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See what creator of Babel has to say >Babel used by millions, so why are we running out of money? Bluntly: Because funds were misallocated for years, and the p

See what creator of Babel has to say >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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 - So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea

fireattack 5y ago
From https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors it looks that Henry did work on the project heavily after the creator left/went inactive, but stopped being active himself after 2019. There probably is more, but not going to speculate.
NiekvdMaas 5y ago
Looking at the the commit activity of some maintainers, that seems to be correct: 7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=2020-05-01&until=2021-05-01 https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202... $110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions
- gnomewascool 5y ago
  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.) [0] https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors
  - ratww 5y ago
    > dealing with issues and PRs 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.
  - lhnz 5y ago
    > 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.
    - metaphor 5y ago
      I admittedly fail to see how that Twitter remark survives a naive sanity check[1]. What am I missing here? [1] https://github.com/hzoo https://github.com/hzoo
      - sebastianmck 5y ago
        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.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - szatkus 5y ago
    Interesting that his contributions apparently declined when he went full-time.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  600 open issues https://github.com/babel/babel/issues https://github.com/babel/babel/issues
  - pas 5y ago
    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.
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      Good point. Can't argue with that. That's the problem with software, it's hard to measure productivity.
- ianbanks 5y ago
  These are the commits of another of the paid contributors, for that same time period: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo&since=2020-05-01&until=2021-05-01 https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo... Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors 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 https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of: https://babeljs.io/team https://babeljs.io/team With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
- mellosouls 5y ago
  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.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    >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.
    - mkipper 5y ago
      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.
    - altendo 5y ago
      > 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.
- dingaling 5y ago
  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".
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    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.
  - tommoor 5y ago
    This is an open source project, if those discussions were happening they'd still be largely visible as contributions on github.
    - woah 5y ago
      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.
      - merb 5y ago
        open source projects that want public funding should do stuff like that in the open. and record it.
    - cjaybo 5y ago
      You say this definitively, as if every OSS project uses GitHub exclusively for all communication. This is obviously not the case.
      - 5y ago
- barbazoo 5y ago
  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.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    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?
- cloudmu 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview Not to mention other behind the scene tasks such as fund-raising, etc.
deleted 5y ago
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PaywallBuster 5y ago
I can see it backfire 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.
wereHamster 5y ago
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.
- brabel 5y ago
  If they were getting a fulltime salary and not actually working on the project, can't they be accused of commiting fraud?
  - akmittal 5y ago
    That is unlikely unless contributors got any legal document signed
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
asiachick 5y ago
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.
- smt88 5y ago
  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.
phpnode 5y ago
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?
- andrew_ 5y ago
  Based on his track record (he did the same thing after departing Yarn), I'd say that's a definite risk. Unstable ground, to be sure.
  - hitekker 5y ago
    May I have a link to his departure from Yarn?
  - olingern 5y ago
    This is not correct
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      It actually is correct. He's routinely dogged the project and team after leaving the project: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1176534097881006080 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1176534097881006080, and was a founding member: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/11/web/yarn-a-new-package-manager-for-javascript/ https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/11/web/yarn-a-new-package...
dsr12 5y ago
Creator of Vue.js Evan You's perspective: "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 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392088730438090756
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  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.
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  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.
  - EvanYou 5y ago
    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. That said, a statement from the current most active paid contributor to Babel is probably more convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357
eplanit 5y ago
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.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  He is no longer involved.
- nend 5y ago
  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?
- andrew_ 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
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tut-urut-utut 5y ago
>> 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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 > - 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, ...
ValentineC 5y ago
>>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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 I can't seem to see this tweet any more. Did it get deleted?
- tckr 5y ago
  Yes.
- tarruda 5y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20210511131438/https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 http://web.archive.org/web/20210511131438/https://twitter.co...
bastardoperator 5y ago
Commit count or lines of code is not a valid method for measuring value. Everyone knows this...
dharmaturtle 5y ago
Screenshot of deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/ai6ntjt.png https://i.imgur.com/ai6ntjt.png
- mottosso 5y ago
  Screenshot of the above message: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2152766/117868229-41456100-b291-11eb-9c5b-01438157657c.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2152766/117868229-... ;D
  - mssundaram 5y ago
    I like the meta joke
nsonha 5y ago
> So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea Why not? Do we not want all babel mantainers to be paid atleast 130k?

fireattack 5y ago

From https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors it looks that Henry did work on the project heavily after the creator left/went inactive, but stopped being active himself after 2019. There probably is more, but not going to speculate.

NiekvdMaas 5y ago

Looking at the the commit activity of some maintainers, that seems to be correct: 7 commits in a year: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=2020-05-01&until=2021-05-01 https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=hzoo&since=202... $110k invoiced: https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions https://opencollective.com/left_pad/transactions

gnomewascool 5y ago
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.) [0] https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors
- ratww 5y ago
  > dealing with issues and PRs 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.
- lhnz 5y ago
  > 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.
  - metaphor 5y ago
    I admittedly fail to see how that Twitter remark survives a naive sanity check[1]. What am I missing here? [1] https://github.com/hzoo https://github.com/hzoo
    - sebastianmck 5y ago
      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.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- szatkus 5y ago
  Interesting that his contributions apparently declined when he went full-time.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
600 open issues https://github.com/babel/babel/issues https://github.com/babel/babel/issues
- pas 5y ago
  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.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Good point. Can't argue with that. That's the problem with software, it's hard to measure productivity.
ianbanks 5y ago
These are the commits of another of the paid contributors, for that same time period: https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo&since=2020-05-01&until=2021-05-01 https://github.com/babel/babel/commits?author=nicolo-ribaudo... Looking at https://github.com/babel/babel/graphs/contributors 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 https://twitter.com/sebmck) is relegated to the very bottom of: https://babeljs.io/team https://babeljs.io/team With a link to some odd throw-away Github account: https://github.com/kittens https://github.com/kittens (edit: the link is fixed now, github.com/nicolo-ribaudo merged my PR almost immediately)
mellosouls 5y ago
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.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  >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.
  - mkipper 5y ago
    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.
  - altendo 5y ago
    > 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.
dingaling 5y ago
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".
- yonaguska 5y ago
  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.
- tommoor 5y ago
  This is an open source project, if those discussions were happening they'd still be largely visible as contributions on github.
  - woah 5y ago
    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.
    - merb 5y ago
      open source projects that want public funding should do stuff like that in the open. and record it.
  - cjaybo 5y ago
    You say this definitively, as if every OSS project uses GitHub exclusively for all communication. This is obviously not the case.
    - 5y ago
barbazoo 5y ago
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.
- morelisp 5y ago
  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?
cloudmu 5y ago
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 https://github.com/hzoo?tab=overview Not to mention other behind the scene tasks such as fund-raising, etc.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

PaywallBuster 5y ago

I can see it backfire 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.

wereHamster 5y ago

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.

brabel 5y ago
If they were getting a fulltime salary and not actually working on the project, can't they be accused of commiting fraud?
- akmittal 5y ago
  That is unlikely unless contributors got any legal document signed
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

asiachick 5y ago

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.

smt88 5y ago
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.

phpnode 5y ago

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?

andrew_ 5y ago
Based on his track record (he did the same thing after departing Yarn), I'd say that's a definite risk. Unstable ground, to be sure.
- hitekker 5y ago
  May I have a link to his departure from Yarn?
- olingern 5y ago
  This is not correct
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    It actually is correct. He's routinely dogged the project and team after leaving the project: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1176534097881006080 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1176534097881006080, and was a founding member: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/11/web/yarn-a-new-package-manager-for-javascript/ https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/11/web/yarn-a-new-package...

dsr12 5y ago

Creator of Vue.js Evan You's perspective: "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 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392088730438090756

ashtonkem 5y ago
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.
thrdbndndn 5y ago
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.
- EvanYou 5y ago
  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. That said, a statement from the current most active paid contributor to Babel is probably more convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357

eplanit 5y ago

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.

miracle2k 5y ago
He is no longer involved.
nend 5y ago
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?
andrew_ 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tut-urut-utut 5y ago

>> 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 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 > - 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, ...

ValentineC 5y ago

tckr 5y ago
Yes.
tarruda 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210511131438/https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392019586833387522 http://web.archive.org/web/20210511131438/https://twitter.co...

bastardoperator 5y ago

Commit count or lines of code is not a valid method for measuring value. Everyone knows this...

dharmaturtle 5y ago

Screenshot of deleted tweet: https://i.imgur.com/ai6ntjt.png https://i.imgur.com/ai6ntjt.png

mottosso 5y ago
Screenshot of the above message: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2152766/117868229-41456100-b291-11eb-9c5b-01438157657c.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/2152766/117868229-... ;D
- mssundaram 5y ago
  I like the meta joke

nsonha 5y ago

> So donating money because of this post may not be a good idea Why not? Do we not want all babel mantainers to be paid atleast 130k?