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This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the c

This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the company agreed to raise it when asked. If your goal is to have people throw money at you which you don't ask for, you are going to have a tough time working. A company that's willing to double your salary when you point out the offer is low sounds pretty great to me. It then sounds like some other timelines were shifted, but rather than engaging with the company to learn what was going on, they silently invented more 'disrespect'. Building a product is hard. It's also expensive. Many many companies go out of business trying. The company being somewhat reasonable with money, and moving other deadlines around to accomplish their goals, is not evil in and of itself. It sounds like OP needs to learn how to engage constructively, communicate their concerns and questions, and empathize with the people they're working with a bit.

friedman23 5y ago
>A company that's willing to double your salary when you point out the offer is low sounds pretty great to me. Yeah, a $1 to $2 raise, how generous. What I got out of this article is that the author knows the value of their time. $20,000 for 4 to 6 months of work for a software engineer is an insult. They might as well ask him to work for free.
- teraflop 5y ago
  > What I got out of this article is that the author knows the value of his time. Her time.
- kabdib 5y ago
  $20K is at most 100 hours of consulting time in SV. Probably less [it's been quite a while since I was in that market]. Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software. He was right to walk away.
  - CyberRabbi 5y ago
    100% it wasn’t even worth the effort of asking for more. I’ve tried that, it’s just humiliating. Their offer was openly disrespectful. If more engineers were brave enough to walk away from abusive employers like this it would be a better and more equitable industry.
  - Alekhine 5y ago
    Minor correction, Endrift is a woman
    - kabdib 5y ago
      I stand corrected. Apologies.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    Analogue isn't an SV company, so why are you using SV rates?
    - FemmeAndroid 5y ago
      They're a Seattle company hiring people with very niche skills. Even if you don't think SV rates apply exactly too Seattle, the scale of them does -- 100 hours vs months of work.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - msbarnett 5y ago
      Endrift lived in SV at the time, as stated in TFA - she would obviously base her rate expectations on her location, not on wherever Analogue happens to be legally incorporated.
      - kllrnohj 5y ago
        Endrift being unhappy with $10k-20k due to their current situation & cost of living is entirely different from the person I responded to claiming that "Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software" Analogue wasn't looking for SV contractors, they were looking for contractors in any location (in this case, a remote contractor). That Endrift happened to be located in SV changes their specific appetite for the offer, but doesn't make the offer unreasonable or disrespectful, either.
- zackbloom 5y ago
  She was very explicit about working on it part-time. If she doesn't know how much of his time it will take, how would the company? Isn't it her job to ask for the appropriate amount of money, and reject an offer which isn't enough?
  - Arainach 5y ago
    >I’m not very good at estimating timelines, so I gave a (very) rough estimate of 2 to 4 months. A reply affirming that that sounded reasonable, with an estimation of 300 to 400 hours of work, with a price tag of $10,000 was what I got back (assuming the project didn’t run seriously overtime). The author of the article gave an estimate of hundreds of hours across 2 to 4 months and Analogue's valuation of that time was $10k - for an expert in the domain working in software. That number is an insult. Even doubled it's quite bad.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Isn't it her job to ask for the appropriate amount of money, and reject an offer which isn't enough? That's exactly what she did. She didn't lead by demanding a specific number, but in some cases, that's actually pretty good advice, it can be good to let companies make the first offer on salary. Otherwise, she engaged with the company, told them upfront that $10,000 wasn't enough without leading them along too much; they came back with $20,000, which sounds like it still wasn't a great offer for her, but she engaged a bit longer to see what the context was and whether or not it would work. When the company came back with NDA demands and demands around her own Open Source projects that she wasn't comfortable with, she decided that the job wasn't for her, and (imo, very respectfully) turned down the offer: https://endrift.com/resources/post-assets/analogue-13.png https://endrift.com/resources/post-assets/analogue-13.png Writing a blog post about this process is allowed, I don't see anything entitled or disrespectful about that. NDAs and non-competes would make me very nervous if I was contracting with someone, particularly if I'm a domain expert with a popular Open Source project in the field that they're hiring me to work on. The other side of this comment thread is that she very factually described a negotiation process she had with a company, described why it went wrong and why it didn't work for her (she feels her time is worth more and wasn't being valued enough, among other issues), and described graciously breaking off the job offer on what seems like good terms to me -- and people are angry about that outcome? > This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. No, it reads like someone negotiating a salary and terms and having a clear view of what they think they're worth and when terms seem bad to them, which is a normal thing that people who look for jobs should be comfortable with. Ultimately, when you're negotiating a contract it does no one any favors for you to do anything else other than advocate for yourself during that negotiation process. Looking at company culture (trademarking fgpa, claims about emulation, etc), looking at side-project terms (delaying releases of an Open Source project), and looking at salary are all part of that -- and being honest about how you read those signals is something that good companies want. It doesn't help anyone to mask these objections. I get a little frustrated when I see people describe normal negotiation as entitled. This article is how job searches and hiring processes are supposed to work.
- xondono 5y ago
  > $20,000 for 4 to 6 months of work for a software engineer is an insult. In SV, the company is from HK. If that offer was ridiculous too, she should have said as much. I’ve been offered flat 200$ for jobs that cost >10k$. Your clients might not know the price of your labor, it’s your job to inform them.
  - RandallBrown 5y ago
    Wikipedia says the company is in Seattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company)
    - xondono 5y ago
      It says “founded”. Their terms of service point to Analogue Enterprises Limited, registered in HK. Founded is a typical weasel word because people tend to be more trusting of american companies.
      - RandallBrown 5y ago
        Either way, the founder is American so they would know if their offer was competitive or not with other American salaries.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  >>$20,000 for 4 to 6 months $20,000 for 300-400hrs of work, as estimated, quoted and documented by the author. I don't know why we are trying to misinterpret the story so hard in this thread. And I don't know how much more entitlement we can possibly have as profession on this continent, where we find $50-$66USD per hour of optional, interesting and challenging, comfortable and remote work, a perceived insult worthy of HackerNews front page. This person was not forced at gunpoint to work beneath their sustainable means. They got an offer, they rejected the offer. I give the author a credit of self-awareness for noting this is indeed a lot of money for a lot of people; less so for most of us on HN it appears.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Honestly, the whole post seems extremely petty to me. This person apparently felt so offended by the offer that they decided to make a post about it, name the company, and put screencaps of the conversation online? It's not like they were taken advantage of or underpaid or actually caused harm. They had a conversation about some work, negotiations broke down because they had wildly different ideas of the work and pay, so they went their separate ways. Was there some public badmouthing of this developer by Analogue or something? Because if not, this is possibly one of the most petty and entitled things I've seen posted to do with software development in a while. Don't want to take a low-ball offer? Don't take it. Posting what look to be private conversations online to shame someone because they didn't offer you enough money for something you have full choice to accept or ignore? WTF?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Eh, if a programmer feels guilty about the market rates for programmers, and they feel over-privileged, and they feel they can live on less money than that, then they can donate their money to people who are less fortunate, donate to advocacy groups, volunteer places in their community, or release Free(Libre) software. They don't need to ignore market rates for the industry and drive their own salary down for the benefit of software companies. We are talking about a company making a $200 luxury gameboy, this is not a company that needs your charity or a product that needs cheap labor. It's OK to both acknowledge that software engineers are extremely privileged and often divorced from the realities of other workers, and to acknowledge that we can use our privilege in ways that can help people (and in fact have something of a moral responsibility to do so), and finally also to acknowledge that we have market rates as an industry and we don't have an obligation to give labor away to companies who want to ignore those rates. Nobody working at McDonald's on a minimum wage salary is going to benefit from you under-charging for your consulting/contract work. If you want to help those people and acknowledge your privilege, there are a lot of ways to do that without undervaluing yourself. Direct your generosity towards under-privileged people/organizations, not towards companies that are even more privileged than you are. It's easy to accidentally misdirect responses to guilt (even legitimate guilt), and undervaluing salaries out of "fairness" to other workers is a misdirection of guilt. The fact that Amazon mistreats its warehouse workers is not helped by Amazon programmers allowing Amazon to pay them less for the same amount of programming labor. It would be helped by activism, by possibly quitting outright so the company is no longer getting the labor, or by publicly advocating for the other workers, or by donating a lot of money to lobbying groups to help raise minimum wage. But it's not showing solidarity with low-income workers to give more money to your employer.
ludamad 5y ago
I haven't had a good time with people who guess my compensation way off. I think that was just a flag here though, the 6 month creeping was starting to ask for more work
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
With all due respect, your comment reads like a case of 'I don't know math'-ism. - $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. That would have been low for me when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000; in Silicon Valley in 2020, you could make more than that working at Panda Express. (This is not an exaggeration for effect, I promise.) - doubling it to $20,000 is a $60K/year salary equivalent, right? That would have been just fine when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000! In Silicon Valley in 2020, it is…not super great, let's just say. BUT! - problem #1: "equivalent" is a dodge in practice, since actually it's, well, just $20K flat. WHICH LEADS TO! - problem #2: the "extra six months" the article referred to the employer trying to add on after the fact did not refer to adding more money to the contract. Now we've gone from $20K for four months to $20K for ten months -- which is actually worse than the original offer -- and at this point we are handily back to "screw this, I'm gonna make more money slinging orange chicken at the mall". tl;dr: the problem is not with the author wanting their time to be properly valued. "But building hardware is expensive, man" is not sufficient justification for this kind of nonsense.
- zackbloom 5y ago
  My understanding is the company wasn't paying for her time, it was paying for a job to be done by an ostensibly part-time contractor. I'm not sure how the deadline changing increases the amount of work that was to be done.
  - swiftcoder 5y ago
    They are asking for a timed exclusive on a product that isn't part of the contracted work. Timed exclusive release rights typically cost significantly more than straight-up contract work.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  Also keep in mind that contractor rates typically need to be 1.5-2.0x higher than salaried wages, since the contractor has to cover all healthcare+benefits themselves, plus whatever time it takes to find a next contract/gig/job when the current contract is over.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
They tried to stall the development of an open source GBA emulator. What's constructive about that? Where's the corporation's empathy?
- zackbloom 5y ago
  We don't really know what happened here, because as far as I can tell the OP didn't actually engage with anyone to understand what was happening. It seems most likely that the company needed to focus more on one project than another for a little while. That is not the same as stalling something intentionally. It's hard for the company to have empathy if the person didn't elect to communicate their thoughts and feelings.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > We don't really know what happened here First they said it wasn't going to impact the author's open source work. Then they started talking about delaying mGBA development until the product was released. Then they started talking about delaying mGBA development until many months after the product was released.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      Terms can change during negotiations, it's not like they changed the terms after an arrangement was agreed to.
willcipriano 5y ago
> This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the company agreed to raise it when asked. If your goal is to have people throw money at you which you don't ask for, you are going to have a tough time working. Would you similarly recommend that if a employee was to find a way to go the extra mile and really make a impact on the business they should hold back? After all, if businesses think people are going to throw labor at them they didn't ask for, they are going to have a tough time. I'm mostly joking but people are told as children that they should work hard and can expect their boss to notice and reward them. It isn't their fault that lots of people abuse that social construct, they are just naïve.
ohgodplsno 5y ago
Analogue has a history of being actual dicks and being unliked in the entire emulation industry. Not only are they constantly putting down software emulation (while then crawling to people like endrift to do the work for them, or attacking Near for their work on bsnes), they are now attempting to hold back emulation to make their product more attractive (as reported by endrift). Let's also not forget that they straight up trademarked the term "fpga" in an attempt to confuse people. This is a case of "Analogue has a history of being shady", and their attempt to negotiate this on Discord while offering a miserable pay is one more proof of it. There's maybe 10 qualified people on earth to make a cycle-accurate GBA BIOS, and they offer 20k for exclusive work for 10 months ?
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > There's maybe 10 qualified people on earth to make a cycle-accurate GBA BIOS, and they offer 20k for exclusive work for 10 months ? Turns out they only needed one, and got it done.
fallat 5y ago
How can you not see that even $20k is entirely insufficient for such specialized work? Do you understand the work that was asked?...
- zackbloom 5y ago
  The company made an offer. The person accepted it. Nothing notable about the scope of the work changed (at least as detailed in the blog post). The person wasn't stiffed or otherwise cheated. They just... didn't like a job offer which they themselves accepted.
  - cafard 5y ago
    " I told them that amount may work and went on with my day." I don't read that as accepting the offer, I read it as continuing the negotiation.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      I absolutely read that as accepting the offer. If you say that an amount "may work" then well, that's it, they are not going to increase the offer unless you ask. The next sentence confirms that too: " 6 days later I was told that the doubling was approved and we could sort out the fine details " Like ok, we're now past the payment negotiation stage, now onto other details. The person in the article clearly(to me) agreed to an insuficient amount of money, and then wrote a blog post to complain about it.
tomrod 5y ago
> This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. There is something sublime, while simultaneously prosaic, about missing that everyone's actions are about themselves, especially in the business portion of life. You can find allies and mentors and trustworthy partners. But ultimately, you are the only one who can decide if your next action is the right one, for you, your career, your mental health. Thus it is always about you. No one else can be a bigger advocate.
danShumway 5y ago
For anyone else reading this, when you're negotiating salary information with a company, it is good for you to think about yourself, it's not entitled. You are supposed to advocate for yourself. I'm not sure if the parent comment realizes that the author didn't actually accept the job? It sounds like parent believes she cut off work or something, which isn't at all what the article describes; it describes a pretty standard run-of-the-mill negotiation process that the author eventually cut off, and that left the author with a sour taste in her mouth about the company culture. None of that is entitlement. If you go into contract work, you are going to get a million sob stories from a million companies about how building products is hard. Often those sob stories will be paired with real red flags like this article describes (leading with aggressively low offers, asking you to put off other work you're doing, etc). Building products is hard, but also paying rent is hard, and so you have a duty to yourself to advocate first and foremost for yourself during negotiations. It's not kindness for you as a contractor to take on work that doesn't fit you or that you don't think is sustainable; you're setting yourself up for burnout and failed projects if you do that. And burning out in the middle of development, not being able to make rent, having to ignore other clients, all of that also makes products hard to ship. All of that is also a recipe for going out of business.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Honestly, it's not the looking out for yourself and not wanting to take a lowball offer that makes this come off as entitled to me, it's the idea that they were apparently so offended that they name names about the situation, and post what appear to be chat logs, just for what looks like a fairly benign negotiation fail. It's professional to treat yourself and your time and skills with the respect they deserve and not bother with lowball offers. It doesn't exactly come across as professional to me to throw all this online for the world to see because apparently they either didn't want to pay (or couldn't afford) what they needed so offered far less than was needed. Maybe there's some subtext here which I'm missing or isn't explained? Did this company disparage her conduct or skills publicly or something? The level of the response (even how it's called a "hate story") just comes across as weird and overly petty to me.
  - 5y ago
aseipp 5y ago
Doesn't matter. She has the needed skills, she gets to set the terms completely. "I want X to happen" and X doesn't happen? No deal. Pretty straightforward. I read all the chat logs and I can say she was much nicer than she probably had to be, honestly. In the end, she realized they wanted to delay mGBA development, that their deadlines were shifting (they wanted no commits for 6-months post release of a product that hasn't launched 2 years later), and that it ultimately wasn't worth her time to even further negotiations. "All about me"-ism, what a complete crock. Made-up MBA word salad used to shame a person for daring to exercise a shred of self-respect and autonomy, instead of being treated like a doormat. > Building a product is hard. It's also expensive... and empathize with the people they're working with a bit. Sorry to be a hater, but I don't care. I'm not going to cry myself to sleep at night because there's one less "product" to consume in the world. One less thing in the world that has my name tucked away in a measly, legally-obligated "About this software" window nobody views, for work that will get thrown in a landfill and forgotten in less than a decade. Sound the alarms everybody, there's one less toy in the world! And if it wasn't for this entitled person, you would have had it faster, with one more feature, for the same cost: the most important things there are. I bawl at the thought. No, I truly don't care that building your product is hard work or that you have thin margins. Because if I did, I'd own stock. Simple as that. So until then, all that hard product-building work? That sounds like your problem. Not my problem.
- TAForObvReasons 5y ago
  There's a deep and misplaced sense of entitlement here. Some companies have money and want to complete a project, and some developers can do the work and want to be compensated. The process by which the compensation is determined involves negotiation. That is a two-sided process. In none of the presented screenshots did the author actually propose what she thought was a fair compensation for the work. She suggests $20K may work but that is the moment to say what she thinks is fair or what would have been worth her time A lot of people who do emulator work are not based in SF. Many are in other countries where $10K stretches a lot further. The actual offer is not really insulting if the company didn't know she was in such a high COL area. In the case of GBA emulator work, there is some sort of market. For example, MVG wrote the emulator for the Shantae re-release and there's no reason to believe others can't do the same. If the author straight up made a counter, we could judge the reasonableness accordingly. In absence, it seems like entitlement.
gamblor956 5y ago
You missed the last part of the story, where the true crux of the matter was that Analogue promised that the work for them would not impact her open source project...and then tried to demand that she delay the next release of her open source emulator until at least 6 months after the release of the Analogue Pocket. At the time of negotiation, that was initially scheduled for Summer 2020...but ended up actually being Dec 2021, so the author's next release would have been delayed more than 1.5 years.
tombert 5y ago
Does it? I think you'd have a point if Analogue were a charity of grant-funded or something, but Analogue is a for-profit entity. Most people reading this post are in the business of selling their time and/or expertise for money, and it's not weird to want to maximize that value. I (like most people I think) hate the process of salary negotiations, but I always do it because of course that's just what you do. I've walked away from offers that seemed interesting because I'm not 100% about how they are handling their finances. This isn't really selfish; I have a responsibility to me and my wife. I need to know that I won't get too burnt out, I need to know that the money I am making will sustain me comfortably, I need to know that I will have enough to pay my mortgage or my wife's school etc. If I am going to work to make someone else a profit, then I should try and maximize my own as well.
teawrecks 5y ago
When I'm negotiating compensation for a job, it should most definitely be 100% "all about me". There is no charity involved here. The company isn't going to make any investments in me that it doesn't think will pay off for itself later, and I should do the same. > The company being somewhat reasonable with money That's the thing, they weren't. If you've done the math and know how much a task is worth, then you should offer roughly that amount. To ask one amount and then double it when it's not enough means you either haven't done the math, or you have and you were hoping the potential hire hadn't. It's like when I see anything regularly go on sale for 50%+ off; they're probably making money even when it's on sale, which means without the sale they have more than a 100% markup over cost. They have their market cornered and are getting as greedy as they can. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with me not buying it either.
dayvid 5y ago
This is about business and not me or them. All that matters is that you're getting what you want out of a business relationship with someone else. In my brief experience as a dev consultant/independent business owner: 1. You should get the scope of work from a client before they throw a number at you. 2. You should then turn them back a proposal with an amount (based on some estimate of hours, or whichever way you prefer to bill people (daily, retainer, hourly, whatever) In this scenario, they threw out a number and it set a bad expectation on the dev. I don't blame the author. This is 300-400 hours of your life you will not get back and it sounds like it's not competitive to them based on their situation. The business will have to try someone else or change up their approach.

friedman23 5y ago

>A company that's willing to double your salary when you point out the offer is low sounds pretty great to me. Yeah, a $1 to $2 raise, how generous. What I got out of this article is that the author knows the value of their time. $20,000 for 4 to 6 months of work for a software engineer is an insult. They might as well ask him to work for free.

teraflop 5y ago
> What I got out of this article is that the author knows the value of his time. Her time.
kabdib 5y ago
$20K is at most 100 hours of consulting time in SV. Probably less [it's been quite a while since I was in that market]. Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software. He was right to walk away.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  100% it wasn’t even worth the effort of asking for more. I’ve tried that, it’s just humiliating. Their offer was openly disrespectful. If more engineers were brave enough to walk away from abusive employers like this it would be a better and more equitable industry.
- Alekhine 5y ago
  Minor correction, Endrift is a woman
  - kabdib 5y ago
    I stand corrected. Apologies.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Analogue isn't an SV company, so why are you using SV rates?
  - FemmeAndroid 5y ago
    They're a Seattle company hiring people with very niche skills. Even if you don't think SV rates apply exactly too Seattle, the scale of them does -- 100 hours vs months of work.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - msbarnett 5y ago
    Endrift lived in SV at the time, as stated in TFA - she would obviously base her rate expectations on her location, not on wherever Analogue happens to be legally incorporated.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      Endrift being unhappy with $10k-20k due to their current situation & cost of living is entirely different from the person I responded to claiming that "Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software" Analogue wasn't looking for SV contractors, they were looking for contractors in any location (in this case, a remote contractor). That Endrift happened to be located in SV changes their specific appetite for the offer, but doesn't make the offer unreasonable or disrespectful, either.
zackbloom 5y ago
She was very explicit about working on it part-time. If she doesn't know how much of his time it will take, how would the company? Isn't it her job to ask for the appropriate amount of money, and reject an offer which isn't enough?
- Arainach 5y ago
  >I’m not very good at estimating timelines, so I gave a (very) rough estimate of 2 to 4 months. A reply affirming that that sounded reasonable, with an estimation of 300 to 400 hours of work, with a price tag of $10,000 was what I got back (assuming the project didn’t run seriously overtime). The author of the article gave an estimate of hundreds of hours across 2 to 4 months and Analogue's valuation of that time was $10k - for an expert in the domain working in software. That number is an insult. Even doubled it's quite bad.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Isn't it her job to ask for the appropriate amount of money, and reject an offer which isn't enough? That's exactly what she did. She didn't lead by demanding a specific number, but in some cases, that's actually pretty good advice, it can be good to let companies make the first offer on salary. Otherwise, she engaged with the company, told them upfront that $10,000 wasn't enough without leading them along too much; they came back with $20,000, which sounds like it still wasn't a great offer for her, but she engaged a bit longer to see what the context was and whether or not it would work. When the company came back with NDA demands and demands around her own Open Source projects that she wasn't comfortable with, she decided that the job wasn't for her, and (imo, very respectfully) turned down the offer: https://endrift.com/resources/post-assets/analogue-13.png https://endrift.com/resources/post-assets/analogue-13.png Writing a blog post about this process is allowed, I don't see anything entitled or disrespectful about that. NDAs and non-competes would make me very nervous if I was contracting with someone, particularly if I'm a domain expert with a popular Open Source project in the field that they're hiring me to work on. The other side of this comment thread is that she very factually described a negotiation process she had with a company, described why it went wrong and why it didn't work for her (she feels her time is worth more and wasn't being valued enough, among other issues), and described graciously breaking off the job offer on what seems like good terms to me -- and people are angry about that outcome? > This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. No, it reads like someone negotiating a salary and terms and having a clear view of what they think they're worth and when terms seem bad to them, which is a normal thing that people who look for jobs should be comfortable with. Ultimately, when you're negotiating a contract it does no one any favors for you to do anything else other than advocate for yourself during that negotiation process. Looking at company culture (trademarking fgpa, claims about emulation, etc), looking at side-project terms (delaying releases of an Open Source project), and looking at salary are all part of that -- and being honest about how you read those signals is something that good companies want. It doesn't help anyone to mask these objections. I get a little frustrated when I see people describe normal negotiation as entitled. This article is how job searches and hiring processes are supposed to work.
xondono 5y ago
> $20,000 for 4 to 6 months of work for a software engineer is an insult. In SV, the company is from HK. If that offer was ridiculous too, she should have said as much. I’ve been offered flat 200$ for jobs that cost >10k$. Your clients might not know the price of your labor, it’s your job to inform them.
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  Wikipedia says the company is in Seattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company)
  - xondono 5y ago
    It says “founded”. Their terms of service point to Analogue Enterprises Limited, registered in HK. Founded is a typical weasel word because people tend to be more trusting of american companies.
    - RandallBrown 5y ago
      Either way, the founder is American so they would know if their offer was competitive or not with other American salaries.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
>>$20,000 for 4 to 6 months $20,000 for 300-400hrs of work, as estimated, quoted and documented by the author. I don't know why we are trying to misinterpret the story so hard in this thread. And I don't know how much more entitlement we can possibly have as profession on this continent, where we find $50-$66USD per hour of optional, interesting and challenging, comfortable and remote work, a perceived insult worthy of HackerNews front page. This person was not forced at gunpoint to work beneath their sustainable means. They got an offer, they rejected the offer. I give the author a credit of self-awareness for noting this is indeed a lot of money for a lot of people; less so for most of us on HN it appears.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Honestly, the whole post seems extremely petty to me. This person apparently felt so offended by the offer that they decided to make a post about it, name the company, and put screencaps of the conversation online? It's not like they were taken advantage of or underpaid or actually caused harm. They had a conversation about some work, negotiations broke down because they had wildly different ideas of the work and pay, so they went their separate ways. Was there some public badmouthing of this developer by Analogue or something? Because if not, this is possibly one of the most petty and entitled things I've seen posted to do with software development in a while. Don't want to take a low-ball offer? Don't take it. Posting what look to be private conversations online to shame someone because they didn't offer you enough money for something you have full choice to accept or ignore? WTF?
- danShumway 5y ago
  Eh, if a programmer feels guilty about the market rates for programmers, and they feel over-privileged, and they feel they can live on less money than that, then they can donate their money to people who are less fortunate, donate to advocacy groups, volunteer places in their community, or release Free(Libre) software. They don't need to ignore market rates for the industry and drive their own salary down for the benefit of software companies. We are talking about a company making a $200 luxury gameboy, this is not a company that needs your charity or a product that needs cheap labor. It's OK to both acknowledge that software engineers are extremely privileged and often divorced from the realities of other workers, and to acknowledge that we can use our privilege in ways that can help people (and in fact have something of a moral responsibility to do so), and finally also to acknowledge that we have market rates as an industry and we don't have an obligation to give labor away to companies who want to ignore those rates. Nobody working at McDonald's on a minimum wage salary is going to benefit from you under-charging for your consulting/contract work. If you want to help those people and acknowledge your privilege, there are a lot of ways to do that without undervaluing yourself. Direct your generosity towards under-privileged people/organizations, not towards companies that are even more privileged than you are. It's easy to accidentally misdirect responses to guilt (even legitimate guilt), and undervaluing salaries out of "fairness" to other workers is a misdirection of guilt. The fact that Amazon mistreats its warehouse workers is not helped by Amazon programmers allowing Amazon to pay them less for the same amount of programming labor. It would be helped by activism, by possibly quitting outright so the company is no longer getting the labor, or by publicly advocating for the other workers, or by donating a lot of money to lobbying groups to help raise minimum wage. But it's not showing solidarity with low-income workers to give more money to your employer.

ludamad 5y ago

I haven't had a good time with people who guess my compensation way off. I think that was just a flag here though, the 6 month creeping was starting to ask for more work

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

With all due respect, your comment reads like a case of 'I don't know math'-ism. - $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary. That would have been low for me when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000; in Silicon Valley in 2020, you could make more than that working at Panda Express. (This is not an exaggeration for effect, I promise.) - doubling it to $20,000 is a $60K/year salary equivalent, right? That would have been just fine when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000! In Silicon Valley in 2020, it is…not super great, let's just say. BUT! - problem #1: "equivalent" is a dodge in practice, since actually it's, well, just $20K flat. WHICH LEADS TO! - problem #2: the "extra six months" the article referred to the employer trying to add on after the fact did not refer to adding more money to the contract. Now we've gone from $20K for four months to $20K for ten months -- which is actually worse than the original offer -- and at this point we are handily back to "screw this, I'm gonna make more money slinging orange chicken at the mall". tl;dr: the problem is not with the author wanting their time to be properly valued. "But building hardware is expensive, man" is not sufficient justification for this kind of nonsense.

zackbloom 5y ago
My understanding is the company wasn't paying for her time, it was paying for a job to be done by an ostensibly part-time contractor. I'm not sure how the deadline changing increases the amount of work that was to be done.
- swiftcoder 5y ago
  They are asking for a timed exclusive on a product that isn't part of the contracted work. Timed exclusive release rights typically cost significantly more than straight-up contract work.
swiftcoder 5y ago
Also keep in mind that contractor rates typically need to be 1.5-2.0x higher than salaried wages, since the contractor has to cover all healthcare+benefits themselves, plus whatever time it takes to find a next contract/gig/job when the current contract is over.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

They tried to stall the development of an open source GBA emulator. What's constructive about that? Where's the corporation's empathy?

zackbloom 5y ago
We don't really know what happened here, because as far as I can tell the OP didn't actually engage with anyone to understand what was happening. It seems most likely that the company needed to focus more on one project than another for a little while. That is not the same as stalling something intentionally. It's hard for the company to have empathy if the person didn't elect to communicate their thoughts and feelings.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > We don't really know what happened here First they said it wasn't going to impact the author's open source work. Then they started talking about delaying mGBA development until the product was released. Then they started talking about delaying mGBA development until many months after the product was released.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Terms can change during negotiations, it's not like they changed the terms after an arrangement was agreed to.

willcipriano 5y ago

> This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the company agreed to raise it when asked. If your goal is to have people throw money at you which you don't ask for, you are going to have a tough time working. Would you similarly recommend that if a employee was to find a way to go the extra mile and really make a impact on the business they should hold back? After all, if businesses think people are going to throw labor at them they didn't ask for, they are going to have a tough time. I'm mostly joking but people are told as children that they should work hard and can expect their boss to notice and reward them. It isn't their fault that lots of people abuse that social construct, they are just naïve.

ohgodplsno 5y ago

Analogue has a history of being actual dicks and being unliked in the entire emulation industry. Not only are they constantly putting down software emulation (while then crawling to people like endrift to do the work for them, or attacking Near for their work on bsnes), they are now attempting to hold back emulation to make their product more attractive (as reported by endrift). Let's also not forget that they straight up trademarked the term "fpga" in an attempt to confuse people. This is a case of "Analogue has a history of being shady", and their attempt to negotiate this on Discord while offering a miserable pay is one more proof of it. There's maybe 10 qualified people on earth to make a cycle-accurate GBA BIOS, and they offer 20k for exclusive work for 10 months ?

jonny_eh 5y ago
> There's maybe 10 qualified people on earth to make a cycle-accurate GBA BIOS, and they offer 20k for exclusive work for 10 months ? Turns out they only needed one, and got it done.

fallat 5y ago

How can you not see that even $20k is entirely insufficient for such specialized work? Do you understand the work that was asked?...

zackbloom 5y ago
The company made an offer. The person accepted it. Nothing notable about the scope of the work changed (at least as detailed in the blog post). The person wasn't stiffed or otherwise cheated. They just... didn't like a job offer which they themselves accepted.
- cafard 5y ago
  " I told them that amount may work and went on with my day." I don't read that as accepting the offer, I read it as continuing the negotiation.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I absolutely read that as accepting the offer. If you say that an amount "may work" then well, that's it, they are not going to increase the offer unless you ask. The next sentence confirms that too: " 6 days later I was told that the doubling was approved and we could sort out the fine details " Like ok, we're now past the payment negotiation stage, now onto other details. The person in the article clearly(to me) agreed to an insuficient amount of money, and then wrote a blog post to complain about it.

tomrod 5y ago

> This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. There is something sublime, while simultaneously prosaic, about missing that everyone's actions are about themselves, especially in the business portion of life. You can find allies and mentors and trustworthy partners. But ultimately, you are the only one who can decide if your next action is the right one, for you, your career, your mental health. Thus it is always about you. No one else can be a bigger advocate.

danShumway 5y ago

For anyone else reading this, when you're negotiating salary information with a company, it is good for you to think about yourself, it's not entitled. You are supposed to advocate for yourself. I'm not sure if the parent comment realizes that the author didn't actually accept the job? It sounds like parent believes she cut off work or something, which isn't at all what the article describes; it describes a pretty standard run-of-the-mill negotiation process that the author eventually cut off, and that left the author with a sour taste in her mouth about the company culture. None of that is entitlement. If you go into contract work, you are going to get a million sob stories from a million companies about how building products is hard. Often those sob stories will be paired with real red flags like this article describes (leading with aggressively low offers, asking you to put off other work you're doing, etc). Building products is hard, but also paying rent is hard, and so you have a duty to yourself to advocate first and foremost for yourself during negotiations. It's not kindness for you as a contractor to take on work that doesn't fit you or that you don't think is sustainable; you're setting yourself up for burnout and failed projects if you do that. And burning out in the middle of development, not being able to make rent, having to ignore other clients, all of that also makes products hard to ship. All of that is also a recipe for going out of business.

kbenson 5y ago
Honestly, it's not the looking out for yourself and not wanting to take a lowball offer that makes this come off as entitled to me, it's the idea that they were apparently so offended that they name names about the situation, and post what appear to be chat logs, just for what looks like a fairly benign negotiation fail. It's professional to treat yourself and your time and skills with the respect they deserve and not bother with lowball offers. It doesn't exactly come across as professional to me to throw all this online for the world to see because apparently they either didn't want to pay (or couldn't afford) what they needed so offered far less than was needed. Maybe there's some subtext here which I'm missing or isn't explained? Did this company disparage her conduct or skills publicly or something? The level of the response (even how it's called a "hate story") just comes across as weird and overly petty to me.
- 5y ago

aseipp 5y ago

Doesn't matter. She has the needed skills, she gets to set the terms completely. "I want X to happen" and X doesn't happen? No deal. Pretty straightforward. I read all the chat logs and I can say she was much nicer than she probably had to be, honestly. In the end, she realized they wanted to delay mGBA development, that their deadlines were shifting (they wanted no commits for 6-months post release of a product that hasn't launched 2 years later), and that it ultimately wasn't worth her time to even further negotiations. "All about me"-ism, what a complete crock. Made-up MBA word salad used to shame a person for daring to exercise a shred of self-respect and autonomy, instead of being treated like a doormat. > Building a product is hard. It's also expensive... and empathize with the people they're working with a bit. Sorry to be a hater, but I don't care. I'm not going to cry myself to sleep at night because there's one less "product" to consume in the world. One less thing in the world that has my name tucked away in a measly, legally-obligated "About this software" window nobody views, for work that will get thrown in a landfill and forgotten in less than a decade. Sound the alarms everybody, there's one less toy in the world! And if it wasn't for this entitled person, you would have had it faster, with one more feature, for the same cost: the most important things there are. I bawl at the thought. No, I truly don't care that building your product is hard work or that you have thin margins. Because if I did, I'd own stock. Simple as that. So until then, all that hard product-building work? That sounds like your problem. Not my problem.

TAForObvReasons 5y ago
There's a deep and misplaced sense of entitlement here. Some companies have money and want to complete a project, and some developers can do the work and want to be compensated. The process by which the compensation is determined involves negotiation. That is a two-sided process. In none of the presented screenshots did the author actually propose what she thought was a fair compensation for the work. She suggests $20K may work but that is the moment to say what she thinks is fair or what would have been worth her time A lot of people who do emulator work are not based in SF. Many are in other countries where $10K stretches a lot further. The actual offer is not really insulting if the company didn't know she was in such a high COL area. In the case of GBA emulator work, there is some sort of market. For example, MVG wrote the emulator for the Shantae re-release and there's no reason to believe others can't do the same. If the author straight up made a counter, we could judge the reasonableness accordingly. In absence, it seems like entitlement.

gamblor956 5y ago

You missed the last part of the story, where the true crux of the matter was that Analogue promised that the work for them would not impact her open source project...and then tried to demand that she delay the next release of her open source emulator until at least 6 months after the release of the Analogue Pocket. At the time of negotiation, that was initially scheduled for Summer 2020...but ended up actually being Dec 2021, so the author's next release would have been delayed more than 1.5 years.

tombert 5y ago

Does it? I think you'd have a point if Analogue were a charity of grant-funded or something, but Analogue is a for-profit entity. Most people reading this post are in the business of selling their time and/or expertise for money, and it's not weird to want to maximize that value. I (like most people I think) hate the process of salary negotiations, but I always do it because of course that's just what you do. I've walked away from offers that seemed interesting because I'm not 100% about how they are handling their finances. This isn't really selfish; I have a responsibility to me and my wife. I need to know that I won't get too burnt out, I need to know that the money I am making will sustain me comfortably, I need to know that I will have enough to pay my mortgage or my wife's school etc. If I am going to work to make someone else a profit, then I should try and maximize my own as well.

teawrecks 5y ago

When I'm negotiating compensation for a job, it should most definitely be 100% "all about me". There is no charity involved here. The company isn't going to make any investments in me that it doesn't think will pay off for itself later, and I should do the same. > The company being somewhat reasonable with money That's the thing, they weren't. If you've done the math and know how much a task is worth, then you should offer roughly that amount. To ask one amount and then double it when it's not enough means you either haven't done the math, or you have and you were hoping the potential hire hadn't. It's like when I see anything regularly go on sale for 50%+ off; they're probably making money even when it's on sale, which means without the sale they have more than a 100% markup over cost. They have their market cornered and are getting as greedy as they can. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with me not buying it either.

dayvid 5y ago

This is about business and not me or them. All that matters is that you're getting what you want out of a business relationship with someone else. In my brief experience as a dev consultant/independent business owner: 1. You should get the scope of work from a client before they throw a number at you. 2. You should then turn them back a proposal with an amount (based on some estimate of hours, or whichever way you prefer to bill people (daily, retainer, hourly, whatever) In this scenario, they threw out a number and it set a bad expectation on the dev. I don't blame the author. This is 300-400 hours of your life you will not get back and it sounds like it's not competitive to them based on their situation. The business will have to try someone else or change up their approach.