitalism. Hunter-gatherering bands are also perfectly capable of overusing natural resources and failing to cooperate. When they succeed, it's because they get the incentives right - at least, there is a reasonable case for that.[1]
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'm not sure who you think you're arguing with but so far most of your rebuttals attack points I never made.
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.
OK, fine. But this is also false. There are many tragedies of the commons that are successfully avoided under capitalism. As you point out, affluent rural areas are one, and the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque. (Villages in the UK stockbrocker belt have little litter, despite being composed of wealthy incomers.) Another example is cartels. In the end, what's left apart from the uninteresting claim that "constraints influence behaviour"?
> the claim that in future these are all automatically going to die off is a post-dated cheque
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.
Capitalism represents a solution to the tragedy of the commons: Privatize it. You guys are interpreting this as a takedown of capitalism when it's the exact opposite. Capitalism represents a solution to this issue. You might not like that solution, but this circumstance just goes to show that naive attempts to reinvent capitalism are unlikely to work.
Contrarily to the common claim of capitalism, this wouldn’t be an optimal solution. Let’s say there are ten shepherds sharing the fields. You privatize it and in a short amount of time, there will be one shepherd left, ultra rich, and nine unemployed shepherds. So capitalism is a good system to optimize the value of the field, not its value for society.
If that actually happens, it will be because one of the shepherds is substantially better at flock management than the others, and their financial success allows them to buy fields from the other shepherds. The other shepherds will only sell their field if the good-flock-manager shepherd makes them an attractive offer (probably enough money such that they can live off the interest for the rest of their life). Not to mention, they very well might get a job working for the good-at-flock-management shepherd, possibly even at a raise since superior profits means there's more wealth to share. (Realistically there will probably be at least 2 sheep conglomerates competing on wages to hire the best shepherds. I'm not an ideologue, I'm cool with the government intervening in the economy a little bit to break up monopolies.)
> If that actually happens, it will be because one of the shepherds is substantially better at flock management than the others, and their financial success allows them to buy fields from the other shepherds.
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.
In some cases that applies, but I don't think a paid version of babel would be viable. Electronic goods resist commodifying. It only works sometimes (like in streaming music), but you need to put in a lot of technological and legal effort.
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.
>I don't think a paid version of babel would be viable.
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.
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).
Hm, a solution. They privatize it, and then companies will say to their webdevs, we don't want to pay extra for a profit of some capitalist, write the website without it.
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.
Companies make those sort of trade offs all the time, whether to buy or build. It doesn't take many to decide to buy to fund a small project like Babel. Not only that but you are likely to see competition driving the whole thing forward.
My point was that framing this as a tragedy of the commons problem, and here's the standard solution, can itself be disputed. The hidden assumption is that the capitalist will take the responsibility to take care of the thing, and provide it for a fair price, but it is by no means given. Certainly, there are examples of economic failures of this type as well. (Even in software, Unixes/Lisps..)
How big of a problem is it to change from babel to some alternative? I'm thinking of a possibly bigger disadvantage should that need to happen. I'm genuinely asking, since I'm not familiar with js tool chains.
I successfully removed it years ago because Typescript replaced everything I was using Babel for, things even build way faster and I even got Intellisense autocompletion and refactoring as bonus.
I doubt typescript is faster than babel with all the static analysis it does. In fact it's typical for projects to use typescript as a check in CI and actually build with babel, for speed. Fast alternatives to babel are things like esbuild and swc
True, I guess if a big company used it they probably could fund it from pocket money, rather than spending more money on switching. Sad that people have to write a "we're running out of money" blog post to make that happen.
There is also a separate aspect, that this also has do with unawareness, and not just excess stinginess. I might speak for only myself, but to a much larger extent that I'd like to admit, I take work and maintenance of open source projects for granted.
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.
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.
I was just thinking how messed up it is that basically companies can take those expenses off their taxes and they still don't contribute, but then I was thinking - do they think that if there was a healthy ecosystem then they would create problems to employ people because the healthy open source community is then another competitor for top quality talent.
Our economic systems weren’t invented. They’re all hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks. Every economic theorist of note is well aware of that and they always have been. Everyone who has tried to build a new complex system from scratch has failed. Usually they’ve failed completely but occasionally they’ve gotten something functional at the end, but not what they designed.
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.
China would probably be the best case study available, but they are of course notoriously difficult to get reliable data about. DeFi (Ethereum Decentralized Finance) would be the next best case study but finding someone capable of wading through all of the scams to find the actual projects is going to be almost as hard as getting reliable data out of China.
In this case the problem would actually be solved if the project was a bit more capitalist and charged money for usage, no? This isn't capitalism failing, it's Burning Man gift economy type stuff failing.
I never understand the reluctance to charge for software amongst this community. Especially when you consider projects like Babel are mostly being used in commercial environments. Why do people expect that their employer should get this stuff for free or that the developer should have to beg for a few crumbs at the end of the month.
I really like the model where tools are free for educational, open-source, and other non-commercial uses. I've ended up paying for software libraries because I was first able to try them out for free in school and other personal projects.
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.
For many OSS is a breath of fresh air. A project where you're in charge, free to set your own goals and deadlines. Free to tinker and experiment. Free to say "do it yourself" when someone gets a wrong idea and goes against your creative vision. Money create exactly the kind of obligations you're running away from. Even if it's not demanded, you're still feel pressure to provide support, make your code fit for some purpose. And for what? Some chump change?
> 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.
On the subject of paying OSS projects, it makes me think that the idea of a part-time OSS "employee" might be a good one. Almost all businesses benefit from OSS but almost none of them pay back to the community. What if a business budgeted for a part-time employee and just sent the money to the OSS community at large. I mean, that "employee" IS helping and develop software, from a certain point of view. Without that work their other employees would have to work much more to reach the same output.
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.
Evan You is getting EUR 14359 (~ $17450) per month via Patreon alone: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou. I don't know about "underfunded" but with that you can hire at least 3 full time senior developers in Berlin ..
It might be the best approach is to offer a commercial license alongside the open source one, in a subscription model. It's just what fits into the preconceptions of a business. They get an invoice, they get a something in return, case closed. There's probably not even a need for extra support. Only thing necessary is some viable way to pay them. Then there's no need of developers talking to managers about justice, how things should be, and all this fruitless stuff. It really doesn't matter that you could obtain it legally and for free, often times.
I'm of the opinion that these issues are no one's business but the folks involved with Babel. Taking this situation to Twitter is childish, and speaks volumes about the author and their interpersonal skills (or their desire to try and tilt the scales for their new startup or whatever).
Given that, your comment seems incredibly unnecessary, and pretty disrespectful to someone you call your friend. It adds very little to the discussion while revealing personal details about the person and their life situation that no one here needs to be privy to.
I'm struggling to see the motivation for sharing this publicly. Surely if your intention was to communicate those last few sentences to Henry, you could have have done so directly?
Here's [0] a blunt take on the situation by Sebastian McKenzie, who left Babel to start Rome Tools. He blames the full time salary of Henry, who he doesn't think contributed enough.
Individuals have a few $ a month to spend on charity like this. Companies, you know, the ones that make millions and billions off of open source software, have a lot more. If I'm ever in a position where I can manage funds or chat with a manager, I'd have my company donate a lot more to OS products.
In OSS you offer something for free with no guarantees and few strings attached and in return hopefully get public contributions. You might get something on top of that in the form of donations, but trying to project growth, incomes and hires seems rather naive. If that kind of product development is what you want, you better sell a product.
Because it is too easily replaced with something else [1].
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.
If you think Babel is really easily replaced with something else, I'm fairly confident you are not in its target audience. Beyond the tool itself being far less trivial than you're making it out to be (most companies don't have Google's resources), it's an incredibly essential part of the JavaScript ecosystem, with tons of widely used extensions and plugins--including extremely central stuff for integrating projects like Typescript and Flow with basically any other form of compilation in the JS world. I chose these two because they are funded by Microsoft and Facebook, respectively; they are certainly not companies that can't afford to fund development for projects like this. Moving that ecosystem to another project would conservatively take years and that's assuming everyone actually wanted to do it.
That project hasn't seen any updates in almost five years.
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.
Surely $130k a year cannot be that much for a tool used by millions of people? Is someone in charge of developing a business model and talking to investors at Babel?
It was like Mozilla, who paid 2 million for the CEO when revenue down like 80%.
Is there any OSS model that is financial sustainable. A foundation like Apache?
Ideally we would need Babel less and less, but kudos to Henry and others contributors, they are making cool stuff (like ecma proposals implementations)
I'm sure there are a lot of Daniels out there. (The combination of "Nebraska" and "2003" tells me that there's at least one more, since Daniel Stenberg (a.k.a. Mr cURL) is living in Sweden.)
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.. ;-)
Regarding open source not getting funding: It’s been the most powerful source of volunteering work precisely because there was no money tainting or inducing work on to people. It’s a true example that society can work without capitalism. Let’s please not change that.
Well done Sherlock. You've cracked the case. The authors of an extremely popular product should not be paid well! Let's incentivize them to quit and find a job with FAANG.
I find the comments here fascinating. So the lead developer was paid $11k a month, and somehow many start calling this a problem. Apparently, if you work on OSS you should be working for something slightly above the poverty line. People are comparing it to other salaries, but seem to forget that this salary likely does not include any other benefits (health insurance, stock options ...). I mean he is the lead developer for a "product" that is used by millions of people, what would a person like that earn in industry? Significantly above that salary, even in most of Europe.
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.
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.
Its 9k cost to employer. Its 6.5k gross salary which translates to 78k gross salary a year for the employee. A lot of engineers make that salary.
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.
It's hard to compare between different countries due to different taxes and so on. But that's almost double what a generic team lead would make here in Sweden (50-60 is probably closer) but a high level dev working a prestige project could make more of course.
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.
True, and in many (oldschool) companies, it is easier to book a workshop for $10k than give a donation of $5k.
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.
At 20k USD / month, you are either incredibly good and/or lucky or you are not saying that you are working in Switzerland, in which case you forgot to say that your cost of living is higher than SV and you have no public health insurance. (but 20k/month is comfortable anyway, even in Switzerland)
There are plenty of contractors in India making $8-10k a month so there must be thousands in EU making $11k a month or more due to proximity and language advantage.
Check freelancing sites to get some idea. Plenty of guys getting long term work at $60-$80 an hour.
That's how much is needed to be paid for getting people to do unethical work. It is not directly comparable to working on a compiler used by many people.
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'.
Idk, the median salary at Uber dev office in Lithuania (which is in eastern Europe) is ~9k EUR per month (which is 11k $). Granted they don't hire that many people and most other companies pay considerably less but I wouldn't say that this is something unachievable for higher end tech leads working in some companies.
Usually the product of a team of 4 is not that well known nor successful. And you can't really compare the average developer with the three developers mentioned since they are clearly outstanding and could get hired by almost any company.
This is the thing I don't think people get. They are treating these devs as though they are just run of the mill when it's highly likely they're very skilled.
The salaries of engineers don't scale that much with success of the product. He can get hired by almost any company, but those companies will pay standard pay for lead developers of a team of 4.
(But also no, his salary is not what bankrupts Babel. It is too low for that.)
One thing with software products is that revenues are usually not correlated at all with the size of the dev team, much more with the popularity of the product.
For sure. California is also quite expensive! You are probably better off earning ~$80k in a LCOL area in the US as opposed to ~£90k in London after taxes, expenses etc
If you include benefits, then yes. You don’t even need to be lead developer to reach that kind of salary if you assume the $11k includes pension, vacation, mobile phone, computer, maybe a budget for seminars, lunch, etc.
Team of 4 of an unknown startup, yeah that'd be around $5k after taxes, health and social insurance and 5 weeks of vacation. Team of 4 of product like Babel, your doubts are misplaced.
Actually, the average salary for people with computer science degree and 5+ years experience is 9-12k USD according to IDA (Engineering union in Denmark).
Other comments are right, $11k a month is a very high engineering salary anywhere in Europe.
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).
Yeah I see dozens on the Braintrust platform literally daily. Some remote roles have gone up to $240ph which would be absolutely insane in Europe (or most of the US).
But he essentially is an independent contractor, that's the point. And talking about Sweden, you miss the pension, health insurance and the employer contribution to the taxes.
How is he an "independent contractor" when everyone -- not everyone here, but he himself and his, ahem, employers -- is talking about him as an employee, and he's been there for years? Never mind the GitHub commits, analyse how many times in the last year he's had to hunt for next month's gig.
Lol sure. If you get this kind of responsibility anywhere in western Europe in a professional setting, you are getting paid definitely somewhere in that salary region.
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)
> 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.
That website is absolutely bogus. Maybe it's been set up to make people think they should be earning less than they are.
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.
I had a look at Oslo, and it's suggested median salary for a software Engineer was almost exactly the same as the average starting salary for a STEM master degree graduate in 2020 (https://www.tekna.no/lonn-og-arbeidsvilkar/lonnsstatistikk/b...).
That does not inspire confidence, but maybe they are better in other profession, or other cities.
You're talking about devs that are very good at negotiating and got one of the very few positions offered by a foreign corporate entity with very deep pockets.
I don't even get how his salary is an argument here, when babel is one of most critical parts in almost all web applications. His knowledge and skillset is way above any average "lead dev" and he's still doing "grunt" work. Sorry, but this is a very reasonable salary.
Critical parts in almost all web applications, including those built directly on the pack of this work. Facebook, Gatsby, Next.js, Netlify and Cloudflare (a bit more indirectly).
"Significantly above that salary, even in most of Europe."
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 would say companies with a revenue above a certain number should be compelled to pay an annual subscription for any and all Open source projects they use. Even if it means projects have to include that in their licenses.
If my employer donated to Babel, I would interpret that like they would be sending gifts to the Crown. I mean fine, but understand that people might be salty.
Yes, instead MSFT has quite a few dead/"reprioritized" projects. That drama probably happened internally, you just didn't see it play out in a bunch of tweets.
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.
$132k/year is the going rate for pretty much anyone with 5+ years experience in California for a non-FAANG job. That's even if you're not amazing. In LA I've gotten offers for $150k when doing job interviews. This is at no name companies. That's not including health insurance and other benefits (e.g. the absolute basics like a company laptop.) I haven't interviewed in a year but I doubt this range has decreased.
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.
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.
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.
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....
I was going to give a similar comment here. I get that this is more common in the US compared to Europe or asian countries, but I'd expect that 5-6k a month would be a far more reasonable salary. You're not in open source for the big payout I assume.. And then again, 2k just to help on the side, that's about minimum wage here for full time employment.
So in order to work for product you're passionate about and used by millions, instead of being paid well you should consider moving to a different part of the world just to live well? Your work should not be rewarded in proportion to the impact you are having?
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.
- Had they figured out how to monetize it, you and me would not have had to try to solve this problem - monetizing is part of long term project sustainability cause time is money and living is not free..
- 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.
OTOH, Babel is a piece of critical infrastructure, a core of every modern web product's path from development to production. It's not a junior / medior developer job to manage and develop a project like that.
$11k / month is pretty close to an entry-level Bay Area salary. Given that Babel is one of the most popular and widely-used tools in the history of web development, I am surprised that all the creators can afford to pay themselves is one near-entry-level Bay Area salary and a few intern-type salaries.
Perhaps the question is why the Bay Area is the golden standard here? Half the salary would make you top 10% earners in almost all other places in the world, but because the salary is paid at SF levels all the "poorer" users have to step up and match the SF expectation? I couldn't find where Henry lives, but this setup allows him to go live anywhere he wants.
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.
If you want to make money and pay developers a salary, you need a product. I don’t want my js tooling to be a commercial product (hi Rome). Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?
In most cases it's just a few people who do >99% of the work. Project with significant contributions outside of the "core dev(s)" are much rarer than people think, and so are the number of contributions.
The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. People have to make a living. And who will manage that thing where everybody donates a little of their time? Babel has nearly 600 open issues and 150 outstanding pull requests; it's a full time job just to manage that.
>The original spirit of open source software is free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
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.
Rome, which is founded by the creator of Babel, just raised $4.5m - so either the current maintainers of Babel are not doing a good job fundraising or their work is not considered as interesting as these guys who are creating a new unified toolchain.
Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet.
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.
> Can we go back to the original spirit of OSS where everybody donates a little of their time instead?
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)
What for is Babel? I know it's a transpiler, but who uses it now? Since I work with fronted, backend and JS (3 years now) I use only Typescript. Babel is like ancient technology for me. Should be deprecated soon, no need to clog the bandwidth.
Feels very dishonest from Sebastian to try to wash his hands from this while, in his own words, "funds were misallocated for years" [1].
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.
This is a genuine problem for all open source projects but I think in this case it's warranted because Babel doesn't add any value to projects. Transpiling new code into old code is an ill-conceived idea; it's not worth the complexity overhead it introduces into the project. These days, I've even run into cases where babel's configs actually prevented me from using new browser features and I could not find documentation online on how to enable it (none of the settings I tried work; maybe it depends on the babel version?)... Kind of Kafkaesque to think that a tool would do the opposite of what it was intended to do.
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.
Saying you're used by millions when you're a javascript library is a bit disingenuous. It's not like whoever happens to hit a website using your scripts is a user in the common sense of the word.
They explain in the article that they get downloaded 117 millions of times per month from npm. When someone visits a website they don't download libraries from npm, those download numbers come from developers and build scripts but not from users.
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.
They have more than 20 million weekly downloads on npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@babel/core, i.e., they are probably used by at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of developers (not to speak of end-users).
Of course, in the JavaScript ecosystem, the same may be true for a 20 LoC package that provides a trivial function implementation, but that's a different story.
That's not a different story, that's precisely why you can't make that assumption. Many projects would download it over and over for each commit in their CI. The package also has 14k direct dependents, making it quite likely to be downloaded more than once for each project.
With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
You realize that a project with 14k direct dependents is obviously hugely widely used, right? And that's not even considering that the intended usage of babel is for compiling end applications (many of which are not open source), not libraries; this is likely undercounting the number of "real" projects using it by several orders of magnitude.
If you only look at the numbers it's the same story, but with some knowledge of the JavaScript ecosystem, it's arguably unreasonable to claim that babel is just a random, trivial package that is pulled in as an arbitrary dependency.
Possibly, but at the same time I am fully aware that babel is used in almost all of the frontend nodejs projects I have been involved with. It isn't something hidden away, it's something you set up for a new project or likely see/configure a little from a templated/skeleton project.
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'.
Even if those 29 million weekly downloads were all automated it would still imply 29 million users have setup automated jobs for building software with Babel.
No it doesn't. For e.g. how many stupid CI pipelines are set up to download it on every run? You could easily be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude out on actual number of direct users.
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).
> 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.