[danShumway]

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]

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]

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]

Which demonstrates poor judgement. The post title is extremely inflammatory whether it's a reference or not.

[danShumway]

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.

[kbenson]

> 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.

I don't really have a problem with someone saying a company low-balled them. Honestly, the fact that she took screencaps of what appear to be private conversations (where the other side specifically refers to it as a personal conversation) and refers to specific people at that company is where I think it goes from being something equivalent to "that time Analogue tried to hire me but vastly underestimated the cost and my value, so I turned them down" into something else. If the author had written something along those lines, even at length, then I don't think the vast majority would have a problem with that.

Instead what we have is something that seems far more personal, and far more targeted as specific people, but without context as to why that's warranted, and not necessarily shared with some people with like situations, but for the world to see.

> Some additional context here is possibly warranted that the author didn't share this post to HN, somebody else did.

The author posted it online. It wasn't some private conversation (although she doesn't seem to think posting private conversations is worth noting enough to justify from what I can see), but pushed out for the world to see. Google's going to index it, people are going to share it.

> 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.

I think perhaps people show be more careful what they say online in open locations. These are not private conversations. Other people see them. When you say something in an open forum it's the equivalent of carving it into a tree in a public area in the real world. Any expectation that it's private is ludicrous, no matter how many people seem to fall back to that excuse when called out for something they've said. Perhaps people just should act as they would like to be treated in public. The author, by making a private conversation public deserves no consideration that her public post wasn't intended to be seen by the world, in my opinion.

> 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 wouldn't think it was really worth doing an expose on either, but the author seems to think it worth while. The negotiation is rather mundane. It's that she decided to air it to the world which I think is the more interesting thing, even if it's interesting in a way that I think doesn't speak well of her.

> this is a reference to a video game title.

I noticed that, and I think that's a bit less objectionable because of it. It's still kind of ick though, and I think speaks to a lack of care regarding the situation.

In case it hasn't come through as obvious, my real objection to the behavior is the airing of private conversations with individuals for no useful reason. That the conversation seems utterly mundane but is presented otherwise makes it worse in my eyes, because there's no obvious reason from the conversation either.

I think I've written enough on this. The only reason I've written what I have so far is because people keep equating her behavior to less objectionable comparisons, but to me it seems clearly different when it's public on the internet, aimed at specific people, and uses screencaps of a private conversation in a way that I think would make most people feel violated if it was put online like that, regardless of whether they said anything objectionable in it.

[danShumway]

> I think perhaps people show be more careful what they say online in open locations. These are not private conversations. Other people see them. When you say something in an open forum it's the equivalent of carving it into a tree in a public area in the real world.

I can agree to disagree on things, but I will leave out by saying that the Internet is a global medium that spans multiple continents, cultures, and languages. If the expectation is that everything posted online needs to be thought of through the lens of a global press release, the end result of that is you are going to have a lot less interesting content online and lot less culture.

There is a difference between a truly private post (meaning that no one is supposed to see it) and a targeted post intending to primarily communicate with a specific audience. When I write posts on HN going into programming details, I don't preface them for people who are unfamiliar with the concept of programming. I don't write in the same style on HN as I do in other contexts, and I don't engage in the same topics. All of that stuff is public, people can correlate it if they want to, in which case I'm going to kind of shrug and kind of look at them weird.

This may just be a personal opinion, people are welcome to disagree with me on this, they can disagree with me on anything. But I think transparent communities with their own circles, memes, cultures, and concerns are a good thing, and making those communities more insular, or demanding that they constantly explain themselves to people who don't understand the references, have a background of their concerns and internal debates, or recognize the people involved -- I think that's an unnecessary burden to place on people.

[kbenson]

I understand, and for the most part entirely agree with that. I don't think every single group should have to guard their words entirely. I do think it's worth people considering whether those statements violate norms in what someone would expect as confidential without cause. If we message privately and then you expose those conversations for your own social gain and there's no real cause to do so, I'm going to feel violated, and the amount of violation will probably scale to some degree with how public it was, regardless of whether I said anything bad. And, I can only hope, people would look upon you unkindly for the act. That's really what I'm doing here, looking unkindly on the author for what I see as a violation of norms I think we'd all be better off keeping from becoming common.

[hitekker]

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]

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.