> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source.
> For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem,
I used to donate to Babel, before they made it apparent they are just interested in funneling the money to one developer. 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up, but this time I cannot do anything as a reaction as I've already pulled my funding.
But my guess is that a lot of people feel the same way, as the donations seems to be going down. 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley, which since you're doing open source, you should really really consider.
Open source is not "VC fueled develoment" and I don't think we should go that way either. Make your operation nimble and survive on little, otherwise you'll soon disappear. Optimize for sustainability, not for paying the one of the highest salary in the world (minus SV bubble of course).
It's not wonder Babel is going the way it's going, as the economy you've setup for yourself is nowhere near sustainable.
On the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low.
My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.
> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.
Have you considered the possibility that your high salary is not entirely due to a shortage of people with the same skill level, but rather because SF/NY companies have too much investor money to spend?
I'm not saying that good software engineers are a commodity, only that SF/NY salaries are too high compared to the rest of the world.
Engineers with 1-2 years of experience in SV can make more than most seniors with 20+ years in Europe. Would you say that's because all these junior engineers in SV are worth more to a company than seniors in Europe?
Two of the most expensive regions in the US are not representative of talent. The world is a big place with some brilliant engineers at very different pay scales.
Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
$132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living
I don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic.
I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants).
Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer.
I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?
> Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas.
A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.
I think you should entertain the possibility that not all that salary gap is explained by geography. I suspect that one of three things would have to be true of either you or the two hypothetical devs:
1. You are really bad at salary negotiation.
2. You would be willing to take an enormous (> 50%) salary hit to work on Babel compared to what you could get in industry.
3. You are insufficiently skilled to lead a project like Babel.
This is based on the conjecture that a suitable lead for Babel should have no problem finding a FAANG job and doing a quick search for average FAANG salaries in the UK.
>Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley.
You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there?
Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?
There are many cities in the USA, outside of the Bay Area, in which $132k would be a reasonable salary for that job. Just west of the Mississippi: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, possibly even Salt Lake City, Phoenix, probably Minneapolis, Honolulu, etc.
> $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living
Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.
Just to give one data point I'm in Poland and I'm earning around 3500€ in a fully remote senior developer/engineer position working on AI tech in a company of around 1k employees. I'm one of the best paid people among my colleagues. The absolute top range job offers in this field in my country would be somewhere around 5000€ but that may be available only to a few developers in the entire 40 million country. I'm sure one could argue that one US engineer is worth 2+ polish engineers but I'm doubtful it's such a large difference. Quite the opposite in fact, I heard rumours that our engineers are quite valued internationally, once you get past the language barrier of course.
I am not sure what your background is, or whether you are, or have worked as, a freelancer. What I am writing might therefore be old news to you, in which case it would still be interesting to hear how you are thinking about the numbers I'll present.
A lot of people write comments such as yours. 11000USD/mth is a very decent salary if you are an employee. What most regular employees completely discount when doing back of the envelope calculations about the salary of other people are the amount of additional contributions that are made by your employer that regular employees might never see, but that are paid for you all the same.
Here is the math for me as a freelancer in Germany, with a similar salary as the one you are claiming is outrageous.
I bill roughly the equivalent per month from Berlin in Germany. I am not sure where the Babel developers are based, so their circumstances might differ, but all the same, here goes:
Of the 9000EUR (11000USD in EUR) I have to pay:
- 19% VAT = 1750
- 950/mth in health insurance
- Put aside 1000/mth for retirement (which is less than I previously had from my employer)
- Set aside money for vacation (as a regular employee in Germany I would have 30 days paid vacation, as a freelancer I had to set aside roughly 600/mth to compensate for this)
- Set aside money in case I get sick (as a regular employee I still get my salary when I am sick, as a freelancer I get paid from day 45). I set aside roughly 450/mth for this.
- Then there are miscellaneous freelancer related expenses and having to buy hardware (which your employer would cover too). Let's make that 300/mth.
- Then there's income taxes on the rest. This differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's make it an even 30% (which is below what I pay).
This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes...
That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?
Even if the Babel guys aren't working as freelancer but pay themselves through a company, the math works out roughly the same (at least from what I have seen in my own business over the last 9 years). The only difference is that the company needs the equivalent monthly budget instead of the individuals.
dude are you insane? in germany your 9000 EUR salary would be huge. and saying you put 1000€/mth away before you calculate is even more insane...
You would get a Netto of around ~4.800 €, which would be more than 80% of all germans will make. Also you could easily make more by reducing social payments (which you can do if you get over 6000 € brutto).
"950/mth in health insurance", wow....... not sure what an insurance you have, but you will probably get 1000 € if you accidentially have a small wound... for 1000 € a month you get the all inclusive package probably. I never heard of somebody that pays a private health insurance 1000€/mth.
sorry to say it, but your entitlement mentality is insane. I can tell you what, in germany with over 9000€ you start to be in the high class.
just some real numbers, not a developer but a normal muncipial employee (no civil servant) with an age of 35 years will make +-3500€ brutto, which is already way more than many people will do (more than 50%)
> This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?
Am I missing something? That's €33,000 disposable cash per annum, right? That would actually be pretty damn amazing for plenty of people, including many here.
And let's just put aside the fact that much of what you've listed is not "taxes".
I get paid about 10k shy of this for primarily javascript and knowing AWS. If you don't think people who work on something so foundational are worth it, then you are what is bananas.
This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken. Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence. It never ceases to amaze me how great software engineers allow themselves to be exploited in such a way. If you consider the societal impact that some of these projects have and the skill set that some of their maintainers have, which pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors, it's frankly ridiculous that they are expected to work for significantly less money. Not to mention that the abstractions some of these people wrote basically allow a significant number of people to enter the industry in the first place.
I'm the lead dev of Ardour, paid entirely by voluntarily payments for the software, and I make about $100k/year from the software itself. That's after nearly 35 years as a C++ software developer. Some people think I'm a brilliant programmer, I'd settle for "probably about as good as anyone you're likely to be able to hire".
So why it is not ridiculous that I'm not working for twice that or more at some larger tech outfit?
Because one of the benefits of working in the open source domain is that the entire structure of the work is completely different. No marketing. No bullshit. No corporate structures to satisfy. I can't speak for anyone else (within OSS or not), but to me those benefits are worth at least $80k/yr, if not much more.
To be fair, perhaps my attitude would be different if I had not previously been involved in starting up a certain well known e-commerce company which, while not allowing me to never work again, let me get the financial aspects of life into pretty good shape.
But I think I know plenty of younger people who want to be in software and are willing to earn less in exchange for more interesting work, less bullshit, more freedom and maybe even a sense of purpose beyond "we're going to make boatloads of cash".
You are a tremendous contributor to open source software. My visually impaired friend appreciates the keyboard controls of ardour and as a result of your hard work (and his) creates and masters a lot of music without too much difficulty.
So, you know, thanks. You made the world a better place.
> This whole thread is basically a testament as to why the OSS model, unfortunately, is broken
This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it. The team handling the economy of Babel right now, does not, hence Babel is not sustainable.
But, if you'd make the salaries a bit more realistic, Babel would have money over each year. But that's based on them not giving themselves one of the highest salary in the world. Let's see what they'll do.
> Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence.
"merely guarantees subsistence", what the hell? Maybe if you live in SF, but any other place in the world, this kind of salary is not even what seniors pull in yearly. My own anecdote:
> Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
I mean, it’s also important to recognize that the average salary most people in the US gets paid does not include benefits. Let’s say the salary for a senior engineer is $100k. (This is super low in reality, especially in the tech world. Maybe not when including other types of companies.) Let’s say the typical cost of benefits is 30%. That works out to $130k total. That’s around $10.8k a month. And remember, this is the low end.
In the blog post, they said they’re going to have each person make $6k per month (excluding benefits). Subtracting 30% for benefits, it works out to $50k a year base salary. For software developers in the US, that’s a pittance at any level.
No, OSS devs shouldn’t be forced to take that little to work on important projects like Babel. If we want talented devs working in a certain area, we need to make it financially attractive.
>This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it.
Isn't this a restatement of the problem? My (uninformed) impression is that there are structural issues that make it hard to effectively run crowdfunded open-source projects. As you say, the secret sauce appears to be a question of managing the organization.
Do you have any thoughts on how to reproducibly run such a projects?
I don’t think this is true. The mode works phenomenally well (eg, Apache, Linux, Postgres, etc).
But it doesn’t work for all projects and isn’t the same as commercial software. If I create a project with the goal to make lots of money, then I probably won’t succeed.
Conflating “doesn’t work for me” with “broken” is not using all the available evidence.
It shouldn't be about making lots of money, personally I find it great that most good software engineers aren't primarily driven by money, but that mindset shouldn't imply exploitation. It's just a fact that large corporations and companies in general benefit disproportionally from OSS. The value that open source software creates stands in no relation to the price that companies pay for it, even if the maintainers of some projects are perfectly happy with the compensation they receive. If you don't need a large part of the money that your work justifies, then just give it to charity, but don't allow companies to take it.
> pretty much dwarfs the skill sets of people in other well paid professions such as lawyers or doctors
I don't know how you could possibly measure this except by years of training, which would put both doctors and lawyers ahead of software developers. But really, it's apples and oranges.
Doctors, for one, work to fiddle essentially a blackbox, under intensive regulation, and the results of their work is very hard to measure. This has led to a model where artificial processes are introduced that select for the privileged and the smart to become doctors. The artificial education does not mean these people have more skillsets. Like most education, it just signals conscientiousness and intellect.
On the other hand, software design is probably the single best domain for humans to build new skills, with its fast feedback loop, transparency, ease of measuring results, and the fact that the whole system is more or less documented and obeys human intuitions.
I can't understand why there are 117 million downloads every month. I doubt there are 117 million programmers using Babel and why download it every month?
What exactly would the benefit of licencing a tool like Babel under GPL be? It would be completely moot. Using a GPL transpiler isn't going to confer GPL virally onto the code that you run through it.
they re also incentivized to write OSS that benefits huge conglomerates, but not individuals so they can attract the big donors. It's broken many years now. Copyleft licenses can at least salvage some of the wreck
I work for a startup that benefits from open source.
I can and do make the case for spending a lot of money on SaaS products and hiring people. But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of company leadership and ask for money to spend on something that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with the realities of running a business and the request would be roundly shouted down.
If there's some value I can get then it's a much easier sell. For example, if there is a Babel job board then I can choose to use that over alternatives when I next hire. Jed Watson proposed https://budgetforopensource.org/, which puts this type of thing in the employee perk category so that I can justify it using hiring as a goal. These are things where I can make a business case for spending real dollars, rather than a philosophical argument.
The irony about this is that it's the same companies then complaining that development is not being continued or not going in the direction they want.
Essentially what you're saying is that the realities of running a business is the equivalent of a millionaire going to the local soup kitchen/food bank and taking as much food as possible and then complaining about the food.
> But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of
> company leadership and ask for money to spend on something > that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with
> the realities of running a business. The request would be > roundly shouted down.
I agree, at minimum, the its free but seeking sponsorship model is making it hard.
Looking at their Sponsorship options on GitHub [1] I see there's a useful perk at the $2,000/month price point, a Support Tier.
It would be interesting to investigate offering "Paid support" for $50-100/month (something easier to put on a development team's corporate credit card), that gives you "priority" in response to GitHub Issues.
Yeah, that jump from $20/month to $500/month is too big. JetBrains asks for $500 per year--that's probably right about the discretionary spend of a decent engineer.
$500/month means you're going to have to generate me an invoice and that invokes a whole bunch of corporate machinery that you don't want activated if you want a donation.
> can and do make the case for spending a lot of money on SaaS products and hiring people. But there is no way in the world I can stand in front of company leadership and ask for money to spend on something that I already get for free. I'd look out of touch with the realities of running a business and the request would be roundly shouted down.
You're right is very difficult. It feels like there needs to be a product version of these tools, I can definitely explain to my partners that we need this tool and it costs £xxx. But to explain that we should pay for free tools when we might be one of a very few that are is going to be a hard sell.
Corps I worked for usually seek to create some kind of contractual obligation between the authors and the company. Of course they pay to get the authors to accept the obligations.
Publicly accusing Henry of not actually working on the project seems short sighted. Only looking at a one year slice of contribution rather than the lifetime of the project masks the full picture of Henry's contributions. Also in Henry's defense, the past year has been a terribly difficult one for most all of us to get through this pandemic.
Not a good look for you Sebastian. Feels like you are looking for a place to point blame and unfortunately decided to direct that blame in Henry's direction. Henry Zhu is a great developer and contributor. Really deserves better than this.
He is levying accusations that money is, effectively, being stolen. That is not polite but if he genuinely believes it to be true, you are suggesting he remain quiet instead?
He is welcome to open a channel with Babel privately and, if unaddressed, make a proper statement about it. Blasting someone by using GitHub contributions as KPI on Twitter is highly unprofessional and awful behaviour
>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.
I think this is a really bad look for Sebastian. He started babel and made the most contributions overall, but he hasn't been involved in the project for 5 years at this point. He left to join Facebook and babel would have died if it weren't for the efforts of Logan, Henry, Nicolo and the other contributors.
The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situation earlier this year, and so the babel team have made changes to make the situation fairer in their eyes. This apparently doesn't go far enough for Sebastian's tastes, so he has publicly called out by name one of the contributors who he feels doesn't do enough to justify their salary. The metric he uses for determining this is the number of github commits and comments that are shown on that person's profile. This is not a fair measure of someone's contribution to a project, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour that Sebastian would criticise if any other company was evaluating people in this way.
In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.
The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool.
Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money.
Out-of-touch, know-it-all.
Edit: I reread this. Adding that no one is perfect, everyone slips up, loses perspective, pouts/whines, etc... We are all human and remember a single angry tweet thread does not define a person. Twitter is toxic signal-fest that brings out the worst in people right or wrong. Cheers!
Yeah you just don't publically call out one of your employees. That's just a dick move at that point. Solve this problem internally and don't throw your developer under the bus because you didn't manage them better.
Just as an FYI: Rome was started under the react-native team at Facebook and has been in development for well over 2 years, Facebook let him take it with him when he left.
There is a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't say it's 1-to-1.
It's tough because I think the "optics of productivity" are somewhat important because money is involved. If I was concerned about things, I would have pinged someone in private months ago. Taking this to a public forum, leading with an accusation isn't the right thing to do regardless of how Babel.js was handling these things.
Yeah, I'm admittedly just learning about this whole situation, but I fail to see how this isn't him just trying to take down the competition of his new project
Sounds like an effort to take down a competitor. If Rome tools is to replace Babel, people need to lose faith in Babel. Seems like a transparent conflict of interest.
"Working on a project" doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of "I'm responsible for this".
Evan You[0] has over 4x more contributions than Henry Zhu[1] this year.
Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y
Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6].
Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everything, but they speak on a macro-scale. It's not an unreasonable expectation to review a PR a day.
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 agree that there are a ton of non-code related things that a project leader should be doing, but the vast majority should be visible in some way. Mailing list discussions, roadmaps, code reviews, creating/triaging issues, etc. It should be pretty easy to get a representative picture of what a project leader did over a whole year.
Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo has been, for about the last year, the most active contributor on Github, but as recently as March 2021 was only being allocated $24,000 (annualised) from the collective.
Another interesting thing I found digging around is that the creator of Babel (https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of:
With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
Depends entirely on their contract and what is expected of them. Coding is just one possible duty of a lead in this sort of project - the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.
Having said that, the salary looks excessive and the commit history isn't a good look without clarification.
But assumptions aren't always the best guide to what is actually going on.
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".
Are FOSS "donations" for on-going or past work, though? I'd lean towards a mixture of both.
However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0]
(I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.)
I 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.
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.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
Management blaming individuals by name (in public no less) shows severe incompetence at the top. I don't doubt he hired a slacker, but that's on management for hiring and retaining that... to the point of demise? Stupid.
I would have a problem with a manager if they did this "publicly" within the team/company. Airing it out on twitter is even more egregious. "Severe incompetence" is somehow understating it IMO, although i can't think of a better description.
If what they said is true:
1) Management hired a developer
2) Paid him for years
3) Gained millions of users
4) Became bankrupt
5) Publicly named the developer as a slacker and the reason the business is failing.
More comments from the founder. Nowhere does he take any responsibility for this mess, just blame blame blame.
"The salary amount isn't unreasonable or excessive. It's the lack of material output that makes it unjustified."
- So, don't pay him for years while bankrupting your project?
"I'm being explicit now since vague tweeting allegations isn't productive."
- Explicitly tweeting allegations isn't productive either. It just makes you and your project look bad. There's no way I'm donating to you now.
"The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project."
- And was allowed to do so for a long time. Also, that's only one part of the equation, was this developer also responsible for fundraising? Or other spending?
"I raised this in March when I looked into it and noticed that for the first two months of the year he had left only two brief comments and created no comments."
- You didn't notice your employees had shipped nothing for two months? Or you were OK with this at the time and are now retroactively blaming them?
Seb is a well-known narcissist, suffering from ego created by his own Twitter myth. I cannot name a single peer among the many circles I converse in which respects the person (another matter for the technical ability). Seb has only to look in a mirror to identify the issues with the current state of the Babel project management.
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.
I am Jùnliàng, a Babel contributor since 2019. I would like to share my perspective here.
GH is a platform where people collaborate on developing softwares, so the contribution graph is engineering-biased. But operating an OSS, especially like Babel which is serving millions, is just like running a company. In a company we have different roles, none of roles is more important than the others. In Babel team, Henry spends most time on reaching out to contacts in companies, giving talks, syncing with different projects in the ecosystem, offering mentorship to junior contributors like me. None of these is visible on GH but they are vital to sustain the project, to attract both new company sponsors and contributors.
2020 is a hard time for any reasons. Before we talk about funding with team, Henry has already voluntarily pooled less money ($11k to $8k) and another long-time core contributor Brian (https://github.com/existentialism) stopped taking money. While this helped bumped up our balance, everyone taking less is a dangerous signal to an OSS: maintainers constantly fighting with financial insecurity may burn out or stop maintaining in order to recover from the mental pressure about "I am responsible for this".
I maintained small side projects like (https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui), where the feature set is frozen and most maintenance works can be automated by bots. This is quite unlike Babel: The feature is open-ended because the language is evolving. Various edge cases should be take cared. Tradeoffs between spec compliance and output code size should be made. It is not a side project that I can dedicate part time efforts like 10hrs/week to work on.
Speaking for myself, I spend around 40hrs/week to meet my own productivity requirements. I don't think I deserve more than other paid team members because everyone has different time constraints and we don't track work time meticulously.
To avoid burn-out and not let Babel consume all my energy, I spare some time on encoding Chinese characters in Unicode, which, just like Babel, has profound impacts on ecosystem but long overlooked and underfunded. I helped submitted hundreds on characters in IRGN2487 (https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData...).
Can someone explain to me what I'm missing with regards to how much they're currently earning? Looking at their base support sponsors (of which there are 4), they are each paying a minimum of $24,000 each ($96,000/year). There are 5 gold sponsors of at least $1000/month ($60,000/year) and 24 silver sponsors of at least $500/month ($120,000/year). That's already $276K without including the bronze/backer tiers.
> that's more 90k/year which allows for a decent living in most places
Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
> Probably not enough for San Francisco though
Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco but still the group somehow want to have SF salaries. Yeah, I wonder why?
$90k/year is between a good and outrageously good salary for Europe, depending on the country. So yeah, plenty of talent available for cheaper than $90k/year.
Readit News
> For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem,
I used to donate to Babel, before they made it apparent they are just interested in funneling the money to one developer. 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up, but this time I cannot do anything as a reaction as I've already pulled my funding.
But my guess is that a lot of people feel the same way, as the donations seems to be going down. 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley, which since you're doing open source, you should really really consider.
Open source is not "VC fueled develoment" and I don't think we should go that way either. Make your operation nimble and survive on little, otherwise you'll soon disappear. Optimize for sustainability, not for paying the one of the highest salary in the world (minus SV bubble of course).
It's not wonder Babel is going the way it's going, as the economy you've setup for yourself is nowhere near sustainable.
My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product.
> My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.
I'm not saying that good software engineers are a commodity, only that SF/NY salaries are too high compared to the rest of the world.
Engineers with 1-2 years of experience in SV can make more than most seniors with 20+ years in Europe. Would you say that's because all these junior engineers in SV are worth more to a company than seniors in Europe?
$132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living
I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants).
Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer.
I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?
Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas.
A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.
1. You are really bad at salary negotiation.
2. You would be willing to take an enormous (> 50%) salary hit to work on Babel compared to what you could get in industry.
3. You are insufficiently skilled to lead a project like Babel.
This is based on the conjecture that a suitable lead for Babel should have no problem finding a FAANG job and doing a quick search for average FAANG salaries in the UK.
You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there?
Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?
$130k is the kind of money a reasonably experienced developer can get in southern New Hampshire, or Ohio, or Arkansas.
Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.
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If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.
Just my 3 cents.
A lot of people write comments such as yours. 11000USD/mth is a very decent salary if you are an employee. What most regular employees completely discount when doing back of the envelope calculations about the salary of other people are the amount of additional contributions that are made by your employer that regular employees might never see, but that are paid for you all the same.
Here is the math for me as a freelancer in Germany, with a similar salary as the one you are claiming is outrageous.
I bill roughly the equivalent per month from Berlin in Germany. I am not sure where the Babel developers are based, so their circumstances might differ, but all the same, here goes:
Of the 9000EUR (11000USD in EUR) I have to pay: - 19% VAT = 1750 - 950/mth in health insurance - Put aside 1000/mth for retirement (which is less than I previously had from my employer) - Set aside money for vacation (as a regular employee in Germany I would have 30 days paid vacation, as a freelancer I had to set aside roughly 600/mth to compensate for this) - Set aside money in case I get sick (as a regular employee I still get my salary when I am sick, as a freelancer I get paid from day 45). I set aside roughly 450/mth for this. - Then there are miscellaneous freelancer related expenses and having to buy hardware (which your employer would cover too). Let's make that 300/mth. - Then there's income taxes on the rest. This differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's make it an even 30% (which is below what I pay).
This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it?
Even if the Babel guys aren't working as freelancer but pay themselves through a company, the math works out roughly the same (at least from what I have seen in my own business over the last 9 years). The only difference is that the company needs the equivalent monthly budget instead of the individuals.
"950/mth in health insurance", wow....... not sure what an insurance you have, but you will probably get 1000 € if you accidentially have a small wound... for 1000 € a month you get the all inclusive package probably. I never heard of somebody that pays a private health insurance 1000€/mth.
sorry to say it, but your entitlement mentality is insane. I can tell you what, in germany with over 9000€ you start to be in the high class.
just some real numbers, not a developer but a normal muncipial employee (no civil servant) with an age of 35 years will make +-3500€ brutto, which is already way more than many people will do (more than 50%)
Am I missing something? That's €33,000 disposable cash per annum, right? That would actually be pretty damn amazing for plenty of people, including many here.
And let's just put aside the fact that much of what you've listed is not "taxes".
Even the reduced salary of $6,000 is still quite a lot if all you are going to do create a couple of small PRs per month: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
No, it's not. I work from home, remotely from Europe and I get paid $17K per month writing some PHP and JS code.
I imagine writing Babel code isn't some trivial task that you can hire a junior dev to do.
There are many cities in the USA where $11k/month is not at all outrageous: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, DC, NYC, etc.
So why it is not ridiculous that I'm not working for twice that or more at some larger tech outfit?
Because one of the benefits of working in the open source domain is that the entire structure of the work is completely different. No marketing. No bullshit. No corporate structures to satisfy. I can't speak for anyone else (within OSS or not), but to me those benefits are worth at least $80k/yr, if not much more.
To be fair, perhaps my attitude would be different if I had not previously been involved in starting up a certain well known e-commerce company which, while not allowing me to never work again, let me get the financial aspects of life into pretty good shape.
But I think I know plenty of younger people who want to be in software and are willing to earn less in exchange for more interesting work, less bullshit, more freedom and maybe even a sense of purpose beyond "we're going to make boatloads of cash".
So, you know, thanks. You made the world a better place.
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This blog post for me is evidence that we can make crowdfunded open source work, as long as the people receiving the money know how to effectively use it. The team handling the economy of Babel right now, does not, hence Babel is not sustainable.
But, if you'd make the salaries a bit more realistic, Babel would have money over each year. But that's based on them not giving themselves one of the highest salary in the world. Let's see what they'll do.
> Very competent people are expected to write widely used software for a salary that basically merely guarantees subsistence.
"merely guarantees subsistence", what the hell? Maybe if you live in SF, but any other place in the world, this kind of salary is not even what seniors pull in yearly. My own anecdote:
> Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116591
> My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
Are all those people capable of managing Babel?
I think the real question is: do you need top talent for important open source projects, or are average developers fine?
In the blog post, they said they’re going to have each person make $6k per month (excluding benefits). Subtracting 30% for benefits, it works out to $50k a year base salary. For software developers in the US, that’s a pittance at any level.
No, OSS devs shouldn’t be forced to take that little to work on important projects like Babel. If we want talented devs working in a certain area, we need to make it financially attractive.
Isn't this a restatement of the problem? My (uninformed) impression is that there are structural issues that make it hard to effectively run crowdfunded open-source projects. As you say, the secret sauce appears to be a question of managing the organization.
Do you have any thoughts on how to reproducibly run such a projects?
I don’t think this is true. The mode works phenomenally well (eg, Apache, Linux, Postgres, etc).
But it doesn’t work for all projects and isn’t the same as commercial software. If I create a project with the goal to make lots of money, then I probably won’t succeed.
Conflating “doesn’t work for me” with “broken” is not using all the available evidence.
I don't know how you could possibly measure this except by years of training, which would put both doctors and lawyers ahead of software developers. But really, it's apples and oranges.
On the other hand, software design is probably the single best domain for humans to build new skills, with its fast feedback loop, transparency, ease of measuring results, and the fact that the whole system is more or less documented and obeys human intuitions.
1 cent a download = 117,000,000 cents = $1,170,000.
So the project is dying because they cannot get every downloader to pay 1 cent for every download.
Even at 1/10 cent it would still come to $117,000
This is how screwed up open source is.
An advanced technological industry which doesn't have infrastructure in place to collect fractions of cents per product delivery.
Why can't the software be downloaded using an API using a key you have to pay for or something?
It's hard for me to feel sympathetic for people who deliberately sign up for a model that encourages free-riding and then complain about it.
Earning money with "do whatever"-style licenses like BSD or MIT is bound to fail. Use GPL and sell commercial licenses on the side.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Publicly accusing Henry of not actually working on the project seems short sighted. Only looking at a one year slice of contribution rather than the lifetime of the project masks the full picture of Henry's contributions. Also in Henry's defense, the past year has been a terribly difficult one for most all of us to get through this pandemic.
Not a good look for you Sebastian. Feels like you are looking for a place to point blame and unfortunately decided to direct that blame in Henry's direction. Henry Zhu is a great developer and contributor. Really deserves better than this.
>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.
>The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project. https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522
- So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situation earlier this year, and so the babel team have made changes to make the situation fairer in their eyes. This apparently doesn't go far enough for Sebastian's tastes, so he has publicly called out by name one of the contributors who he feels doesn't do enough to justify their salary. The metric he uses for determining this is the number of github commits and comments that are shown on that person's profile. This is not a fair measure of someone's contribution to a project, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour that Sebastian would criticise if any other company was evaluating people in this way.
In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.
The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
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!
> 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.
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.
An important difference is Rome Tools employees are being paid with VC money and not money from the community.
"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
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)
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.
7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202...
$110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
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.
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".
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
https://github.com/babel/babel/issues
Maybe some donors will donate to other projects
So many other OSS projects barely getting even 100 USD a month and Babel is complaining they're unable to work with over 300k a year and a number of corporate sponsors which have been supporting the project for a long time.
And the nodejs ecosystem already seems like an outlier getting more funding than most other languages/systems/projects.
There probably is more, but not going to speculate.
For some reason I believe donating to The Blender Foundation actually pays for devs to work on blender (and I donate).
I have a friend working on an open source project. I know he works full time on it. I donated because I knew he was working full time and because I like the project and want to see it succeed.
I have no reason to believe sponsoring random npm package asking for funding does anything other then maybe make some person feel good that they decided to post some code on npm and/or github.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
I can't seem to see this tweet any more. Did it get deleted?
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Why not? Do we not want all babel mantainers to be paid atleast 130k?
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?
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
GH is a platform where people collaborate on developing softwares, so the contribution graph is engineering-biased. But operating an OSS, especially like Babel which is serving millions, is just like running a company. In a company we have different roles, none of roles is more important than the others. In Babel team, Henry spends most time on reaching out to contacts in companies, giving talks, syncing with different projects in the ecosystem, offering mentorship to junior contributors like me. None of these is visible on GH but they are vital to sustain the project, to attract both new company sponsors and contributors.
2020 is a hard time for any reasons. Before we talk about funding with team, Henry has already voluntarily pooled less money ($11k to $8k) and another long-time core contributor Brian (https://github.com/existentialism) stopped taking money. While this helped bumped up our balance, everyone taking less is a dangerous signal to an OSS: maintainers constantly fighting with financial insecurity may burn out or stop maintaining in order to recover from the mental pressure about "I am responsible for this".
I maintained small side projects like (https://github.com/JLHwung/postcss-font-family-system-ui), where the feature set is frozen and most maintenance works can be automated by bots. This is quite unlike Babel: The feature is open-ended because the language is evolving. Various edge cases should be take cared. Tradeoffs between spec compliance and output code size should be made. It is not a side project that I can dedicate part time efforts like 10hrs/week to work on.
Speaking for myself, I spend around 40hrs/week to meet my own productivity requirements. I don't think I deserve more than other paid team members because everyone has different time constraints and we don't track work time meticulously.
To avoid burn-out and not let Babel consume all my energy, I spare some time on encoding Chinese characters in Unicode, which, just like Babel, has profound impacts on ecosystem but long overlooked and underfunded. I helped submitted hundreds on characters in IRGN2487 (https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2487UKData...).
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Not only a decent living, but that's a very good salary in most places in the world. As an anecdote, I've always worked in private sector IT (as a developer and manager), have around 20 years of experience and worked in both small and big enterprises and startups, and I've never had that high salary. If you'd offer me that for working on open source full-time, I'd be surprised. My expectation would be that there is a ton of people willing to work for much less, so why Babel had to go with that person?
> Probably not enough for San Francisco though
Good thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco but still the group somehow want to have SF salaries. Yeah, I wonder why?
I don't how it is in USA. but that's less than your 90k/year figure by a significant amount