6 ms·

Babel has no money because someone took a $130K salary and didn't work

• spzb 5y ago
  Would be helpful to have some details otherwise this is just an unsubstantiated allegation on Twitter.
  • yagizdegirmenci 5y ago
    Author of the tweet is the creator of Babel.js
    • spzb 5y ago
      Whilst that provides context it doesn’t explain the allegations.
      • yagizdegirmenci 5y ago
        Yeah that's a big claim to make, from my understanding his point is the money is misallocted while there are bunch of people putting more effort on the project who doesn't gets paid or getting paid lower then Henry. (Based on commits, pull requests, issues etc.).
  • rcxdude 5y ago
    It's pretty amazing how useless twitter threads can be for actually containing the relevant information, even if it has actually been tweeted as part of it. He has more specific allegations if you dig around his twitter profile for a bit and you can in principle look most of the details up because the development is all public. TBH sounds like this could become a bit of a mess, if it isn't already.
  • traspler 5y ago
    You can check his GitHub here: https://github.com/hzoo https://github.com/hzoo
    • geofft 5y ago
      I see a large number of code reviews per month, though.
      • NicoJuicy 5y ago
        If you look deeper, he is not the one commenting on pr's. Only approving
      • traspler 5y ago
        Yeah, I thought so too. There is a lot more to maintaining a project than just push code. Here are some other takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116357 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392096427313147908 https://twitter.com/youyuxi/status/1392096427313147908
  • maest 5y ago
    See this comment, from a parallel submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27115880
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  If they worked, would Babel have more money? Looking at their website, it seems it is a free project. No mention of any paid product. Then how would they have more money had one person worked?
  • Arnt 5y ago
    Look at another aspect. There's the work aspect: the lucky fellow who was paid $11k/month for creating one PR and two issues. There's also management/overfiew aspect: the organisation that didn't notice that it was paying. If the organisation (I realise it's just a few people) were paying enough attet6ion to notice that it was paying for ~nothing, then it's a fair assumption that it would also be paying enough attention to its sponsors.
    • perryizgr8 5y ago
      Definitely it is very surprising that they continued to pay despite there being close to zero output. If I tried this in my company I'd have a PIP in 2 months and probably get fired in another 2.
      • akmittal 5y ago
        Most people pay because babel is useful and they want to support the project. Funds going to wrong hands is different deal.
        • perryizgr8 5y ago
          I meant the org should have stopped paying an employee if he didn't work.
          • Arnt 5y ago
            Perhaps, but that seems rather destructive. A more constructive approach would have been to pay attention to the sponsors.
  • 5y ago
• omega3 5y ago
  The gist of the allegation: "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." "Sorry but that's DEFINITELY not $132k worth of work. Especially when there are other contributors who are working for free doing much more. Obviously everything isn't on GitHub, there's work in private but it is representative."
  • yuppie_scum 5y ago
    There’s six figure slackers at a lot of companies.
    • darkcha0s 5y ago
      Companies have a lot of money, and a lot of it to burn. OSS doesn't.
  • teachingassist 5y ago
    I understand that the tweeter is the original author of Babel - as such, I find this a little bit embarrassing. The author originally had 100% control of governance and management decisions, and personally chose exactly how to delegate those. A single person's salary (and the public disclosure of it) has created massive point of political tension for the project. I think that's a bigger problem than the perceived waste of $.
    • _fat_santa 5y ago
      Yeah I also don't understand why this wasn't handled sooner. He said that in February the dev only made a small number of issues and no commits, I feel like the issue should have been caught there.
      • teachingassist 5y ago
        There's also a question of - what's the job description? Henry makes it clear in a March 2018 blogpost that he doesn't see it as a primarily coding job, and his Twitter bio describes him as 'steward', not 'developer'. https://www.henryzoo.com/in-pursuit-of-open-source-part-1/ https://www.henryzoo.com/in-pursuit-of-open-source-part-1/ https://twitter.com/left_pad https://twitter.com/left_pad So, why is he being taken to task on only quantity of code as a measure?
• prepend 5y ago
  I really don’t like “commit counters” because people who don’t know will inappropriately equate green boxes with productivity. But it is useful for general signs of activity. So I think it’s stupid to say stuff like “foo has 120 commits and bar has 119; therefore foo is more productive” But I think it’s a good starting point to think something like “Hrm, Bar only has 21 commits in a year and the rest of the team has 120. Let’s look into that.” Sometimes there’s a good explanation (eg, “Foo makes a huge commit every two weeks, let’s talk to them about the benefit of daily check ins and branches”) but it also helps identify real problems. I once worked with a company that was wrapping up a project. They have contractors 30 days notice to finish their work at the end of the release and go. One contractor went from regular activity to zero commits during the last month. Since I was supposed to integrate and code review his stuff, I asked if he would check in and he just said “yeah sure.” He left with no commits during the month. Not that there’s a specific number of commits that was good and he was obviously mentally checked out, but zero indicates something worth investigating.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • geoelectric 5y ago
    It's interesting, because this tracks my take on code coverage metrics, speaking from a quality background. There are only two intrinsically meaningful values: None, and less than yesterday. Former indicates no analysis, second indicates new code/branch/paths checked in without tests. Past that, it's all relative. Major code coverage here and sparse there tells some kind of story, either about lopsided risk, lopsided difficulty, or lopsided process.
    • prepend 5y ago
      It’s funny because I like knowing it and find it useful but can almost never talk about it because it gets misinterpreted by pointy haired boss-types who want to track it, or practitioners who want to cargo cult it, or cynical people who think it’s worthwhile to game. Office365 introduced some crazy usage metrics like number of minutes and “engagement” and whatnot. It was total garbage and not right (showing my first active as 1030, despite using mobile and sending tons of email and doc edits at 6am). But it had a metric about engagement through using at mentions in my direct report chain. Some manager thought this was good and praised people very engaged and instructed people to be more engaged. A few folks just at mentioned instead of putting names in their email’s To field. They shot to the top of this dipshit’s leaderboard.
• geofft 5y ago
  The "open-source funding crisis" is simply the crisis of not knowing how to reliably organize our society in any way other than for-profit companies but wanting to direct our useful energies at something other than propping up those for-profit companies. I get paid well over $130K a year, and if I manage to get 12 issues, 25 comments, and 29 pull requests to open source projects, that's a good year. Where does my salary come from? What do I actually do with the rest of my time? The world has no visibility into that. (The answer is - a hedge fund. Turns out there is no hedge fund software engineer funding crisis.) There's nothing wrong with getting paid $130K a year to not work on open source. There's specifically nothing wrong with getting paid $130K a year from the organizations who you want to be funding open source. Babel's highest sponsorship tier (https://opencollective.com/babel https://opencollective.com/babel), at $24K a year each, comes from Airbnb, AMP (Google), Trivago, and Adobe. Other top contributors listed on that page include Salesforce and Facebook. Do we complain when those organizations spend well over $130K a year on not-open-source? Do we complain when those organizations spend well over $130K on internal projects that just completely fail? I'm starting to think the answer is that we should, in fact, complain. As the linked Twitter thread points out, Babel isn't running out of money because $130K is too high a salary - it's running out of money because the lack of visible results endangers their ability to get future funding. But the amount of funding they're getting is scraps from any of these organizations that, I'm sure, get way more than $24K/year value from Babel. If you have a thousand software engineers, and a piece of software makes them all just 1% more productive, its value to you is ten full-time developer salaries. And all these companies are more than happy to employ thousands of software engineers, plus hundreds of managers and other human infrastructure to support those engineers. And they understand that sometimes those engineers don't deliver value - usually because they were told to work on the wrong thing - and that's a correctable problem and you keep paying those engineers while you correct it. If they have a question about whether someone is doing the right work (maybe they're doing good work, but it's not what was agreed on paper - it certainly seems like Henry is doing a lot of code reviews and publicity work?), having skilled managers is how you figure out whether that work is nonetheless worthwhile, or the engineer needs to be told to shift their focus. We understand that having managers, who are also paid more than $130K/year, is important to a functioning engineering organization. (Usually they're traditional line managers, but even at organizations that reject traditional managers, you still have senior contributors whose value is primarily in how they guide and advise other people's work and not so much in their own work.) It may be true that an open-source project's future is in danger because they've employed one person and that one person isn't visibly productive, but the mistake here is on the expectation that this could ever work. Imagine if Adobe employed one engineer to work on Photoshop, discovered they were not terribly productive in terms of new features implemented in Photoshop, and then worried because they'd have trouble begging the CFO for funds for a second engineer. We would see this as ridiculous. If you want to see continued development on Photoshop, you need a team. If the senior management of a tech-driven organization refuses to proactively staff an engineering team with more people than strictly needed, no one would think to beg. We'd just know this management is incompetent and short-sighted and not worth bargaining with. (And, like Babel, Photoshop has been around for many years and does its job just fine. In a sense it doesn't need new features. But I'm sure that Adobe has way more than one engineer on the project, nonetheless.) We need to figure out how to stop begging for scraps from companies that regularly fund hundreds of millions of dollars in development for code that only benefits themselves, and start saying, look, this open-source project brings you millions of dollars in business value per year. $24K is a joke. We're not going to try to justify the additional value of a second contributor, when you've got ten highly-paid people on the committee deciding whether to give $12K or $24K. Give us millions of dollars, then you might see some results.
• killingtime74 5y ago
  If I don’t do any work for a week or a month that’s my problem. If I do it for a year it’s my employer that has a problem
  • prepend 5y ago
    If I don’t have an employer and instead get an autodonation without any supervision, then that’s the donor’s problem. Or teammates if it affects the level of future donations.
• eplanit 5y ago
  Henry might have grounds for a lawsuit.
• bmeski 5y ago
  Sounds/looks like Sebastian has never worked outside of the tech bubble. There will always be slackers and who the hell is he/him/fart to judge. This line of thinking ends in the Killing Fields.
• darepublic 5y ago
  At a previous company we got rid of Babel on our node stack completely. Felt good. Not possible yet with web but that is what we should be getting to. Funding Babel for the indefinite future means the web will have stagnated. In an ideal world Babel dies.
  • glassounds 5y ago
    Babel doesn't necessarily need to transpile all the way to ES5, you can specify targets. It's a useful tool for using newer features even without supporting IE
    • darepublic 5y ago
      The place where I see it as still necessary is transpiling code that uses es6 modules for web. If browsers all supported es6 modules and not half heartedly I think myself and a lot of devs could ditch Babel for good.
• ramblerman 5y ago
  Whatever happened, this is not the way to air this information, or the right medium to judge someone (1 tweet). Sebastian makes himself look bad here, and added to it that he is leaving babel, to start a competing product with VC funding, makes his public take-down of babel even worse.
  • prepend 5y ago
    Yes, but he also says he’s mentioned it privately many times. When the appropriate channels are exhausted, this seems appropriate for an OSS project where transparency is part of the formula. Especially since the problem is being framed in a way that OP thinks is incorrect and misleading. I don’t like “back channels” on open source projects because they make it harder for new users to get into the project. Discussions should be open and accurate, not behind closed doors. As a potential donor to this project, I’m glad that OP posted this as otherwise I wouldn’t know about their weird way of dividing donations.
  • tinus_hn 5y ago
    The tweet is now unavailable
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  I noticed that the “original” article mentioned that a lot of time was spend promoting Babel through talks at conferences and companies. And seriously, it takes a lot of hours to drive over 100.000 in donations and sponsorship home every year. Somebody has to do it. If it’s that guy, I don’t know, but I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
• lioeters 5y ago
  The deleted tweets: > 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. > I am sitting on an ivory tower so I know this is a terrible look. The elephant in the room is being ignored and it's hard to see so much sympathy for a self-inflicted problem that isn't being honestly publicly addressed. https://web.archive.org/web/20210511084825/https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392025650014326789 https://web.archive.org/web/20210511084825/https://twitter.c...