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?

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.

> 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.

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.