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Can you imagine taking a job at his startup. You have a bad week, run into a hard problem and start to sweat that your commit log isn't full enough.

by Touche 5y ago

adamrezich 5y ago
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?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Management? Fundraising? There's more to running an organization than just coding.
  - thrdbndndn 5y ago
    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.)
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      The organization is substantially larger than just its paid employees. https://babeljs.io/team https://babeljs.io/team
      - thrdbndndn 5y ago
        I'm sorry but how does this not sound worse? "My job is to manage a team of employees who code." vs "my job is to manage a team of unpaid volunteers who code, while I earn a proper salary".
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Managing volunteers is still real work - sometimes more so. It's hardly uncommon for non-profits to have paid staff managing volunteers.
        thrdbndndn 5y ago
        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"?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        The article answers this. > 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.
eplanit 5y ago
It's like measuring a carpenter by how many nails they've driven per day.
- wussboy 5y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    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.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      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.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        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.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        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.

Can you imagine taking a job at his startup. You have a bad week, run into a hard problem and start to sweat that your commit log isn't full enough.

by Touche 5y ago

Can you imagine taking a job at his startup. You have a bad week, run into a hard problem and start to sweat that your commit log isn't full enough.

adamrezich 5y ago

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?

ceejayoz 5y ago
Management? Fundraising? There's more to running an organization than just coding.
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  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.)
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    The organization is substantially larger than just its paid employees. https://babeljs.io/team https://babeljs.io/team
    - thrdbndndn 5y ago
      I'm sorry but how does this not sound worse? "My job is to manage a team of employees who code." vs "my job is to manage a team of unpaid volunteers who code, while I earn a proper salary".
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Managing volunteers is still real work - sometimes more so. It's hardly uncommon for non-profits to have paid staff managing volunteers.
        thrdbndndn 5y ago
        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"?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        The article answers this. > 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.

eplanit 5y ago

It's like measuring a carpenter by how many nails they've driven per day.

wussboy 5y ago
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.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  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.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      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.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        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.