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Analogue Pocket Hate Story

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Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#81

Post by [deleted] »

xondono wrote: post #75
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…

> $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.

[deleted]

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#82

Post by emodendroket »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #54
tombert wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember that post; Byuu conceded that FPGAs will always have an edge latency-wise, but was really annoyed that people acted like FPGA magically made things "more accurate" than something like bsnes, saying FPGAs can still be subject to the same bugs or mistakes as emulators, and are harder to develop. I got the impression that Byuu did not like the Analogue people very much.

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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#83

Post by zackbloom »

fallat wrote: post #78
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?...

The company made an offer. The person accepted it. Nothing notable about the scope of the work changed (at least as detailed in the blog post). The person wasn't stiffed or otherwise cheated. They just... didn't like a job offer which they themselves accepted.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#84

Post by Mindwipe »

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…

It's also worth noting that while people tend to simplify the discussion down to the US, the legal status of software emulation is... a lot more ropey in some non-US territories.

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.)

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#85

Post by zackbloom »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #52
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…

They tried to stall the development of an open source GBA emulator. What's constructive about that? Where's the corporation's empathy?

We don't really know what happened here, because as far as I can tell the OP didn't actually engage with anyone to understand what was happening. It seems most likely that the company needed to focus more on one project than another for a little while. That is not the same as stalling something intentionally. It's hard for the company to have empathy if the person didn't elect to communicate their thoughts and feelings.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#86

Post by aj7 »

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.

I’m amazed how long it dragged on.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#87

Post by honkycat »

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.

The carts and games are way more valuable than the consoles themselves, which were mass produced over many generations.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#88

Post by NikolaNovak »

friedman23 wrote: post #24
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…

>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 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.

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#89

Post by jagger27 »

beervirus wrote: post #76
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"?

How about the extreme lowball offer for a domain expert?

Re: Analogue Pocket Hate Story

#90

Post by FemmeAndroid »

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?

They're a Seattle company hiring people with very niche skills. Even if you don't think SV rates apply exactly too Seattle, the scale of them does -- 100 hours vs months of work.
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