Reframe a fixed price as "this will be X amount of hours". Invariably, nobody knows what kind of "gotchas" will be encountered during dev, and with fixed price, you're absorbing that risk yourself. As an hourly rate, that risk is borne by the client. This also applies to shifting scope; if the client shifts scope mid-way, they will bear that cost in an hourly setup instead of you.
If you can bill $1M for a project because you're a worldwide expert, do so, otherwise bill by hour/day/week because you should already know that deadlines will be broken and the spec you are given when you sign has nothing to do with actually is required to ship the product.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
No there isn't.
> 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
Actually the "right time" to specify it, is literally any time she decides she's come to an adequate number, and put it in ink, at her own leisure. Again, she has the skills, she gets to makes the demands. Go make another offer to someone else instead. Not difficult to understand.
> The actual offer is not really insulting if the company didn't know she was in such a high COL area.
Again: your problem. Not my problem.
Why isn't it entitlement on Analogue's side to offer so low a bid and with ridiculous restrictions?
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.
Analogue was hoping for a screaming deal on this software. He was right to walk away.
$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-$66USD per hour of optional, interesting and challenging, comfortable and remote work, a perceived insult worthy of HackerNews front page. This person was not forced at gunpoint to work beneath their sustainable means. They got an offer, they rejected the offer. I give the author a credit of self-awareness for noting this is indeed a lot of money for a lot of people; less so for most of us on HN it appears.
Her time.
In SV, the company is from HK. If that offer was ridiculous too, she should have said as much.
I’ve been offered flat 200$ for jobs that cost >10k$. Your clients might not know the price of your labor, it’s your job to inform them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Turns out they only needed one, and got it done.
> 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.
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.
Do you understand the work that was asked?...
- $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.
The offer was not (as I understand it) $20k for 4 months of life, it was $20k for estimated 300-400hrs of work, freely estimated by the author themselves. Which comes out to $50-$65 USD/hr. Which is atrociously low for Silicon Valley consultant rates, and quite high in much of the world. So it may well not be worth author's time, but does not on its own indicate atrocious personal intentional malignant disrespect worthy of international outrage.
(everything else, I'm leaving intentionally aside - I understand a small snippet of one person's perspective about the issue, and nothing about the framework of hardware development, where I hear margins to be slimmer than slim, unlike in the wider world of purely-software development).
I don't think $50 an hour is a reasonable salary for consulting period. An experienced/senior developer working full time for a company with benefits in a cheap area should still (off the top of my head) probably be looking for at min $100,000 to $120,000 yearly salary (roughly $50 an hour). Depending on the situation you might be able to get more than that, I'm sure I could find people who would tell me that my estimation is also low. It is a very low salary for developers living in San Francisco, but let's leave that area out of the conversation for a second since it's something of an anomaly.
When you consult/contract, you are now paying for your own health insurance, your taxes are now more complicated, you are paying for most of your own gear, your situation is more complicated and your work is short time, you don't have the same level of job security, you are more self-directed, and you are taking on a greater amount of responsibility for the success of the project you're working on.
You need to charge more for consulting work than you charge for normal full-time development.
And all of that even ignores that at the point you're doing consulting work, you're doing it because you're likely a domain expert. A full-time domain expert in a company should be making way more than $120,000 a year, and similarly should be charging even more for consulting work. Contractors undervaluing themselves and choosing to charge too little is a pretty big cause of burnout and failure for people who are trying to get into that kind of work. I would not entertain for a second a $50 an hour rate for contracting work even if I lived in a rural area with cheap housing.
Everyone's situation is different, maybe there are people who can make that work and it makes sense for them, but on average people undervalue what their salaries should be when contracting. The overwhelming advice that I hear from contractors is "take what you think is fair to pay yourself and at least double it to get your minimum rate." Huge cause of burnout for people who get into self-employment, they give away their work for too little and then can't keep up because they're over-stressed and overworked.
I have a senior dev on my team at 35k€/year. Prices in SV != Prices in the rest of the world.
Big whoop, right? My 500 W PC with a 40" OLED panel can do that with ease. Well this can do it in a handheld with 7+ hours of battery.
Watch the linus tech tips video, the failed completely in this regard.
That said, I will concede that there is definitely an audience for low-power devices obviously, and maybe FPGAs will fill that niche.
But that also doesn't necessarily offset the latency of getting inputs into the emulator in the first place or in getting video frames from the emulator to the display.
As a software engineer, I spend all day dealing with bugs. I have a good gaming PC and a PS5, and spend much more time on my PS5 because it always just works. No tweaking settings, no crashes, no compatibility issues, no incompatibility with my controller.
When I get home from a hard day's work, I want to play something on an appliance. Analogue devices are appliances, and emulators (and even the Mister) are not.
In the UK for example, there is no legal ability to format shift for end users at all, so ultimately you can't really do legal software emulation, at all.
(Do not take this as legal advice that hardware emulation is permitted. It's complicated.)
They offered an entirely reasonable amount of money for anyone who didn't live in the valley (most people), then we're flexible enough to double it when it wasn't enough.
They asked the person to sign a reasonable NDA that sounds much less restrictive than anything I've ever had to sign, and they were out? 6 months of non-competition on a direct competitor in a tech job is nothing.
This “non-competition for 6 months is nothing” is also a red flag, in my view, for the whole tech scene then. It doesn’t make it right, if common as you say, just make the norm wrong.
And you left out of your comment the point that they were not fulfilling a few promises made even before the job had started. Which is a very big part of author’s reason.
The blog author is the developer of the mGBA emulator which is free and open source... There is no commercial competition for Analogue there.
This whole thing sounds more to me like one of Analogue's lawyers thought up a scheme to lock down that project for cheap under the guise of paying for some development work.
It’s a pretty straightforward conversation. I just say what I’m willing to do. If it doesn’t work out, it’s okay. But that’s harder for enthusiasts.
I think part of this is that enthusiasts also want to help out and they’re usually unfamiliar with consulting style gigs. When both parties want to play and they’re both willing to discount/pay premium but bid and ask don’t cross even with the handicap, then this sort of thing tends to happen.
That’s why the value judgment comes in. They both want to play.
The point is to be better than a real Gameboy. Most of the original GBs don't have backlights, the original GBA in particular is INCREDIBLY hard to see unless you're sitting directly under a lamp. The speakers are usually pretty quiet. With the Gameboy Advance, if you want a frontlight/backlight you need to get an SP which I personally think is very uncomfortable for extended periods, and also doesn't have a headphone jack without a dongle (Nintendo was way ahead of Apple on that!). The GBA is backwards compatible with older Gameboy games, but the cartridges awkwardly stick out of the device an inch or 2, which make them awkward to transport around.
Plus what others have mentioned, with the fact that it'll probably get hacked very soon to enable running any game from an SD card.
I will say that FPGA emulation is cool in some ways -- the power draw is less and you can achieve lower latency without some of the CPU-intensive methods that software emulators have pursued to do it. But most of the claims made about it do not stand up to scrutiny.
Which is not to say there's no reason to own an Analog Pocket, it's a set of tradeoffs. I just personally find those trade offs make very little sense.
[0] by which I mean the game, taken as a piece of artistic expression
Compared to original hardware, the promise is that it will have a better screen, a sleep mode, let you play on TV, load ROMs from computer (if you're a developer), etc. Compared to software, the promise is the form factor.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-analo...
I've ordered one today as soon as the orders opened, personally I'm incredibly excited about it - it will compliment my collection of classic gameboys really really well.
I like the idea of updated hardware and features in that form-factor, but was put off by the negatives. I would definitely buy a revision if they make one though.
The author's treatment was not great though, so I hope the company does better in the future.
Edit: here is the review: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541242
This story had 0 comments and was far off the front page. I read the article, found it interesting, and upvoted it. That seems to have bumped it to the front page to snowball.
So let's assume (as a good faith actor would) that the counter party doesn't know what this undertaking really entails. It's a lot of work - so a better response might be something like "the amount of work we are talking about would take a good engineer approximately 4 months. let's start the negotation there"
Maybe the author is new to business, but there's a lot to be desired in their communication. The screenshots of their communications only emphasize my take on it.
> As evidenced by the continuously slipping timeline in mGBA, 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).
> $10,000.
They could have ghosted. They could have made a reasonable counter.
Instead they decided to sling mud.
Childish and unprofessional.
