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Analogue Pocket Hate Story

endrift.com

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Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#101

Post by danShumway »

zackbloom wrote: post #3

This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the company agreed to raise it when asked. If your goal is to have people throw money at you which you don't ask for, you are going to have a tough time working. A company that's willing to double your salary when you point out the offer is low sounds pretty great…

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#103

Post by msbarnett »

kllrnohj wrote: post #73
kabdib wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

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

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#104

Post by monocasa »

emodendroket wrote: post #82
matheusmoreira wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware emulation is also just as impenetrable as the original systems themselves. Software emulation serves as documentation for the hardware and is therefore much better at preserving that knowledge.

You could look at the Verilog/VHDL/whatever they use, right? Either way the source code has to be available for it to be useful in that way.

Sticking another emulator under a decompiler is probably at least a couple orders of magnitude easier than looking at an FPGA bitstream. Particularly for the kinds of people who hack on emulators.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#105

Post by kllrnohj »

msbarnett wrote: post #103
kllrnohj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#106

Post by aseipp »

zackbloom wrote: post #3

This reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism. It sounds like this person negotiated their salary, and then decided the company didn't value them _because_ the company agreed to raise it when asked. If your goal is to have people throw money at you which you don't ask for, you are going to have a tough time working. A company that's willing to double your salary when you point out the offer is low sounds pretty great…

Doesn't matter. She has the needed skills, she gets to set the terms completely. "I want X to happen" and X doesn't happen? No deal. Pretty straightforward. I read all the chat logs and I can say she was much nicer than she probably had to be, honestly. In the end, she realized they wanted to delay mGBA development, that their deadlines were shifting (they wanted no commits for 6-months post release of a product that hasn't launched 2 years later), and that it ultimately wasn't worth her time to even further negotiations.

"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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#107

Post by happy-dude »

kllrnohj wrote: post #99
happy-dude wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LTT video[1] is also from their ShortCircuit channel, their unboxing/ first-impressions channel and should not be confused with their review content. I personally watched the 54 minute in-depth overview from My Life in Gaming[2], and it was clear that LTT/ShortCircuit overlooked or were incorrect in some parts of their initial impressions. EDIT: Specially in regards to the display, they spent no time at all to ex…

> EDIT: Specially in regards to the display, they spent no time at all to experiment with the 3 built-in GBA display modes; if they used the modes that replicated the original GBA or GBA SP (AGS-101) screens, they would've had a more color-equivalent appearance. They did use the GBA SP mode in the comparison: https://youtu.be/h6l5fAbcim0?t=619 But the broader point that the channel is specifically unboxing/first-impr…

> They did use the GBA SP mode in the comparison: https://youtu.be/h6l5fAbcim0?t=619

Apologies, missed that for sure. There could still be a multitude of other factors at play (backlight brightness, saturation setting, sharpness setting, etc.)

> But the broader point that the channel is specifically unboxing/first-impressions and not a review is definitely accurate.

Agreed!

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#108

Post by kllrnohj »

emodendroket wrote: post #23
klodolph wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The device supports several different systems, not just the various Game Boy iterations. 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.

You can easily buy an Anbernic device for less than one hundred dollars if you just want portable emulation, so it's not the form factor. It's specifically for people who are hung up on software emulation vs. FPGA-based emulation.

https://anbernic.com/products/anbernic-new-rg351v-retro-game...

Seems to be $120 for equivalent form-factor, but still missing a large amount of what the Pocket supports (such as physical cartridges, link cable, and TV output), and with a worse display and a smaller battery. And it's not like the Pocket is that much more expensive at $220.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#109

Post by emodendroket »

awill wrote: post #80
emodendroket wrote: post #10

It makes a certain kind of sense. The marketing for these products has always revolved around denigrating software emulators as total, inaccurate trash, which is completely unfair for a lot of reasons (byuu used to have a great blog post about it but I think it is gone). But of course, you've gotta convince people they "need" to spend hundreds of dollars on emulation when it's available for free otherwise. Turns out…

As someone who has purchased the some analogue hardware, I will say that a reason I bought the mega sg and super nt is less about pixel-perfect accuracy, and more about buying an appliance. 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 incompati…

I can understand this mindset perfectly, but it bothers me when it's mixed in with confused stuff about how playing on a cycle-accurate emulator is somehow a perversion of the original experience.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#110

Post by danShumway »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #72
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, your comment reads like a case of 'I don't know math'-ism. - $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, righ…

Everything else aside, let's pick a math and stick with it :). 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 i…

> Which is atrociously low for [deleted] consultant rates

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.

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