>Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the project has been too slow to improve.
I think this is a really bad look for Sebastian. He started babel and made the most contributions overall, but he hasn't been involved in the project for 5 years at this point. He left to join Facebook and babel would have died if it weren't for the efforts of Logan, Henry, Nicolo and the other contributors.
The original post on the babel website was written in response to him investigating the babel funding situation earlier this year, and so the babel team have made changes to make the situation fairer in their eyes. This apparently doesn't go far enough for Sebastian's tastes, so he has publicly called out by name one of the contributors who he feels doesn't do enough to justify their salary. The metric he uses for determining this is the number of github commits and comments that are shown on that person's profile. This is not a fair measure of someone's contribution to a project, and it's exactly the kind of behaviour that Sebastian would criticise if any other company was evaluating people in this way.
In the meantime, Sebastian has started another competing project, Rome Tools, which was recently VC funded.
The whole thing stinks. Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?
Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool.
Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money.
Out-of-touch, know-it-all.
Edit: I reread this. Adding that no one is perfect, everyone slips up, loses perspective, pouts/whines, etc... We are all human and remember a single angry tweet thread does not define a person. Twitter is toxic signal-fest that brings out the worst in people right or wrong. Cheers!
> Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.
Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?
Going to Twitter is akin to having a disagreement at work, standing up and shouting across the whole office at the person you disagree with. I haven't been in an office in awhile, is that what people do nowadays?
Twitter is also (but isn't the only) tabloid social media. It promotes the sharing of sensational and one-sided content that is scant on details. I know we're supposed to be critical about what we read, but my first instinct was to assume Henry was a bad guy.
It would have been better to see this discussion in a forum or mailing list or anywhere that is designed for an actual longform discussion. Even if in public longer more detailed discussions can capture the nuance.
A disagreement between two individuals should be initially communicated between those two and ideally resolved privately. Hopefully both sides have enough empathy to understand the other's perspective to reach an amicable conclusion.
Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here) is a sign of immaturity and not what someone does if their goal is to fix the original concern. By airing it out on Twitter, you put the other person on the defensive and they're less inclined to actually help you to resolve the original complaint.
Airing it out on Twitter is an escalation, and a decent outlet for escalating issues that are systematic and/or can't be resolved through other communication channels.
If I:
- built Project A
- left Project A and started the competitor Project B
- contributed a lot of PRs to Project B each week, and
- saw that a guy in a similar role at Project A, has relatively few weekly contributions to Project A
My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.
The problem with that mindset is that there is a huge difference between leading a greenfield project with very few users and leading an established project that's a major piece of the infrastructure in basically every front-end app. In the former case, the bulk of the work is actually building the functionality, so looking at PRs / commits can make some sense. In the latter case, there are more constraints to consider and a lot of the work is in determining _what_ needs to be worked on, as opposed to actually writing new code. Also in things like project management, fundraising, etc., which don't show up as GH commits.
> My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.
It is one thing to raise the issue in private with "Project A", another thing is to tweet this to thousands of followers. Especially after "Project A" already had resolved the issue on its own.
Why? Once Project A gets to feature complete, does it need to be worked on at anywhere near the same rate? Other than fixing bugs/upgrading because of APIs they are using upgrading, the number of commits should be really small. Or should people change CSS constantly to have a string of useless PRs?
At that point, a huge amount of someone's time is spent managing bug tickets, attempting to isolate debug, etc.
I mean, how does that not just push all of this towards companies and open source solutions that provide access to old browsers and what not? I mean no matter what direction you push, it's going to be someone else's open source code that needs money.
I guess what I’m getting at is that most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway. And instead of adding yet another layer between our code and the browser—embrace the current generation of (at this point very robust) language features available.
And if that’s not good enough use something like TypeScript!
> most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway
Maybe that's true for users in the western world. However, if you are in the asian market, there are popular browsers you've nerver heard of (some localized fork of chromium that's way behind). That is not to mention the poorer populace of the world still uses whatever that runs on WinXP or something, if they have Internet at all.
As software engineers it's not our job to use technology to dictate (control) how people access information, telling them to use newer browsers and newer hardware and what not, our job is to support as many people out there as we can.
Well put... However, the unfortunate thing about web technology is that websites no longer support NOSCRIPT. If we want true global compatibility, it’s HTML + CSS and ZERO JavaScript. That has immense privacy benefits too.
God I hate this word, it's like in bad OOP where you classify things just for the sake of having more classes. This belongs to a class called compiler, just call it compiler.
Actually, it assumes only that evolution of new features slows down. Once things are _slow enough_ the value of an extra dependency is dramatically reduced.
This is where anecdotal evidence is difficult - hard evidence that we can reference points to the contrary and supports my reply. I have further anecdotal evidence I could cite, but it's not trustworthy.
while I don't agree with public bashing, he is right about yarn 2 being a disaster.
After a 18months since GA, migrating to v2 is still a pain and not the default version, while v1 does not receive update anymore smh...
Yeah you just don't publically call out one of your employees. That's just a dick move at that point. Solve this problem internally and don't throw your developer under the bus because you didn't manage them better.
Just as an FYI: Rome was started under the react-native team at Facebook and has been in development for well over 2 years, Facebook let him take it with him when he left.
There is a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't say it's 1-to-1.
It's tough because I think the "optics of productivity" are somewhat important because money is involved. If I was concerned about things, I would have pinged someone in private months ago. Taking this to a public forum, leading with an accusation isn't the right thing to do regardless of how Babel.js was handling these things.
Neither is people piling on the maintainer of Babel based on GitHub activity and someone essentially accusing them of embezzlement. Sorry if that makes me upset.
$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.
open source maintainer salary !== FAANG total comp package
E5 engineers at FB are making an avg 200k base [1]. That is not that far off what you would expect the difference to be between open source maintainer and senior engineer at Facebook.
That is not 3-4x. Even if you include stock, that will put the FB eng around 350k. You may have an argument for the 2-3x range but basically only at the very top level companies and senior roles, not mid level contributors. And by including stock or other forms of TC besides base, you begin inflating the impression of cash flow. Stock grants don’t land in your wallet like paychecks do. Your QoL or vested net worth will take time to be impacted. It’s not like all of a sudden you can now afford X% more in your daily life.
I agree that 2-3x is more appropriate. Either way, don't you think the maintainer of Babel could easily be making more money and doing easier work (individual contributor at some large org)?
The accusations that this person is freeloading off of Babel donations seem absurd (especially when you consider who is making them). The babel maintainer could be coasting at a large engineering organization with a lot less responsibility is what I am getting at it. It's exactly what the creator did...
I was solely commenting on the SV compensation point, but yes, you’re totally right that he could be doing less work for significantly more money elsewhere. The accusations are unjust for sure. IMO less because of the salary numbers and more because commit count is simply not a good measure of employee performance.
It seems a common trend that software engineers think their high salaries are something they can take for granted forever.
I prefer to think that we are riding in a bubble that can pop any minute now. This line of thinking allows me to be more responsible with spending and save more for rainy days.
Good thinking - those of us with some grey in our hair remember when coming out of college with a CS degree into a $45-50k government contracting gig was cause for celebration rather than disappointment, after watching our slightly older friends take loans for Porsches on their snazzy dot-com salaries... and then struggle with the fallout a year or two later when said dot-coms drastically cut staff or disappeared entirely.
Of course, it's not a joke of a salary in the United States. Is $130k a joke of a salary for an NBA player even though it's 90th percentile? Context matters.
$130k is barely over the median pay for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States. A lot of the people stewarding and maintaining these projects are talented enough to be earning wages that are much further into the outliers (i.e. FANG compensation of 300-400k+/year).
That's all I'm saying. What's much more likely to be happening here is that the maintainer of Babel took a much harder job that cannot be summarized by output metrics like GitHub activity tracking.
Attacking him and essentially tossing around accusations of embezzlement when you've just received VC funding for a competitor is just wrong.
yes, context does matter. So why are you comparing a full time OSS developer with FANG? ridiculous. I don't have any opinion on the babel drama, but 130K isn't a "joke" even for a OSS developer who is "senior".
I'm comparing the salaries because the person is qualified to do either job. Someone turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain OSS, and then is accused of embezzlement by someone who left for FANG salaries and VC-backing.
Yea, tbh this is 100% my read on this situation. Wouldn't go near the dude or his work after this. Spent way too long at Facebook where no one ever has to sell a product and now doesn't understand at all how money works.
Yeah, I'm admittedly just learning about this whole situation, but I fail to see how this isn't him just trying to take down the competition of his new project
Sounds like an effort to take down a competitor. If Rome tools is to replace Babel, people need to lose faith in Babel. Seems like a transparent conflict of interest.
"Working on a project" doesn't only mean pushing commits. It also means deciding what to do, syncing with committees, running a team structure, thinking about how and where to get funding, and handling the mental pressure of "I'm responsible for this".
Evan You[0] has over 4x more contributions than Henry Zhu[1] this year.
Evan's absolutely correct, there's a lot of 'invisible' community activity, but in my experience of OSS, it's typical to have a 'contribution' on GitHub every day, which is missing in the case of a Babel maintainer who's being paid $130k/y
Let's compare to the other maintainers: [2][3][4][5][6].
Contribution counts aren't and shouldn't be everything, but they speak on a macro-scale. It's not an unreasonable expectation to review a PR a day.
Evan's metric and henry's are not directly comparable.
Someone on vue core team (perhaps evan himself) said internal group co-ordination and management is handled by other team members, most prominent among them being Chris Fritz[1] (before he stepped down) and Sarah Drasner[2].
This reduces managerial burden on Evan and gives him more energy & time to focus on technical challenges
While Henry is the senior most member in babel team, so most of the management work is on him. which eats his time a lot more.
The necessary "glue" work that often doesn't get tracked but eats a lot of time, energy, and cognitive capacity is very often overlooked. I'm not saying that is or isn't what happened here.
I've worked with a lot of teams where no sort of solid leadership existed. Filling that gap is often difficult to justify because there's a tremendous amount of thought involved and it's a thankless task. Sure you can take the existing structure and direction and just plug away but ultimately, most efforts that do this fail. You need to look ahead and think about future adaptability if you want success. People often act like software development is as straightforward as data entry. You should have X entries per day. If you didn't add X entries then you must be slacking. Development requires not only technical prowess which is difficult to maintain in-and-of-itself but creativity, vision, and strategy. If you ignore the rest your project will fail or at least become an artifact of times past at some point.
We actively discourage team leads from trying to be the "team lead that still codes a bit here and there", they mostly just get in the way and don't focus on the team's real needs.
I.e. we'd rather them take a late lunch or go home early than push a sub par PR nobody wants to criticise.
To add another data point, on the BabelJS Slack, in the last 12 months, @Henry (hzoo, based on the matching profile pictures) has posted 96 messages, and @nicolo-ribaudo 251.
One can bring the messages up with these filters:
"from:@Henry before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11" and
"from:@nicolo-ribaudo before:2021-05-12 after:2020-05-11"
it's insane Github reports PR stats. I always knew this would happen. But never so publicly. You just assume that your management is looking at it constantly and basing their decisions on it. Because why wouldn't they. Their entire philosophy is "never let a metric go to waste."
All this does is encourage bad behavior. Not squashing commits, throwing up tons of one line changes. Remember that contest Digital Ocean did for Hacktoberfest? Remember what a total shitshow they caused on Github? People were making egregious commits for a fucking t-shirt. Now imagine real money on the line.
Technically you can do and undo the same thing a trillion times and have a trillion commits. In the end your net impact in the code will be zero, yet you will be the PR champ.
1. His language sounds like he knew Henry personally. I will take it with a grain of salt. But same applied to creator of the Babel, since he could have beef with Henry.
2. He said lots of circumstantial things about the matter. Namely: 130K isn't high for NYC; he could have and probably had better offer easily; he didn't need to maintain Babel but did, etc. All these are good but didn't answer the direct question, is he worth 130K for his work in the project. Even with the understanding that lots of work is in private, his public contribution in recent years seems to be way too low to not make people raise eyebrows.
3. Also, it's funny he said "is 130k too much for someone to maintain Babel" to the creator, who probably earned way less for creating Babel from scratch.
I do know Henry personally and Henry actually consulted me when he was debating whether he should quit his job to work on Babel full time. We also occasionally talk about the burdens of OSS maintenance so I know first hand how hard he's been trying to keep Babel afloat.
The linked comment above is one that people interested should read. Especially people who only read the relatively inflammatory and context free initial tweet.
I agree that there are a ton of non-code related things that a project leader should be doing, but the vast majority should be visible in some way. Mailing list discussions, roadmaps, code reviews, creating/triaging issues, etc. It should be pretty easy to get a representative picture of what a project leader did over a whole year.
Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo has been, for about the last year, the most active contributor on Github, but as recently as March 2021 was only being allocated $24,000 (annualised) from the collective.
Another interesting thing I found digging around is that the creator of Babel (https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of:
With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
Depends entirely on their contract and what is expected of them. Coding is just one possible duty of a lead in this sort of project - the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.
Having said that, the salary looks excessive and the commit history isn't a good look without clarification.
But assumptions aren't always the best guide to what is actually going on.
>the article itself talks about him undertaking various fundraising duties - thats in addition to whatever time period (eg. retrospective) the money is supposed to cover.
So, he fundraised money to have time to further fundraise, and he did it so well that they have to decrease his salary?
Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.
> Sounds like he did not do so great job here either.
The original article notes that funding took a hit in 2020. 2020 was an unprecedented year for any number of reasons. To simply say someone did a poor job fundraising in a year beset by constant challenges everywhere lacks proper context.
That's not to say more could have been done; I don't feel, however, that I'm in a position to say. Making money on open source is a difficult enough prospect regardless how one does it without also considering other factors that increase that difficulty.
I know almost nothing about this situation, but if I was hired to raise money and did a bad job, I'd expect to be fired. I wouldn't expect to have a blog post written about me.
Back when I was a senior programmer I would probably have had as few credited code changes as that.
But what you wouldn't see are the hundreds of problems I debugged and analysed for other programmers , down to the level of "make this change on line 530".
The most productive team lead I worked with didn't do a lot of story work. He was constantly checking in on everyone else to ensure that no individual contributed was blocked on anything. A problem that would have taken me 3 hrs to figure out, was solved during pairing in 15 minutes.
So thanks for being that guy for a lot of other devs that learned from you.
Why? Maybe they talked on video chat or a screenshare, or a messenger like slack. Forcing people to use a possibly less efficient communication method just to have a hard record of their contributions seems like the hallmark of an extremely dysfunctional and distrustful development organization.
They’d use something visible or their process is borked and not transparent and not welcoming to new users.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a listserv, or an IRC channel, or a GitHub issue. But it does matter if the collaborations are invisible to the team and to others on the project.
It’s their project so they are welcome to organize as they wish, but for a healthy open source project, I think having some collaboration method where newcomers can understand all the meaningful and helpful discussions is a good thing.
If a super awesome person is doing 1:1 calls/DMs/Emails all the time, that’s going to be tough to maintain. Not to mention a pain for any work where it’s multiple people collaborating and coordinating a changes that impact each other.
irony really is dead. The creator of git still uses the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Though I can certainly think of a dozen other ways to communicate that aren't GitHub or Slack.
Are FOSS "donations" for on-going or past work, though? I'd lean towards a mixture of both.
However, by that measure the original creator should also be compensated for their past work, given that they wrote about an order of magnitude more code than the second most prolific contributor, at least in the main babel repository.[0]
(I have no way to easily measure other equally important contributions, such as shepherding other contributors, dealing with issues and PRs, so I'm ignoring them.)
> I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12
> issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests.
> This is across all Babel orgs.
>
> https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
There has been a lot of innovation within the tooling ecosytem over the last year (esbuild, vite, snowpack, bundless, swc, whatever Jarred Sumner is working on). None of this innovation is coming from Babel.
It seems like a gravy train. Open-source contributors of other projects are currently carrying the torch of uncompensated work.
If they want to get paid, they need to think about how they currently fit into the ecosystem.
I explicitly state 2020. Activity picked up in March. Use GitHub search filters and it’s more apparent.
Activity graphs can be deceiving, it’s extremely easy to look busy. Actually drill down and you’ll notice a lot of the activity earlier in this year was just pull request approvals, without comment, mostly done after someone else had already approved.
According to the original tweets by @sebmck there were only 25 comments in PRs by said contributor in the last year, so even that didn't happen, apparently.
I would expect an outrage here if someone suggested evaluating someone's work performance based on the number of commits the same way we consistently criticize evaluation based on number of lines of code or hours spent in the office.
Still, it's difficult to do even 'soft' work on a GitHub project without producing some kind of trail.
Few commits? Well, OK, lots of reviews and PR handling.
Not too much of that either? Ah, issue triage!
Oh, not that either. Well, they're the most senior dev. Strong technical direction and forward-thinking research! Maybe mailing lists instead of the issue tracker or wiki.
... but Babel's usefulness is at an all-time low as browsers adopt new features regularly, core-js now handles all the polyfills, and non-Babel transpilers and non-JS languages add all the interesting features and performance improvements?
Well, obviously advertising the project, helping with fundraising... for what's majority their own salary... Hrm. Mitchell Baker, is that you?
That's the wrong way to look at it.
He has a lot more contributions, including code reviews of pull requests.
https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview
Not to mention other behind the scene tasks such as fund-raising, etc.
That doesn't seem to mean much nowadays. (Or maybe ever.) It's an old popular complex project, there are a lot of ongoing discussions. For example the TypeScript repo has 5K issues. And it's a flagship MS project, so it's not about funding, quality, etc.
So many other OSS projects barely getting even 100 USD a month and Babel is complaining they're unable to work with over 300k a year and a number of corporate sponsors which have been supporting the project for a long time.
And the nodejs ecosystem already seems like an outlier getting more funding than most other languages/systems/projects.
Open source projects funded by donations need accountability. Regular reports about how much money is available, how it's being spent, and what the results are. If I saw that this guy, getting a full-time salary, creating fewer PRs in a year than me in a week, I'd be pissed, and the project certainly wouldn't get my donations.
I think this is an important point. How do I know donating money will end up actually going to the project.
For some reason I believe donating to The Blender Foundation actually pays for devs to work on blender (and I donate).
I have a friend working on an open source project. I know he works full time on it. I donated because I knew he was working full time and because I like the project and want to see it succeed.
I have no reason to believe sponsoring random npm package asking for funding does anything other then maybe make some person feel good that they decided to post some code on npm and/or github.
In the US, any donation to a nonprofit can be earmarked by the donor for a particular purpose. They're legally bound to use your money only for that purpose.
> - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea
It's true. The fact that babel is not an excuse for a wrong or absent management. Given the amount of money disposable to the project through donations, it would perfectly make sense to "hire" a manager that will actually manage contributors, deliverables, timelines, ...
Management blaming individuals by name (in public no less) shows severe incompetence at the top. I don't doubt he hired a slacker, but that's on management for hiring and retaining that... to the point of demise? Stupid.
I would have a problem with a manager if they did this "publicly" within the team/company. Airing it out on twitter is even more egregious. "Severe incompetence" is somehow understating it IMO, although i can't think of a better description.
If what they said is true:
1) Management hired a developer
2) Paid him for years
3) Gained millions of users
4) Became bankrupt
5) Publicly named the developer as a slacker and the reason the business is failing.
More comments from the founder. Nowhere does he take any responsibility for this mess, just blame blame blame.
"The salary amount isn't unreasonable or excessive. It's the lack of material output that makes it unjustified."
- So, don't pay him for years while bankrupting your project?
"I'm being explicit now since vague tweeting allegations isn't productive."
- Explicitly tweeting allegations isn't productive either. It just makes you and your project look bad. There's no way I'm donating to you now.
"The reason there's no money is because someone took a $130k annual salary and didn't actually work on the project."
- And was allowed to do so for a long time. Also, that's only one part of the equation, was this developer also responsible for fundraising? Or other spending?
"I raised this in March when I looked into it and noticed that for the first two months of the year he had left only two brief comments and created no comments."
- You didn't notice your employees had shipped nothing for two months? Or you were OK with this at the time and are now retroactively blaming them?
Seb is a well-known narcissist, suffering from ego created by his own Twitter myth. I cannot name a single peer among the many circles I converse in which respects the person (another matter for the technical ability). Seb has only to look in a mirror to identify the issues with the current state of the Babel project management.
This is a bit ridiculous on the other direction. It's like your main job is putting nails, and at the end of the year you have only put 29 nails. Sure, nails per day is not the best metric, but if in one year building furniture you only put 29 nails in total it's definitely not a good outlook for your productivity.
But his job wasn't putting nails. In this metaphor, his job would have been increasing the furniture company's output and profits; maybe he found another of doing it. Perhaps for instance, he figured out that instead of nails, he could utilize another joinery approach, like dovetails.
Sure, that's a fair point. I don't know enough about the exact job, internals, etc, just commenting that while commits/day or /week or even /month might not be the best metric, if you are (which I'm unsure here) hired to do that then if you only do 29/year, yeah you are probably not doing your job.
When that “carpenter” is also answering the phone and doing quotes for work, apparently. If Henry is also the community manager and main fundraiser (which from the sounds of other posts he is), I’d argue that the last thing you’d want him spending time on would be code.
If he was a smaller fraction of the work force, that would make sense. But if you have a single full-time worker who is receiving about 2/3 of the payroll budget, I'd argue that you can't afford for them to spend most of their hours on business stuff.
Business stuff is what pays the bills. You can't have 2/3 of the work force just merging PRs and find out 6 months later that nobody paid the taxes and you won't be bringing in enough money to make payroll next month.
I wasn't saying not to do administrative tasks, but that they shouldn't be over half your entire company's work-hour allocation. Even with fundraising in there too.
Imagine if you had 3 employees and 2 of them were HR. That is not a good allocation of labor.
If you're including sales in the bucket of administrative tasks (and fundraising is very much equivalent to sales), many successful companies are at or near 100% administrative tasks.
It does seem odd that so much of the work would go towards paying to keep looking for more money (fundraising for fundraising), but there are plenty of sales oriented organisations out there who don't make anything. It's just odd in this case that an OSS project seems to have gone on that direction.
I suspect nobody should be earning such a salary working on a project like that.
It's like having a startup with 1 full-time salesperson and 3 part-time engineers. It would never work unless you already have a product (which Babel does).
I sort of get the idea of spending your money trying to sale an existing product but it doesn't seem to have worked in this case. That doesn't mean allocating the money differently would have worked either (arguably it would have been better for current patrons though).
I have no horse in this race but where are comments like this coming from, in response to this:
>I'm just going to be explicit. In 2020, Henry created 12 issues, commented 25 times, and created 29 pull requests. This is across all Babel orgs.
100k+ for a year of that sounds pretty cushy. he didn't say that he did "only" 1 or 2 PRs a week or something. where are these hyperbolic comments in response coming from? what other kind of work could have possibly been done in addition to this meager amount of code work to justify such a salary?
That makes sense for a normal size organization but they literally only have three employees. And the majority of the fund raised was used for his salary.
If anything, it's not fair at all for the other two who did the substantial work and only earn 2k per month.
(To be fair they have changed the distribution this year.)
I'm not doubting it's real work; just that why other people in the same team have to volunteer (or being underpaid in case of the other two employees), while a single person is paid "properly"?
> In November 2019, after successfully paying Henry a salary for over a year, we expanded our goal to also support three additional maintainers: Jùnliàng, Kai, and Nicolò.
They started with one paid salary. Tried to expand that. Didn't get enough money to do so; now they're asking (fairly, IMO) for the community that treats them as critical infrastructure to pony up.
>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