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> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source. > For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporar
by capableweb 6y ago
> we settled on $11,000 per month as a baseline salary for working full-time on open source.
> For now, Nicolò, Henry, and Jùnliàng will all be paid a temporary rate of $6,000 per month. This doesn't solve the problem,
I used to donate to Babel, before they made it apparent they are just interested in funneling the money to one developer. 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up, but this time I cannot do anything as a reaction as I've already pulled my funding.
But my guess is that a lot of people feel the same way, as the donations seems to be going down. 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley, which since you're doing open source, you should really really consider.
Open source is not "VC fueled develoment" and I don't think we should go that way either. Make your operation nimble and survive on little, otherwise you'll soon disappear. Optimize for sustainability, not for paying the one of the highest salary in the world (minus SV bubble of course).
It's not wonder Babel is going the way it's going, as the economy you've setup for yourself is nowhere near sustainable.
- ChrisRR 6y agoExactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley. $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living
- varispeed 6y ago> $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. If that's true, then you should probably have a word with your employer. Typical dev pay is 80k (~$120k) or twice as that if contracted.
- RReverser 6y agoThat's nowhere typical, even in London you'll find that only in higher-end companies.
- pmlnr 6y agoEh, no. Really no; that typical is at absolute max 50K across the UK.
- mciancia 6y agoUhh, maybe London is special but getting 70-100kGBP out of university is not really hard there. Just high CoL and taxes are making that a lot less
- Plyphon_ 6y agoITJobsWatch [0] suggests the median salary for a Senior Dev role in London is around 75k currently. [0] https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/senior%20developer.do https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/london/senior%20developer...
- ChrisRR 6y agoIt's absolutely not. £50k is fairly typical senior dev salary with some industries being higher or lower
- Plyphon_ 6y agoIt probably is true but as with all cost/currency comparisons you can't really look at the raw pre-tax figures in isolation to know if someone has more buying power doing the same job in one country or another. Everything from the price of broadband, pint of milk, loaf of bread, healthcare, car costs, etc etc contributes to someones buying power vs their salary
- pointjek 6y agoNo, it's simply because we aren't socialists. Demand better.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago> Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley. Cost of living is one input into cost of labor, but far from the only one. E.g. Canadian salaries are much lower for programmers than American ones, looking at comparably expensive areas. A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers.
- capableweb 6y ago> A huge part of the reason Silicon Valley coders are expensive is that the ecosystem there has made for phenomenally successful tech companies. They have both the money and the motive to engage in a bidding war for talented developers. Alternative narrative: All the companies want to be located in Silicon Valley but no developers actually want to live there. So you have to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to even consider living there.
- kemayo 6y agoThat seems unlikely, since it's a nice city in a temperate climate. Absent any discussion of the job market, I'd like living there. Now, given the cost of housing in the Bay Area, having to pay ridiculously high salaries for people to afford living there... Which, yes, is a bit circular. The tech boom (plus dumb zoning choices, and also California's property tax laws) has resulted in that vast increase in housing costs, as too many people try to cram into the available housing stock. Note news stories about rent plummeting in SF as people went remote for COVID.
- TulliusCicero 6y agoThere are things that suck about SV, but there are great things too: the weather is extremely nice, lots of cultural diversity, good food scene, and there's so much tech that you have lots of opportunities and security. But taking a cynical angle like yours, you could apply that reasoning to any big city in any country: why do they have to pay more? Well, obviously because people hate Tokyo/Paris/NYC/Milan/London/etc.
- 2ion 6y ago> $132,000 is almost double my salary is the UK. They could easily get 2 full time UK devs for that, or even more in many EU countries with lower cost of living Yes, but in EU a common problem is, good developers are not worth more because the companies are unable to make use of IT to justify a higher price. It's a bunch of ossified tech laggers, not tech leaders, that employs developers in much of the EU. They only need 2nd rate people to handle what US tech puts on the market.
- nicoburns 6y agoAlternatively, there's just more VC money in the US.
- rightbyte 6y agoBabel is an complex perpetual maintenance solution to bad engineering in the first place. I'd rather be a "ossified tech lagger" then having to deal with that.
- nsonha 6y agocould you elaborate what is bad engineering? It's one thing to say babel is no longer a critical tool, it's another thing to say that it's "bad engineering"
- rightbyte 6y agoThe browser compibatility mess. I did not mean to say Babel is bad engineering, but a solution to the problem of bad engineering.
- MomoXenosaga 6y agoGlobal competition will drive wages down. Right now SV is still were Detroit was in the 1960s.
- dyeje 6y agoAre you implying that the downfall of Detroit was global competition?
- pembrook 6y agoOP wouldn't be wrong to do so. Detroit (the city) suffered through the changes of suburbanization and racial tensions during the 50s/60s...but Detroit (the industry) also suffered a steady decline in automotive market share starting around then as well. This had equally devastating effects to the region. Just look at Flint. I believe Detroit automakers used to account for 90% (I may be off by +/- 10%) of global car sales coming out of WW2. By the 2000s Japan, Germany, and others had eaten away half of that share in the US market, and an even higher percentage in global markets. Silicon Valley has had a many decades head start in Tech just as Detroit did in Automotive (let's say 1900s-1960s for autos and 1970s-2020s for Tech). To think global competition won't eventually start eating away at this dominance is foolish, especially given the profits at stake.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWhat’s less clear to me is whether or not the tech industry is like the car. Will the rate of innovation drop as we slowly approach an asymptotically perfect product, or will it accelerate as access to concentrated labor and knowledge drives up the rate of change?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoan excellent question. however, it may be orthogonal to the question of whether or not other parts of the US, and more broadly, other parts of the world, can be where that continuing development happens. regardless of which of those two paths turns out to be the future, there's still the question of what SV's role will be.
- bfrog 6y agoThe valley you'd be make closer to 300k
- capableweb 6y agoGood thing Babel, Open Source and everything else related to this has nothing to do with San Francisco or Silicon Valley but still the group somehow want to have Silicon Valley salaries. Why use the most expensive place on earth as a benchmark?
- randomdata 6y agoPresumably because that is the alternative, requiring sufficient incentive to stay away from the alternative? It is not like you need to live in SV to work in SV.
- vardaro 6y agoThat's TC though, can't think of a company that pays this much in base. 130k base salary is comparable to a new grad or mid level SWE in the bay.
- bradlys 6y agoFor many companies, that TC is very liquid. Some don't even have 1-yr cliffs anymore and tech stocks aren't exactly hurting these days.
- drstewart 6y ago>Exactly, I thought the reason that US developers are so highly paid compared to everywhere else in the world was to offset the high cost of living in silicon valley. You know not all developers live in Silicon Valley, right? And London is just as expensive, why aren't the salaries the same there? Bizarre post. Why would you brag about being underpaid?
- patrec 6y agoI think you should entertain the possibility that not all that salary gap is explained by geography. I suspect that one of three things would have to be true of either you or the two hypothetical devs: 1. You are really bad at salary negotiation. 2. You would be willing to take an enormous (> 50%) salary hit to work on Babel compared to what you could get in industry. 3. You are insufficiently skilled to lead a project like Babel. This is based on the conjecture that a suitable lead for Babel should have no problem finding a FAANG job and doing a quick search for average FAANG salaries in the UK.
- robjan 6y agoYou're making the assumption, which many people on this forum make, that everyone wants to work for FAANG
- patrec 6y agoNot at all. FAANG is just a convenient and geographically comparable reference point. I have no trouble finding non-FAANG UK developer jobs online that pay more than ~$65k/year and neither should you. I'm not deeply familiar with babel, but I'm pretty sure that if you can lead that project (which should involve a fair amount of in-depth knowledge about JS, coding chops and CS knowledge) you will have many options to earn in excess of $65k anually.
- SomeCallMeTim 6y agoI don't live in Silicon Valley. I live in Colorado, in a Denver/Boulder suburb. Not one of the most expensive places to live, though prices have been skyrocketing during the pandemic. I see jobs all around me every week that go to the $150k-160k range. If I decided to take a Google or Amazon job I could easily break $200k, maybe more (including stock grants). Developers in the US get paid more because demand has actually pushed our wages up to closer to what they're actually worth to an employer. I've read estimates that a strong software engineer can add $500k-$1M of value per year to a company. You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right?
- sangnoir 6y ago> You want a strong software engineer in charge of Babel, right? I want Babel to continue to exist, even if it steered by an engineer who is not "the best in the world", if we take your assertion at face value (higher salary = better engineer). Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously, I will posit that there is a least 1 Eastern European engineer who's better (based on HackerRank/leetcode/CodeJam stats), and is willing to accept a lower salary. So Babel might be better served recruiting there.
- nsonha 6y agoI suppose you can just summon such a person without effort? Recruiters get paid for a reason and we're talking about a situation where they don't even have the money for devs.
- SomeCallMeTim 6y ago> Since we're taking Silicon Valley metrics seriously Umm... Colorado? We're more than a thousand miles as the crow flies or 20 hours of driving away from Silicon Valley. More to the point: If the rest of the team is in US time zones, coordinating with an Eastern European developer is much harder. It means someone has to stay up really late or get up really early, and typically you still don't get much overlap. Granted if such a brilliant developer who needed very little input from the rest of the team were to apply, they'd do well to hire them. But as the other comment mentions, how do you find such a developer on demand?
- thrower123 6y agoYou folks are horribly, horribly underpaid over there. $130k is the kind of money a reasonably experienced developer can get in southern New Hampshire, or Ohio, or Arkansas.
- cacarr 6y agoThere are many cities in the USA, outside of the Bay Area, in which $132k would be a reasonable salary for that job. Just west of the Mississippi: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, possibly even Salt Lake City, Phoenix, probably Minneapolis, Honolulu, etc.
- varispeed 6y agoWhy do you think 11K is a lot? If you compare how much companies make thanks to this project, I am curious why don't they make 100K a month?
- tgv 6y agoFor 100K, you can write your own version. It's not hard.
- tarruda 6y ago> 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas and same reaction I had the last time this came up Even the reduced salary of $6,000 is still quite a lot if all you are going to do create a couple of small PRs per month: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250 https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1392053448892469250
- Grimm1 6y agoOn the flip side, Silicon Valley isn't the only expensive place and 132k was well below my full time salary in New York as a senior eng before I jumped into my own work. Actually I don't think I know any full time engineers right now in my personal network making lower than 150k and they're all very talented people who wouldn't be able to hop on something like this for various reasons related to that being too low. My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you.
- ThalesX 6y agoI'm on the other side of the boat, and presumably the ocean. In Eastern Europe, part of the EU and have a lot of connections working in outsourcing. Some senior level engineers can end up making 4000 - 5000€ per month, which would translate to ~$65.000 per year. I know of very few that make 6000€ or more. Giving the benefit of the doubt and saying that any engineer here will be half the value of one from SV (which, I don't agree with at all), I'd argue that you'd still be better off paying two senior engineers at the particular level I am familiar with to build your product. > My point is without high pay a whole class of very good engineers is unavailable to you. I think depending on the model, the same argument can be made for FAANG and / or other VC money fueled companies. There are some talented, principled engineers that refuse to work for non-fundamented businesses, and perhaps only aiming for the 150k+ people will render a whole class of very good engineers unavailable to you.
- Grimm1 6y agoThat's valid too, but and big but, I'd argue your engineers aren't being paid their value though and that's largely down to what I feel is Europe not valuing engineers relative to what they accomplish enough. Don't drive our wages down, drive yours up. I'm consistently astounded that my friend who lives in France is only making what she makes given her level of schooling and skill. That doesn't detract from your point though. Only the hassle of hiring outside of the US may be a blocker there as well.
- shkkmo 6y ago
- ahD5zae7 6y agoJust to give one data point I'm in Poland and I'm earning around 3500€ in a fully remote senior developer/engineer position working on AI tech in a company of around 1k employees. I'm one of the best paid people among my colleagues. The absolute top range job offers in this field in my country would be somewhere around 5000€ but that may be available only to a few developers in the entire 40 million country. I'm sure one could argue that one US engineer is worth 2+ polish engineers but I'm doubtful it's such a large difference. Quite the opposite in fact, I heard rumours that our engineers are quite valued internationally, once you get past the language barrier of course. Just my 3 cents.
- eterevsky 6y agoI work for Google in Switzerland and I have plenty of polish colleagues. The salaries here start around 150k per year, including bonus.
- probst 6y agoI am not sure what your background is, or whether you are, or have worked as, a freelancer. What I am writing might therefore be old news to you, in which case it would still be interesting to hear how you are thinking about the numbers I'll present. A lot of people write comments such as yours. 11000USD/mth is a very decent salary if you are an employee. What most regular employees completely discount when doing back of the envelope calculations about the salary of other people are the amount of additional contributions that are made by your employer that regular employees might never see, but that are paid for you all the same. Here is the math for me as a freelancer in Germany, with a similar salary as the one you are claiming is outrageous. I bill roughly the equivalent per month from Berlin in Germany. I am not sure where the Babel developers are based, so their circumstances might differ, but all the same, here goes: Of the 9000EUR (11000USD in EUR) I have to pay: - 19% VAT = 1750 - 950/mth in health insurance - Put aside 1000/mth for retirement (which is less than I previously had from my employer) - Set aside money for vacation (as a regular employee in Germany I would have 30 days paid vacation, as a freelancer I had to set aside roughly 600/mth to compensate for this) - Set aside money in case I get sick (as a regular employee I still get my salary when I am sick, as a freelancer I get paid from day 45). I set aside roughly 450/mth for this. - Then there are miscellaneous freelancer related expenses and having to buy hardware (which your employer would cover too). Let's make that 300/mth. - Then there's income taxes on the rest. This differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but let's make it an even 30% (which is below what I pay). This leaves me with 3950 before taxes, or 2765 after taxes... That doesn't sound so amazing anymore, does it? Even if the Babel guys aren't working as freelancer but pay themselves through a company, the math works out roughly the same (at least from what I have seen in my own business over the last 9 years). The only difference is that the company needs the equivalent monthly budget instead of the individuals.
- thinkloop 6y agoThe rule of thumb is about 80% for me - an $80K employment salary is worth about $100K contracting.
- merb 6y agodude are you insane? in germany your 9000 EUR salary would be huge. and saying you put 1000€/mth away before you calculate is even more insane... You would get a Netto of around ~4.800 €, which would be more than 80% of all germans will make. Also you could easily make more by reducing social payments (which you can do if you get over 6000 € brutto). "950/mth in health insurance", wow....... not sure what an insurance you have, but you will probably get 1000 € if you accidentially have a small wound... for 1000 € a month you get the all inclusive package probably. I never heard of somebody that pays a private health insurance 1000€/mth. sorry to say it, but your entitlement mentality is insane. I can tell you what, in germany with over 9000€ you start to be in the high class. just some real numbers, not a developer but a normal muncipial employee (no civil servant) with an age of 35 years will make +-3500€ brutto, which is already way more than many people will do (more than 50%)
- bufferoverflow 6y ago> 11K per month?! That is absolutely bananas No, it's not. I work from home, remotely from Europe and I get paid $17K per month writing some PHP and JS code. I imagine writing Babel code isn't some trivial task that you can hire a junior dev to do.
- justsomeuser 6y agoAny roles going?
- fire 6y agowow, any open roles? international hiring or europe only?
- cacarr 6y ago> 11K per month could pay for many developers if you hire people outside of Sillicon Valley ... There are many cities in the USA where $11k/month is not at all outrageous: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, DC, NYC, etc.
- SixDouble5321 6y agoI get paid about 10k shy of this for primarily javascript and knowing AWS. If you don't think people who work on something so foundational are worth it, then you are what is bananas.