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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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..)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
$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.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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"
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.
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?
> 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.
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)
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.
$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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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".
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....
>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.
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.)
According to the original tweets by @sebmck there were only 25 comments in PRs by said contributor in the last year, so even that didn't happen, apparently.
> I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12
> issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests.
> This is across all Babel orgs.
>
> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
I 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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.. ;-)
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.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadThe idea of having some sort of meta layer that you compile from to another source is old, but totally underrated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler
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.
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.
Typescript and Flow allow for much higher quality software without having to add complexity to browsers (like Dart initially was intended to).
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 have nothing against babel. I think it's great especially in maturing TC39 drafts.
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.
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.
And so on, and on
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.
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).
With this, it's not that unlikely that one company (one customers) downloads the package thousands of times a week.
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'.
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.
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.
[1] for example Google's Traceur: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
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.
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.
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.
https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/sponsors/
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.
You can have the best of both worlds: Intellisense based on types in the editor yet fast transpile in the build.
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.
Has anyone tried to design an economic system recently, based on tools from the information age?
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.
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).
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.
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.
(Sorry for derailing the thread...)
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Some sources:
* "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/
* "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/
* "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...
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.
[0] https://relate.kde.org/
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...
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.
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 give what I can, because contributing any amount to any libs is better than just talking and contributing zero.
Their impact is so much bigger and I aspire so much to have as a deep understanding of the Javascript world as they do.
> 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.
I think I know why they're running out of money!
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.
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.
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.
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...
Edited: Copay is deductible-agnostic
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.
Maybe the salary differences really are just $6000 a year?
So, realistically, you have to account and budget for about ~330$ a month of your wages going away additionally for your healthcare during employment term negotiations.
Senior engineers can go for twice that... Of you live in the EU, have a CS degree, make 2k USD/mo, consider relocation to maybe Norway :)
~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.
I really need to finish my site which visualizes this ... But here's some data on ElasticSearch I did a while ago: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...
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.
You contradict yourself there. If no one wants to pay for said product, how would a product bring in more money?
Tools is what makes us 10x more productive; its ridiculous companies cant spare 1% of their IT budgets to pay for them.
They spare their budget by having employees contribute to OSS on the clock.
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.
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)
Maybe incentivizing people to donate in order to achieve milestones that they can see making their companies more money could work too.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Not sure if anyone has any data on this...
I think I spot the problem.
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.
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?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sourc...
They need to convince people/corporations to donate, default is that they get nothing.
They need to convice people to stop taking it from the expositor.
Why does the mechanic feel entitled to be paid for their repairs?
They need to convice people to stop driving away.
Why does the .... feel entitled to be paid for their work?
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.
FAANG is not on the list, FAANG pays $180k-$190k for entry level (Netflix does not recruit entry level much though).
So total compensation, entry level at some places is $15k higher, or more.
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?
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.
Is it heresy now to propose that Babel maybe isn't THAT valuable?
The problem is that they are very few. With tools like CRA, vue-cli, angualr cli, babel is even less visible.
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?
Still good ROI though.
I’d much rather plunge money into any competing compiler to get it feature compatible.
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.
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.
(But also no, his salary is not what bankrupts Babel. It is too low for that.)
And you're forgetting equity.
As contractors, you could theoretically in any country, the more eastern, the more luck you need to have, but it's doable.
Source: I've asked ex-colleagues, recruiters, and people at meetups.
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'.
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.
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.
FANG has lots of offices in Europe.. I work at one of those at around 20-35k USD / month, depending on stonk prices :)
Making 11k USD is not uncommon for contractors in northern Europe, Switzerland or Germany.
Sure, you can find many who are paid less. But talent is expensive.
Check freelancing sites to get some idea. Plenty of guys getting long term work at $60-$80 an hour.
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.
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.
That's just the average!
lolnope
You can go very very far with that money in western Europe too. 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.
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)
I know a couple of senior (non lead) developers who earn this much.
https://teleport.org/cities/prague/salaries/
Quite obvious.
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.
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).
He is already working with a discount
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".
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.
And that'll be heavily skewed upwards by SV, so yes, it is actually quite a big figure, given that it's a charity-type job which generally pay less.
That's highly unlikely given how a median is calculated.
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.
The ‘great engineering salary’ is a matter of perspective and location…
>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.
>The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
- So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
There probably is more, but not going to speculate.
7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202...
$110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0]
(I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.)
[0] https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/hzoo
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.
https://github.com/babel/babel/issues
That's the problem with software, it's hard to measure productivity.
https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo...
Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo has been, for about the last year, the most active contributor on Github, but as recently as March 2021 was only being allocated $24,000 (annualised) from the collective.
Another interesting thing I found digging around is that the creator of Babel (https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of:
https://babeljs.io/team
With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
Having said that, the salary looks excessive and the commit history isn't a good look without clarification.
But assumptions aren't always the best guide to what is actually going on.
So, he fundraised money to have time to further fundraise, and he did it so well that they have to decrease his salary?
Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.
The original article notes that funding took a hit in 2020. 2020 was an unprecedented year for any number of reasons. To simply say someone did a poor job fundraising in a year beset by constant challenges everywhere lacks proper context.
That's not to say more could have been done; I don't feel, however, that I'm in a position to say. Making money on open source is a difficult enough prospect regardless how one does it without also considering other factors that increase that difficulty.
But what you wouldn't see are the hundreds of problems I debugged and analysed for other programmers , down to the level of "make this change on line 530".
So thanks for being that guy for a lot of other devs that learned from you.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a listserv, or an IRC channel, or a GitHub issue. But it does matter if the collaborations are invisible to the team and to others on the project.
It’s their project so they are welcome to organize as they wish, but for a healthy open source project, I think having some collaboration method where newcomers can understand all the meaningful and helpful discussions is a good thing.
If a super awesome person is doing 1:1 calls/DMs/Emails all the time, that’s going to be tough to maintain. Not to mention a pain for any work where it’s multiple people collaborating and coordinating a changes that impact each other.
Few commits? Well, OK, lots of reviews and PR handling.
Not too much of that either? Ah, issue triage!
Oh, not that either. Well, they're the most senior dev. Strong technical direction and forward-thinking research! Maybe mailing lists instead of the issue tracker or wiki.
... but Babel's usefulness is at an all-time low as browsers adopt new features regularly, core-js now handles all the polyfills, and non-Babel transpilers and non-JS languages add all the interesting features and performance improvements?
Well, obviously advertising the project, helping with fundraising... for what's majority their own salary... Hrm. Mitchell Baker, is that you?
Maybe some donors will donate to other projects
So many other OSS projects barely getting even 100 USD a month and Babel is complaining they're unable to work with over 300k a year and a number of corporate sponsors which have been supporting the project for a long time.
And the nodejs ecosystem already seems like an outlier getting more funding than most other languages/systems/projects.
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.
"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".
https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392088730438090756
2. He said lots of circumstantial things about the matter. Namely: 130K isn't high for NYC; he could have and probably had better offer easily; he didn't need to maintain Babel but did, etc. All these are good but didn't answer the direct question, is he worth 130K for his work in the project. Even with the understanding that lots of work is in private, his public contribution in recent years seems to be way too low to not make people raise eyebrows.
3. Also, it's funny he said "is 130k too much for someone to maintain Babel" to the creator, who probably earned way less for creating Babel from scratch.
That said, a statement from the current most active paid contributor to Babel is probably more convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357
Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y
Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6].
Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everything, but they speak on a macro-scale. It's not an unreasonable expectation to review a PR a day.
[0] https://github.com/yyx990803 (2,979 contributions)
[1] https://github.com/hzoo (771 contributions)
[2] https://github.com/existentialism (2,608 contributions)
[3] https://github.com/JLHwung (1,849 contributions)
[4] https://github.com/loganfsmyth (130 contributions)
[5] https://github.com/nicolo-ribaudo (2,329 contributions)
[6] https://github.com/xtuc (1,614 contributions)
What about long running feature branches that get squashed before merging?
One can bring the messages up with these filters:
"from:@Henry before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11" and "from:@nicolo-ribaudo before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11"
Someone on vue core team (perhaps evan himself) said internal group co-ordination and management is handled by other team members, most prominent among them being Chris Fritz[1] (before he stepped down) and Sarah Drasner[2].
This reduces managerial burden on Evan and gives him more energy & time to focus on technical challenges
While Henry is the senior most member in babel team, so most of the management work is on him. which eats his time a lot more.
[1] https://twitter.com/chrisvfritz [2] https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/
I've worked with a lot of teams where no sort of solid leadership existed. Filling that gap is often difficult to justify because there's a tremendous amount of thought involved and it's a thankless task. Sure you can take the existing structure and direction and just plug away but ultimately, most efforts that do this fail. You need to look ahead and think about future adaptability if you want success. People often act like software development is as straightforward as data entry. You should have X entries per day. If you didn't add X entries then you must be slacking. Development requires not only technical prowess which is difficult to maintain in-and-of-itself but creativity, vision, and strategy. If you ignore the rest your project will fail or at least become an artifact of times past at some point.
I.e. we'd rather them take a late lunch or go home early than push a sub par PR nobody wants to criticise.
You can send PRs updating typos in documentation, or PRs affecting the core aspects of a project.
You can send 100 PRs full of tech debt or 1 that makes the thing run 100x faster.
PR counts suck as a way to measure work.
All this does is encourage bad behavior. Not squashing commits, throwing up tons of one line changes. Remember that contest Digital Ocean did for Hacktoberfest? Remember what a total shitshow they caused on Github? People were making egregious commits for a fucking t-shirt. Now imagine real money on the line.
>I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12 issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests. This is across all Babel orgs.
100k+ for a year of that sounds pretty cushy. he didn't say that he did "only" 1 or 2 PRs a week or something. where are these hyperbolic comments in response coming from? what other kind of work could have possibly been done in addition to this meager amount of code work to justify such a salary?
If anything, it's not fair at all for the other two who did the substantial work and only earn 2k per month.
(To be fair they have changed the distribution this year.)
https://babeljs.io/team
"My job is to manage a team of employees who code." vs "my job is to manage a team of unpaid volunteers who code, while I earn a proper salary".
> In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a salary for over a year, we expanded our goal to also support three additional maintainers: Jùnliàng, Kai, and Nicolò.
They started with one paid salary. Tried to expand that. Didn't get enough money to do so; now they're asking (fairly, IMO) for the community that treats them as critical infrastructure to pony up.
Imagine if you had 3 employees and 2 of them were HR. That is not a good allocation of labor.
It does seem odd that so much of the work would go towards paying to keep looking for more money (fundraising for fundraising), but there are plenty of sales oriented organisations out there who don't make anything. It's just odd in this case that an OSS project seems to have gone on that direction.
I suspect nobody should be earning such a salary working on a project like that.
I sort of get the idea of spending your money trying to sale an existing product but it doesn't seem to have worked in this case. That doesn't mean allocating the money differently would have worked either (arguably it would have been better for current patrons though).
We can change the analogy to also look at how many pieces of furniture produced, or whatever, but it starts to just be a pointless tangent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situation earlier this year, and so the babel team have made changes to make the situation fairer in their eyes. This apparently doesn't go far enough for Sebastian's tastes, so he has publicly called out by name one of the contributors who he feels doesn't do enough to justify their salary. The metric he uses for determining this is the number of github commits and comments that are shown on that person's profile. This is not a fair measure of someone's contribution to a project, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour that Sebastian would criticise if any other company was evaluating people in this way.
In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.
The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
edit: so... they don't have to pay him + they get the benefit
> The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
I had no idea he had started a competing project. This really stinks, almost like he is sabotaging his competitor.
Folks should just develop their own shims where necessary and TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS.
Sure no one likes doing that, but it’s important to follow the fast-pace ECMAScript adoption.
I mean, how does that not just push all of this towards companies and open source solutions that provide access to old browsers and what not? I mean no matter what direction you push, it's going to be someone else's open source code that needs money.
I guess what I’m getting at is that most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway. And instead of adding yet another layer between our code and the browser—embrace the current generation of (at this point very robust) language features available.
And if that’s not good enough use something like TypeScript!
Maybe that's true for users in the western world. However, if you are in the asian market, there are popular browsers you've nerver heard of (some localized fork of chromium that's way behind). That is not to mention the poorer populace of the world still uses whatever that runs on WinXP or something, if they have Internet at all.
As software engineers it's not our job to use technology to dictate (control) how people access information, telling them to use newer browsers and newer hardware and what not, our job is to support as many people out there as we can.
In any case, for the plethora of down voters: Babel states: “Use next generation JavaScript, today”
At some point next gen == current gen, and therefor given enough stability, Babel becomes obsolete.
Folks, donate to Mozilla instead they actually move things forward not backward.
My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.
It is one thing to raise the issue in private with "Project A", another thing is to tweet this to thousands of followers. Especially after "Project A" already had resolved the issue on its own.
At that point, a huge amount of someone's time is spent managing bug tickets, attempting to isolate debug, etc.
Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool.
Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money.
Out-of-touch, know-it-all.
Edit: I reread this. Adding that no one is perfect, everyone slips up, loses perspective, pouts/whines, etc... We are all human and remember a single angry tweet thread does not define a person. Twitter is toxic signal-fest that brings out the worst in people right or wrong. Cheers!
- A joint decision was made how to split and pay maintainers.
- A disagreement about performance / results has come from that.
- Tweeting to rally the homies is immature (and quite embarrassing) way of solving a problem.
I am not saying funds could not be reallocated differently. I’m saying the people involved with this are acting unprofessional / like children.
Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?
It would have been better to see this discussion in a forum or mailing list or anywhere that is designed for an actual longform discussion. Even if in public longer more detailed discussions can capture the nuance.
Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here) is a sign of immaturity and not what someone does if their goal is to fix the original concern. By airing it out on Twitter, you put the other person on the defensive and they're less inclined to actually help you to resolve the original complaint.
Airing it out on Twitter is an escalation, and a decent outlet for escalating issues that are systematic and/or can't be resolved through other communication channels.
No, this is after the issue has been corrected, which is even worse
It's tough because I think the "optics of productivity" are somewhat important because money is involved. If I was concerned about things, I would have pinged someone in private months ago. Taking this to a public forum, leading with an accusation isn't the right thing to do regardless of how Babel.js was handling these things.
- premium support
- custom features / enterprise product offerings
- commercial licensing
- professional services/consultancy
An important difference is Rome Tools employees are being paid with VC money and not money from the community.
You are out of touch my friend.
I think you can cool it on the anger here too. It’s not helpful.
$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.
Right, hence my out of touch comment. This just doubles down.
$130k is barely over the median pay for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States. A lot of the people stewarding and maintaining these projects are talented enough to be earning wages that are much further into the outliers (i.e. FANG compensation of 300-400k+/year).
That's all I'm saying. What's much more likely to be happening here is that the maintainer of Babel took a much harder job that cannot be summarized by output metrics like GitHub activity tracking.
Attacking him and essentially tossing around accusations of embezzlement when you've just received VC funding for a competitor is just wrong.
I prefer to think that we are riding in a bubble that can pop any minute now. This line of thinking allows me to be more responsible with spending and save more for rainy days.
E5 engineers at FB are making an avg 200k base [1]. That is not that far off what you would expect the difference to be between open source maintainer and senior engineer at Facebook.
That is not 3-4x. Even if you include stock, that will put the FB eng around 350k. You may have an argument for the 2-3x range but basically only at the very top level companies and senior roles, not mid level contributors. And by including stock or other forms of TC besides base, you begin inflating the impression of cash flow. Stock grants don’t land in your wallet like paychecks do. Your QoL or vested net worth will take time to be impacted. It’s not like all of a sudden you can now afford X% more in your daily life.
IMO HN likes to exaggerate compensation levels.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...
The accusations that this person is freeloading off of Babel donations seem absurd (especially when you consider who is making them). The babel maintainer could be coasting at a large engineering organization with a lot less responsibility is what I am getting at it. It's exactly what the creator did...
The accusations are unjust.
I was solely commenting on the SV compensation point, but yes, you’re totally right that he could be doing less work for significantly more money elsewhere. The accusations are unjust for sure. IMO less because of the salary numbers and more because commit count is simply not a good measure of employee performance.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
I can't seem to see this tweet any more. Did it get deleted?
Why not? Do we not want all babel mantainers to be paid atleast 130k?
I 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.
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.
Something tangible that the company gets back.
[1] https://github.com/sponsors/babel?o=esb
$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.
Just paid three days ago too.
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.
Is there a norm I'm not aware of?
Maybe?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really, my advice is to start holding the node ecosystem hostage until you get properly compensated. Leftpad 'em.
Isn't this about Daniel, the Curl project maintainer? Don't think curl is used heavily in Node.
I think Daniel started Curl in 1997, but if there is one person who thanklessly held a large part of software industry like this, that is Daniel.
Such a brilliant and humble person!
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.. ;-)
1: https://mobile.twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
Babel, Rome, Deno, are all transpilers the tech isn't as unique as it once was. Things come and go in JS land, and Babel will go the way of Dodo.js
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.