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There’s something to be said for those salaries being too “Valley”. $121k per year is a lot of money; you’d likely be able to find good JS developers in the UK for half that and in continental Europe for even less (in Eastern Europe you could probably get away with $30k…).

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$121k is not a lot of money for someone writing compilers. And I would seriously doubt that you could just take your average developer and expect them to be able to contribute to a project like Babel in an equally productive way.

120k is a wildly high salary in Europe, and contrary to popular belief Europeans don’t just cut ties to their homeland and move to Silicon Valley just because the salary is higher. You can find a lot of compiler experts sitting safely in the UK or Italy or Russia.

The requirement for working on Babel is being a Javascript expert and compiler engineer, not a good JS developer. It's 85k GBP, that is very reasonable for those skills.

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