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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

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.
- aeone 5y ago
  Without weighing in on the rest, I'd quickly note that the name of the post seems mostly to be a reference to an (unrelated) visual novel called "Analogue: A Hate Story".
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Which demonstrates poor judgement. The post title is extremely inflammatory whether it's a reference or not.
- hitekker 5y ago
  Yeah, how dare the OP warn us that a fly-by-night company is trying to lowball and screw over engineers. Or that this company has failed to deliver on a project for 2 years because they can't find people willing to accept terrible offers.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Do you really need to be told about every company that could conceivably offer to pay you too little? I've go news for you, you won't be able to read that list as fast as new entries get added. Telling people to value their time and effort is laudable. Lambasting some company or person in public because they offered you less than you were worth is not. If I contacted you in private and offered you $1000 to design a GBA emulator (not quite the same thing, I know) and you thought that was far too little money, is that worth posting screencaps of, or maybe you should just tell me "really that's so low of an offer that whether you intend it to be or not it's sort of insulting, as I would be working for so far less than I value my time"? That seems like the most useful thing to do for all involved. Maybe something good comes of it, maybe nothing changes, but at least it's not just one person pointing at another and doing the equivalent of saying "look at them and laugh because they had the temerity to try to pay me for work, but just not enough". I mean at some point the person she's talking to literally says in the screencaps "No hehe this is just a personal conversation". It's not screwing someone over to make an offer of work, no matter how low. Some people are happy to do certain types of work for free. Others want to be paid. The amount they may want to be paid might be based on many things, including market rates and cost of living in their area. Making an offer to someone is never screwing them over, nor even trying to, as long as they can freely reject it. The whole idea that them making an offer, no matter how low, is some sort of way of screwing someone over is just totally weird to me, and I'm not sure how people are even coming to that conclusion.

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.

aeone 5y ago
Without weighing in on the rest, I'd quickly note that the name of the post seems mostly to be a reference to an (unrelated) visual novel called "Analogue: A Hate Story".
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Which demonstrates poor judgement. The post title is extremely inflammatory whether it's a reference or not.
hitekker 5y ago
Yeah, how dare the OP warn us that a fly-by-night company is trying to lowball and screw over engineers. Or that this company has failed to deliver on a project for 2 years because they can't find people willing to accept terrible offers.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Do you really need to be told about every company that could conceivably offer to pay you too little? I've go news for you, you won't be able to read that list as fast as new entries get added. Telling people to value their time and effort is laudable. Lambasting some company or person in public because they offered you less than you were worth is not. If I contacted you in private and offered you $1000 to design a GBA emulator (not quite the same thing, I know) and you thought that was far too little money, is that worth posting screencaps of, or maybe you should just tell me "really that's so low of an offer that whether you intend it to be or not it's sort of insulting, as I would be working for so far less than I value my time"? That seems like the most useful thing to do for all involved. Maybe something good comes of it, maybe nothing changes, but at least it's not just one person pointing at another and doing the equivalent of saying "look at them and laugh because they had the temerity to try to pay me for work, but just not enough". I mean at some point the person she's talking to literally says in the screencaps "No hehe this is just a personal conversation". It's not screwing someone over to make an offer of work, no matter how low. Some people are happy to do certain types of work for free. Others want to be paid. The amount they may want to be paid might be based on many things, including market rates and cost of living in their area. Making an offer to someone is never screwing them over, nor even trying to, as long as they can freely reject it. The whole idea that them making an offer, no matter how low, is some sort of way of screwing someone over is just totally weird to me, and I'm not sure how people are even coming to that conclusion.