I'm always impressed by how many excellent products John and the jQuery team produce.
Out of curiosity, how does John earn a living?
I saw him speak at the Philly Emerging Tech conference last year and his talk convinced me to switch over to jQuery from Prototype (those were the days). Do the speakers get paid much for their presentations?
Many technical conferences cover flights and hotel but don't pay a speakers fee. My experience is that speakers are usually paid for 3 hour tutorial sessions but not for 45 minute conference sessions or panels. Keynotes are much more likely to pay than regular sessions. Some of the more high-end conferences do pay their speakers, especially if they rely on "big names" rather than just topics to pull in their audience.
It's a chapter from the latest book by Scott Berkun (the author of "Making Things Happen") about public speaking and it mentions some numbers for how much speakers can get paid. At the very bottom, he writes that he's averaging $100k a year right now, from books and presentations. Just a few data points.
Ok, that's absolutely not true in the tech world. I was chatting with some friends that also speak frequently to developer-centric audiences and we were all commiserating how hard it is to get basic necessities when speaking - it's a challenge finding conferences that will pay for a hotel room, let alone actually pay you to speak at the conference. Really the only time you can ever expect to get paid to speak is if you're doing training or a workshop - conferences are a complete wash.
Out of curiosity, how does John earn a living?
I saw him speak at the Philly Emerging Tech conference last year and his talk convinced me to switch over to jQuery from Prototype (those were the days). Do the speakers get paid much for their presentations?