[friedman23]

>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.

[kabdib]

$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.

[Alekhine]

Minor correction, Endrift is a woman

[kabdib]

I stand corrected. Apologies.

[kllrnohj]

Analogue isn't an SV company, so why are you using SV rates?

[FemmeAndroid]

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.

[kabdib]

Specialist knowledge. Hard problem. Company is located in Seattle.

Someone capable of doing a good job on this can make FAR more doing something else. $20K is a joke.

[jonny_eh]

And yet someone did it. So either someone took the lowball or they paid up in the end.

[msbarnett]

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]

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.

[msbarnett]

> 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.

I wouldn't expect to get cycle-accurate FPGA emulation work (by one of a handful of experienced experts in simulating the original hardware!) done for ~$30 USD an hour from basically anywhere on the planet. Contracting out of Eastern Europe or South America you'd end up paying about that much for a mostly incompetent web dev -- for what Analogue wanted, there's no real way to describe it other than "hoping to hit a homerun on an absolutely insanely unreasonable offer".

This is deeply specialist knowledge that Analogue is looking for.

[CyberRabbi]

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.

[aj7]

I’m amazed how long it dragged on.

[NikolaNovak]

>>$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]

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]

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.

[friedman23]

> 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 comment is just so ridiculous I don't know where to start.

Let's start with entitlement, not once did I say things like the author or software engineers in general are "entitled" to anything. My words are about reality, reality is, $20,000 is not enough money to get me to do any work for longer than a month because I can walk down the street and get a job that pays me more after a 5 hour interview.

Let's talk about having the "privilege" to do interesting work remotely. Aka, the privilege to donate your time to someone else's business. I can do interesting work on my own thank you very much, I don't need $20,000 from some company for the privilege to do interesting work, I can open my laptop and do it and I own the result in the end.

If making a lot of money causes you to feel guilt sort your issues out.

[NikolaNovak]

I feel we may still be talking past each other, so let me attempt to clarify my position one more time:

* Not taking an offer because it's not worthwhile - more power to you and the author. Zero issues or concerns from me. I wouldn't take it either.

But I wouldn't make a thing out of it either! The person is clearly comfortable in their day job, they have hobbies they enjoy, and they had an offer they negotiated then rejected (eventually; after the other side followed-up; apparently only companies are bad when they ghost employees, employees not replying with change of heart is fine:). Life.Is.Good.

* A well-to-do random person freely not taking a random $20k contract from a random company making top post on Hacker News with outrage at the "disrespect" and the awful exploitative business practices and evil leaders? Yeah, that's entitlement.

[BizarroLand]

That's 300-400 hours in the mines. That doesn't account for the time you spend pondering about the problems, or studying and researching solutions. Sure, you could in theory power through 10 hour days and knock it out in a month, but that is only if you know the solution and all that has to be done is to press keys on a keyboard until the solution is built.

[NikolaNovak]

All 100% correct, and in my mind 100% irrelevant. Author was the sole source of seemingly unpressured estimate; it was up to them to give an inclusive realistic estimate and quote they felt confident about.

They gave an estimate, company made an offer; they asked for more, company doubled. They decided it still wasn't worth it. Awesome. Nobody was forced to do business together. Why are we still trying to make excuses as if there was some pressure to do un/underpaid work? I did not see it in the very polite and understanding screenshots. Am I missing something that's causing this outrage? why is this even a thing we're talking about is still my personal question in this thread :D

Edit: You know what; I re-read to see if I'm missing something, and indeed I did: though author insists, multiple times, in bold letters, that company mandated six months, based on screenshots, company in fact relented and agreed to one month difference. Which author themselves indicate was far less than normal between-releases period.

1: https://endrift.com/resources/post-assets/analogue-12.png

Nope, I'm out, I have no rage to spare at this particular "injustice".

[teraflop]

> What I got out of this article is that the author knows the value of his time.

Her time.

[xondono]

> $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]

Wikipedia says the company is in Seattle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company)

[xondono]

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]

Either way, the founder is American so they would know if their offer was competitive or not with other American salaries.

[zackbloom]

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]

>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]

> 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

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.