4 ms·

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

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.
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danShumway 5y ago
This isn't really a random company. Analogue is a company that is plastered across almost every tech/gaming site I visit right now. I think there is a difference between airing every grievance you have with everyone, and airing a specific grievance you have with a company that is getting a huge amount of coverage, if you are someone who is also reasonably prominent within the community that is being covered by the press and that is being targeted with this hardware release. Because Endrift also isn't really a random person, she's in charge of some extremely public, fairly lauded emulators in the retro space. Analogue is releasing one of the more anticipated and public hardware projects in that space, and Endrift within that context is talking about their experiences with Analogue the company -- including some reasonably relevant details like that the company asked them to delay a release of an Open Source emulator. Back when I was in college, people in my department shared what was being offered by companies that came over to job fairs trying to hire us. We talked about the hiring processes, the interview processes, and what their culture was like, because we were all part of a community of people who were going to be interacting with the same companies. Unless it was under NDA we didn't keep a ton of that stuff secret, we wanted the people we were going to class with to know what companies were worth pursuing and what companies weren't. So sure, this doesn't warrant a NYT article, it's not an accusation that means Analogue the company should be burned to the ground or something, but don't you see any value in a prominent voice in the emulation community talking about (on a personal blog) their experiences with a company that is a very public presence within the emulation space? Some additional context here is possibly warranted that the author didn't share this post to HN, somebody else did. I feel like often with worries about things being "too public", there's a weird phenomenon where communities being open enough that people outside of that community can look in suddenly means that anything posted publicly is expected to be intended for a global audience or planned out as a potentially viral piece. But in the same way that I don't think the negotiation process here is worth as much debate as its seeing in the comments, I also don't think the author reflecting on that experience publicly is weird, at least not given the context of the general news about Analogue happening right now, and at least not given the context that this is the person running mGBA. I certainly don't think it's weird enough that it warrants publicly claiming that the author is lacking empathy. > even how it's called a "hate story" Someone else has already mentioned, but this is a reference to a video game title.

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.
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danShumway 5y ago

This isn't really a random company. Analogue is a company that is plastered across almost every tech/gaming site I visit right now. I think there is a difference between airing every grievance you have with everyone, and airing a specific grievance you have with a company that is getting a huge amount of coverage, if you are someone who is also reasonably prominent within the community that is being covered by the press and that is being targeted with this hardware release. Because Endrift also isn't really a random person, she's in charge of some extremely public, fairly lauded emulators in the retro space. Analogue is releasing one of the more anticipated and public hardware projects in that space, and Endrift within that context is talking about their experiences with Analogue the company -- including some reasonably relevant details like that the company asked them to delay a release of an Open Source emulator. Back when I was in college, people in my department shared what was being offered by companies that came over to job fairs trying to hire us. We talked about the hiring processes, the interview processes, and what their culture was like, because we were all part of a community of people who were going to be interacting with the same companies. Unless it was under NDA we didn't keep a ton of that stuff secret, we wanted the people we were going to class with to know what companies were worth pursuing and what companies weren't. So sure, this doesn't warrant a NYT article, it's not an accusation that means Analogue the company should be burned to the ground or something, but don't you see any value in a prominent voice in the emulation community talking about (on a personal blog) their experiences with a company that is a very public presence within the emulation space? Some additional context here is possibly warranted that the author didn't share this post to HN, somebody else did. I feel like often with worries about things being "too public", there's a weird phenomenon where communities being open enough that people outside of that community can look in suddenly means that anything posted publicly is expected to be intended for a global audience or planned out as a potentially viral piece. But in the same way that I don't think the negotiation process here is worth as much debate as its seeing in the comments, I also don't think the author reflecting on that experience publicly is weird, at least not given the context of the general news about Analogue happening right now, and at least not given the context that this is the person running mGBA. I certainly don't think it's weird enough that it warrants publicly claiming that the author is lacking empathy. > even how it's called a "hate story" Someone else has already mentioned, but this is a reference to a video game title.