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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

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.

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.