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Analogue Pocket Hate Story

endrift.com

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Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#71

Post by ohgodplsno »

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…

Analogue has a history of being actual dicks and being unliked in the entire emulation industry. Not only are they constantly putting down software emulation (while then crawling to people like endrift to do the work for them, or attacking Near for their work on bsnes), they are now attempting to hold back emulation to make their product more attractive (as reported by endrift). Let's also not forget that they straight up trademarked the term "fpga" in an attempt to confuse people.

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 ?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#72

Post by NikolaNovak »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #43
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…

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 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).

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#73

Post by kllrnohj »

kabdib wrote: post #34
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.

$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?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#74

Post by beervirus »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #43
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…

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…

$10,000 was for moonlighting, not a full-time job.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#75

Post by xondono »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #43
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…

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…

> $10,000 for four months is the equivalent of a $30K/year salary.

I have a senior dev on my team at 35k€/year. Prices in SV != Prices in the rest of the world.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#76

Post by beervirus »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #58

The DM screen caps in this post are beyond damning. I didn’t realize Analogue’s business practices were this shady but I guess that is to be expected from all large corporations.

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

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#77

Post by RandallBrown »

xondono wrote: post #70
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.

> $20,000 for 4 to 6 months of work for a software engineer is an insult. In SV, the company is from HK. If that offer was ridiculous too, she should have said as much. I’ve been offered flat 200$ for jobs that cost >10k$. Your clients might not know the price of your labor, it’s your job to inform them.

Wikipedia says the company is in Seattle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_(company)

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#78

Post by fallat »

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…

How can you not see that even $20k is entirely insufficient for such specialized work?

Do you understand the work that was asked?...

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#79

Post by hbn »

izzydata wrote: post #2

I don't even understand the use-case for this device. Who saved all their cartridges, but not their Gameboy? You may as well get a cheaper and more versatile retro handheld. The idea that hardware emulation is somehow better than software emulation when the end results feel indistinguishable to the user seems like a pointless argument.

> Who saved all their cartridges, but not their Gameboy?

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#80

Post by awill »

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 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.

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