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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

You left out the rest of the paragraph (emphasis mine):

> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."

I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.

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$200 /hr is a pretty low consulting rate. You are never going to be 100% utilized, so right off the bat you can divide that $400k by at least 50% over a long period of time. You also have to pay for your own insurance, equipment...

$200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!

Seems fine to me if it's well known so that donors know what they're getting.

Another part of the article mentions him "wasting" money

> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.

The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.

Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.

It's a legal requirement for most US non-profits to file public and accurate accounting of their funds and expenses, Ruby Together is no exception and all the info is publicly available [1].

Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...

And in the USA, if you volunteer professional labor, you cannot take it off on your taxes.

So yeah, if I can't get the benefit of taking off of my taxes, I do want paid. Can't afford it otherwise, since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.

Are you saying that if you donate your time without pay you would still be taxed as though you _had_ been paid?

No, that's not how it works in the USA - apparently this person wants a tax deduction for their voluntary contribution as if it was a financial contribution to a non-profit which is tax deductible.

On the flip side, contributions have financial value, otherwise what are we all doing here?

I don't think they want a tax deduction necessarily, they're just pointing out that because of how voluntary labour is valued by the tax system it is rational to want to be paid for contributing to non-profits instead of doing it for free.

If you spent N hours working and donated your $X*N salary to a non-profit, you'd get a tax deduction for that amount. However if you instead spend the same N hours contributing, you get literally nothing even though the work should be valued at some fraction of $X*N if not the same value (and some laws such as campaign finance limits do treat volunteering of this form to be valued at standard rates even if it's unpaid, so this is not without precedent).

I don't think a tax deduction like that would work (everyone will pretend to be donating 16 hours of volunteer time a day), so it's back to charging for your work as a contractor.

I just tell people to charge the non-profit a reasonable non corp rate. That would just be paid work for a non profit, which (the company) is already tax exempt.

You know thats not what I'm saying.

I'm making a larger comparison that most of our resource, which is labor, cannot be donated at the mean cost per hour and taken off of taxes.

However rich people, whose primary resource is money, CAN be taken off on taxes.

Rich people have ways they can donate and shed their tax burden. Whereas average working people cannot volunteer professional labor and take off the same equivalent.

No I don't! I know next to nothing about the American tax system.

In fact it would surprise me if you _could_ somehow reduce your tax burden by doing vountary work.

> since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.

Simultaneously?

You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.

Rich people can donate money, and they take large tax writeoffs for it.

The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor.

I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.

You can sell that labor “you cannot afford” to donate to someone else - and donate the money you receive for it. So you get a tax write off instead of getting shat on or whatever.

It’s also the SF Bay Area, which h has a very high cost of living. That context is important. Also the article was corrected, the rate was $150.

That's not how you compute yearly earnings from a consulting rate. We consultants need to negotiate contracts, do marketing, accounting, etc. We get sick, we go on vacation and sometimes you're just hustling for clients. Also, that day that you're completely unmotivated, or moody, or hangover, or it was election day and the news are crazy, and you don't write a line of code in the whole day? You still get paid when on a salary, but you don't bill that to a client. 200 * 32 * 42 gives you a much better estimate for a highly productive individual.

As a non-profit, the exact amount that Ruby Together paid Andre was publicly disclosed in its annual tax filings [1]:

2015: $29,250

2016: $43,988

2017: $48,143

2018: $51,058

2019: $60,000

2020: $32,693

2021: $21,420

The filings also note that "The entire board of directors reviews and approves (by vote) compensation for the CEO."

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...

Looking at the filings, it's not clear to me what the $250k "Program Services" were, or the $122k "Other Salaries and Wages" are.

I guess there could potentially be additional non-salary compensation, i.e. using another business to charge fees of the non-profit?

Looking closer at some filings there's also "$9k travel expenses" "$4k office expenses", "$12k IT expenses", which could potentially be supplementing his compensation as well.

For such a critical piece of software/infrastructure that runs in massive companies making hundreds of millions, this is a rounding error. I literally do not see a single issue with that rate, even in 2000s.

Now the arguments for frivolous spending is definitely an issue that should be criticized, but getting paid to support a massive language ecosystem and SaaS at-large, that’s a non issue at any rate

The eventual rate paid by Ruby Together settled on $150/hr and has remained that amount for the last decade. Justin’s data is far out of date.

400k is about the total comp for most FANG devs. Plus theirs no proof he was constantly billing that.

The only issue is a lack of transparency.

Yeah. Sometimes more than that, even

400k/yr is excessive?

For an open source org that’s running on donations and falsely implying that their donations are going to maintain server costs, yes that’s excessive. If the donations where clearly communicating that they where directly for this persons personal salary then no.

According to TFA they were saying that the donations were to pay "our team".

I honestly don’t know if you are trying to bait or just completely missed the context of that part of TFA. But in either case here is the rest of TFA on that point:

To pay our team … which initially linked to a list of the board members without any explanation of how the money was being allocated. This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.

"Excessive" is obviously a subjective measurement. At times I don't think that HN's median audience appreciates that a 400k/yr salary is objectively extremely high, even for software engineers, even in 2025. A "mere" $367K/yr total compensation puts you in the 90th percentile of SWE earnings. I know Google, Facebook, and a few others greatly exceed that in total compensation at their higher SWE levels, but they're probably not the baseline you should be looking at across the industry.

I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.

it's really important to not compare freelance and W2 salaries directly. freelance gets 10% off the top immediately for social security and Medicare taxes that employers usually pay. next is your health insurance which will eat another couple thousand a year. then you have to remember that as freelance you don't get paid for vacation and sick time, so there goes another ~10%. also, you're not getting paid for all the hours. if you spend a day without work to do as a freelance, you don't get payed for it. $200 an hour is still a good salary, but it's not $400k a year. it's probably closer to $250k

What would you buy with $400k/yr?

I define a “great” standard of living as roughly: nutritious food (basic meat, vegetables, spices); a home apartment in an area without excessive crime, noise, or pollution; medical care; a couple weeks of vacation per year; ability to frequently purchase cheap things like video games, movie tickets, takeout; ability to rarely purchase more expensive things like high-end technology, quality furniture, very fancy meals; some choice of more frequent vacations, a better apartment/location, fancier everyday food, more things; and everything we take for granted (water, electricity, clean clothes, etc.).

Listing it out it’s actually quite a lot. But is it $400k? I really doubt it (very likely even $100k is more than enough, though inflation will change that). If you or a family member has health issues you may need this much, but that’s the exception (and a failure of health insurance and altruism…)

I'd "buy" increased financial safety (which is better than current or decreased financial safety).

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