I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.

They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k

> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers

As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.

$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.

100k per month per person is over 1 million a year.

So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.

I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?

Most “senior devs” are actually bad.

Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.

Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.

And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.

Realistically if you can work on a small and high profile project like tailwind you're gonna be snatched up by someone willing to pay you at or near FAANG levels

According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.

As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.

[1]: https://careers.usnews.com/best-jobs/software-developer/sala...

That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.

Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.

Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.

All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].

You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.

Running one of the world’s leading UI libraries is far more impactful than anything 99% of FAANG engineers have or will ever work on.

Tailwind requires a compiler to work.