Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.

Yes, even when it's a publicly funded open-source dev-tool.

Just the usual immature behavior of super-genius developers who have no concept of professionalism since any company in the world will write them a yearly check of infinite money.

Out-of-touch, know-it-all.

Edit: I reread this. Adding that no one is perfect, everyone slips up, loses perspective, pouts/whines, etc... We are all human and remember a single angry tweet thread does not define a person. Twitter is toxic signal-fest that brings out the worst in people right or wrong. Cheers!

Guy is pretty young (created babel in high school I read) so maybe that's part of it. I find that the older I get the more empathy I have.

Wow, that’s amazing. Right on regarding empathy and age/experience. No one is really an awful person. Just petty drama...

Mismanaging hundreds of thousands of dollars of charitable contributions goes a bit beyond petty drama in my opinion.

Ha, love the 10/10 spin there.

- A joint decision was made how to split and pay maintainers.

- A disagreement about performance / results has come from that.

- Tweeting to rally the homies is immature (and quite embarrassing) way of solving a problem.

I am not saying funds could not be reallocated differently. I’m saying the people involved with this are acting unprofessional / like children.

Labeling in mismanagement is just an opinion not an objective fact. There are a lot of ways to interpret these exact facts.

> Jesus. Maybe I am old-school, but if you have a disagreement or someone isn't holding themselves to a standard, you don't take it to Twitter to signal to in-crowd.

Not saying I disagree, but, in your words, what's bad with taking it to Twitter?

Going to Twitter is akin to having a disagreement at work, standing up and shouting across the whole office at the person you disagree with. I haven't been in an office in awhile, is that what people do nowadays?

... No. At least not where I work.

It doesn't really need to be taken to Twitter. There's almost zero benefit in publicly shaming your colleague like this.

Twitter is also (but isn't the only) tabloid social media. It promotes the sharing of sensational and one-sided content that is scant on details. I know we're supposed to be critical about what we read, but my first instinct was to assume Henry was a bad guy.

It would have been better to see this discussion in a forum or mailing list or anywhere that is designed for an actual longform discussion. Even if in public longer more detailed discussions can capture the nuance.

Taking it to Twitter makes the criticizing person look super toxic. I think reputation can be saved by doing this privately

Personally, I think Seb burnt his own rep and the rep of Rome tools, and unfortunately it reflects really really poorly on his cofounder as well.

A disagreement between two individuals should be initially communicated between those two and ideally resolved privately. Hopefully both sides have enough empathy to understand the other's perspective to reach an amicable conclusion.

Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here) is a sign of immaturity and not what someone does if their goal is to fix the original concern. By airing it out on Twitter, you put the other person on the defensive and they're less inclined to actually help you to resolve the original complaint.

Airing it out on Twitter is an escalation, and a decent outlet for escalating issues that are systematic and/or can't be resolved through other communication channels.

> Airing out on Twitter as a first response (not sure if that's what happened here)

No, this is after the issue has been corrected, which is even worse

> 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?

I had no idea he had started a competing project. This really stinks, almost like he is sabotaging his competitor.

If I: - built Project A - left Project A and started the competitor Project B - contributed a lot of PRs to Project B each week, and - saw that a guy in a similar role at Project A, has relatively few weekly contributions to Project A

My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.

The problem with that mindset is that there is a huge difference between leading a greenfield project with very few users and leading an established project that's a major piece of the infrastructure in basically every front-end app. In the former case, the bulk of the work is actually building the functionality, so looking at PRs / commits can make some sense. In the latter case, there are more constraints to consider and a lot of the work is in determining _what_ needs to be worked on, as opposed to actually writing new code. Also in things like project management, fundraising, etc., which don't show up as GH commits.

> My eyebrows would be a little raised. Not that I would call them out in a tweet, but I would at least be curious where that guy is spending his time.

It is one thing to raise the issue in private with "Project A", another thing is to tweet this to thousands of followers. Especially after "Project A" already had resolved the issue on its own.

Why? Once Project A gets to feature complete, does it need to be worked on at anywhere near the same rate? Other than fixing bugs/upgrading because of APIs they are using upgrading, the number of commits should be really small. Or should people change CSS constantly to have a string of useless PRs?

At that point, a huge amount of someone's time is spent managing bug tickets, attempting to isolate debug, etc.

Rome isn’t anywhere near ready to compete with babel.

Honestly the very idea of a JavaScript compiler like that is destined for obsolescence per standardized features added to browsers.

Folks should just develop their own shims where necessary and TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS.

Sure no one likes doing that, but it’s important to follow the fast-pace ECMAScript adoption.

> TEST AGAINST VARIOUS BROWSERS

I mean, how does that not just push all of this towards companies and open source solutions that provide access to old browsers and what not? I mean no matter what direction you push, it's going to be someone else's open source code that needs money.

You’re right that was an off topic note.

I guess what I’m getting at is that most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway. And instead of adding yet another layer between our code and the browser—embrace the current generation of (at this point very robust) language features available.

And if that’s not good enough use something like TypeScript!

> most current browsers support very nice JavaScript features anyway

Maybe that's true for users in the western world. However, if you are in the asian market, there are popular browsers you've nerver heard of (some localized fork of chromium that's way behind). That is not to mention the poorer populace of the world still uses whatever that runs on WinXP or something, if they have Internet at all.

As software engineers it's not our job to use technology to dictate (control) how people access information, telling them to use newer browsers and newer hardware and what not, our job is to support as many people out there as we can.

Well put... However, the unfortunate thing about web technology is that websites no longer support NOSCRIPT. If we want true global compatibility, it’s HTML + CSS and ZERO JavaScript. That has immense privacy benefits too.

babel is a transpiler, which is more than just a way to shim shim features in browsers.

God I hate this word, it's like in bad OOP where you classify things just for the sake of having more classes. This belongs to a class called compiler, just call it compiler.

It has a specific meaning that is distinct from compilier.

You might call it a tanspiler and technically it IS. But the Babel homepage calls it a compiler.

In any case, for the plethora of down voters: Babel states: “Use next generation JavaScript, today”

At some point next gen == current gen, and therefor given enough stability, Babel becomes obsolete.

Folks, donate to Mozilla instead they actually move things forward not backward.

This assumes that javascript has stopped evolving at some point.

Actually, it assumes only that evolution of new features slows down. Once things are _slow enough_ the value of an extra dependency is dramatically reduced.

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.

This is not correct

It actually is correct. He's routinely dogged the project and team after leaving the project: https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1176534097881006080, and was a founding member: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/11/web/yarn-a-new-package...

Having worked on both projects, I can tell you that it's more complex than what you're making it out to be.

It’s always complex, but that tweet is pretty damn explicit. It’s a bit of a challenge making anything else of that.

This is where anecdotal evidence is difficult - hard evidence that we can reference points to the contrary and supports my reply. I have further anecdotal evidence I could cite, but it's not trustworthy.

Which aspect, and how?

while I don't agree with public bashing, he is right about yarn 2 being a disaster. After a 18months since GA, migrating to v2 is still a pain and not the default version, while v1 does not receive update anymore smh...

May I have a link to his departure from Yarn?

Yeah you just don't publically call out one of your employees. That's just a dick move at that point. Solve this problem internally and don't throw your developer under the bus because you didn't manage them better.

he doesn't manage babel. I think he's just saying this as a peer. It's bad regardless.

Just as an FYI: Rome was started under the react-native team at Facebook and has been in development for well over 2 years, Facebook let him take it with him when he left.

that's really rare, right?

It seems to be MIT licensed, and if so then maybe anyone could. But probably the actual authors have the most legitimacy and knowledge.

when I asked seb about this (because I was a little surprised) he said FB wants to use it too

edit: so... they don't have to pay him + they get the benefit

Only if it's worth something.

There is a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't say it's 1-to-1.

It's tough because I think the "optics of productivity" are somewhat important because money is involved. If I was concerned about things, I would have pinged someone in private months ago. Taking this to a public forum, leading with an accusation isn't the right thing to do regardless of how Babel.js was handling these things.

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> $130k in the United States is a joke

You are out of touch my friend.

I think you can cool it on the anger here too. It’s not helpful.

Neither is people piling on the maintainer of Babel based on GitHub activity and someone essentially accusing them of embezzlement. Sorry if that makes me upset.

$130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.

> $130k for a senior developer in the United States is nothing. People at FANG are making 3-4x that annually.

Right, hence my out of touch comment. This just doubles down.

open source maintainer salary !== FAANG total comp package

E5 engineers at FB are making an avg 200k base [1]. That is not that far off what you would expect the difference to be between open source maintainer and senior engineer at Facebook.

That is not 3-4x. Even if you include stock, that will put the FB eng around 350k. You may have an argument for the 2-3x range but basically only at the very top level companies and senior roles, not mid level contributors. And by including stock or other forms of TC besides base, you begin inflating the impression of cash flow. Stock grants don’t land in your wallet like paychecks do. Your QoL or vested net worth will take time to be impacted. It’s not like all of a sudden you can now afford X% more in your daily life.

IMO HN likes to exaggerate compensation levels.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

I agree that 2-3x is more appropriate. Either way, don't you think the maintainer of Babel could easily be making more money and doing easier work (individual contributor at some large org)?

The accusations that this person is freeloading off of Babel donations seem absurd (especially when you consider who is making them). The babel maintainer could be coasting at a large engineering organization with a lot less responsibility is what I am getting at it. It's exactly what the creator did...

The accusations are unjust.

Oh yeah, 100% agree with you there.

I was solely commenting on the SV compensation point, but yes, you’re totally right that he could be doing less work for significantly more money elsewhere. The accusations are unjust for sure. IMO less because of the salary numbers and more because commit count is simply not a good measure of employee performance.

Not sure what you're taking issue with here.

$130K is objectively not a joke of a salary in the United States. That's roughly 90th percentile.

It seems a common trend that software engineers think their high salaries are something they can take for granted forever.

I prefer to think that we are riding in a bubble that can pop any minute now. This line of thinking allows me to be more responsible with spending and save more for rainy days.

Good thinking - those of us with some grey in our hair remember when coming out of college with a CS degree into a $45-50k government contracting gig was cause for celebration rather than disappointment, after watching our slightly older friends take loans for Porsches on their snazzy dot-com salaries... and then struggle with the fallout a year or two later when said dot-coms drastically cut staff or disappeared entirely.

Of course, it's not a joke of a salary in the United States. Is $130k a joke of a salary for an NBA player even though it's 90th percentile? Context matters.

$130k is barely over the median pay for a Senior Software Engineer in the United States. A lot of the people stewarding and maintaining these projects are talented enough to be earning wages that are much further into the outliers (i.e. FANG compensation of 300-400k+/year).

That's all I'm saying. What's much more likely to be happening here is that the maintainer of Babel took a much harder job that cannot be summarized by output metrics like GitHub activity tracking.

Attacking him and essentially tossing around accusations of embezzlement when you've just received VC funding for a competitor is just wrong.

yes, context does matter. So why are you comparing a full time OSS developer with FANG? ridiculous. I don't have any opinion on the babel drama, but 130K isn't a "joke" even for a OSS developer who is "senior".

I'm comparing the salaries because the person is qualified to do either job. Someone turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain OSS, and then is accused of embezzlement by someone who left for FANG salaries and VC-backing.

Yea, tbh this is 100% my read on this situation. Wouldn't go near the dude or his work after this. Spent way too long at Facebook where no one ever has to sell a product and now doesn't understand at all how money works.

Yeah, I'm admittedly just learning about this whole situation, but I fail to see how this isn't him just trying to take down the competition of his new project

Sounds like an effort to take down a competitor. If Rome tools is to replace Babel, people need to lose faith in Babel. Seems like a transparent conflict of interest.

How is Rome Tools going to make money?

Typical paths with OSS:

- premium support

- custom features / enterprise product offerings

- commercial licensing

- professional services/consultancy

> Will Rome Tools employees get called out and shamed in public if they don't have enough visibility on their github profile?

An important difference is Rome Tools employees are being paid with VC money and not money from the community.