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Analogue Pocket Hate Story

endrift.com

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Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#111

Post by emodendroket »

kllrnohj wrote: post #108
emodendroket wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, I can't use the Analog Pocket to play PlayStation, Dreamcast, Genesis, etc., can I?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#112

Post by beervirus »

jagger27 wrote: post #89
beervirus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't really see anything that unreasonable. What did you find "beyond damning"?

How about the extreme lowball offer for a domain expert?

Yes, negotiation. She asked for more money and got it.

Welcome to earth.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#113

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

You missed the last part of the story, where the true crux of the matter was that Analogue promised that the work for them would not impact her open source project...and then tried to demand that she delay the next release of her open source emulator until at least 6 months after the release of the Analogue Pocket. At the time of negotiation, that was initially scheduled for Summer 2020...but ended up actually being Dec 2021, so the author's next release would have been delayed more than 1.5 years.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#114

Post by sumtechguy »

emodendroket wrote: post #31
engineer_22 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. 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 scr…

He describes that offer coming after his estimate, so no. > 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). > $10,0…

25-35 an hour for that sort of work is absurdly low. Especially for someone who has an established emulator in their resume. Then on top of that the author had an existing job in SV so they knew about what sort of hour range they should be getting. They doubled it but then bumped out the time from 4 to 6 months of work. They still have not shipped 2 years later. Now taking pre orders, which I personally skip because of the possibility of them not ever shipping. So it would have dragged on. Then the ask for delaying the emu itself until they shipped. If they had agreed to that they would have had to sit on a release for nearly 2 years at this point. There is quite the cadre of hucksters in that area of software/hardware. Also I would posit that the task for 300-400 hours was probably under estimated by a factor of at least 3x, probably more as it was 'part time'.

I have seen this sort of thing before in the 'real' industry. You work for a hardware company and they see the software work as a 'extra' that you just bash something out and hope for the best. I have went out of my way to not work for hardware companies anymore. Many do not 'grok' software. That the hardware and software have to work together or they both fail.

This sort of story is probably better on r/choosingbeggars.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#115

Post by Sebguer »

C19is20 wrote: post #97
jagger27 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the extreme lowball offer for a domain expert?

If an 'expert' accepts an 'extreme lowball offer', are they really an expert?

Yes, because 'expert' doesn't indicate any level of financial competence, and experts often undervalue themselves and get exploited.

What is the logical conclusion of your comment? Is expertise solely tied to the amount of compensation someone receives?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#116

Post by tombert »

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…

Does it? I think you'd have a point if Analogue were a charity of grant-funded or something, but Analogue is a for-profit entity. Most people reading this post are in the business of selling their time and/or expertise for money, and it's not weird to want to maximize that value. I (like most people I think) hate the process of salary negotiations, but I always do it because of course that's just what you do. I've walked away from offers that seemed interesting because I'm not 100% about how they are handling their finances.

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#117

Post by msbarnett »

kllrnohj wrote: post #105
msbarnett wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#118

Post by tombert »

emodendroket wrote: post #94
kllrnohj wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

runahead is brilliant but it relies on save states being trivially fast to create, which isn't broadly true especially as you get to newer & newer consoles. And strictly speaking needs to be adjusted on a per-game basis as it really depends on the game's internal latency in responding to button presses. But that also doesn't necessarily offset the latency of getting inputs into the emulator in the first place or in g…

FPGA doesn't really solve your other two issues, nor is it practical for anything post-PlayStation/Saturn/N64, so those objections are not very strong. Past that point the games are designed more with a certain amount of lag in mind anyways.

> FPGA doesn't really solve your other two issues, nor is it practical for anything post-PlayStation/Saturn/N64

I agree with most of your point here, bus is that particular one true? Doesn't the Gamecube (for example) use a PowerPC chip? I would be very surprised if isn't an effort to make FPGA implementations of the PowerPC.

I realize that there's a lot more to making a clone system than "just recreating the CPU", but why would making an FPGA for something after the N64 be impractical?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#119

Post by kbenson »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #88
friedman23 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>>$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…

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?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#120

Post by danShumway »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #88
friedman23 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>>$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…

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.

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