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, right? That would have been just fine when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000! In Silicon Valley in 2020, it is…not super great, let's just say. BUT!
- problem #1: "equivalent" is a dodge in practice, since actually it's, well, just $20K flat. WHICH LEADS TO!
- problem #2: the "extra six months" the article referred to the employer trying to add on after the fact did not refer to adding more money to the contract. Now we've gone from $20K for four months to $20K for ten months -- which is actually worse than the original offer -- and at this point we are handily back to "screw this, I'm gonna make more money slinging orange chicken at the mall".
tl;dr: the problem is not with the author wanting their time to be properly valued. "But building hardware is expensive, man" is not sufficient justification for this kind of nonsense.
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).
> 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.
You don't have to go far for Silicon Valley rates to be insane.
I'm in Canada. Experienced developer salary under 100k CAD is the norm. Consultant rates of $100CAD/hr are not unusual.
And then there's the rest of the world.
I have no beef with author for rejecting an offer that didn't make sense to them.
I am however disappointed for eagerness to ascribe malevolence and disrespect, and demonize a company whose side, balance sheet, and options we don't understand even remotely. I've read the screenshoted messages and they all seemed polite & understanding; no pressure, no offense. They made an offer and it didn't work out, life goes on for all involved - unless, and this is my personal daily fear, an internet mob decides some offense was committed. I expect and hope for more from HN.
> unless, and this is my personal daily fear, an internet mob decides some offense was committed. I expect and hope for more from HN.
Is that what happened here? The second most popular comment on this page starts with, "this reads like a case of 'all about me'-ism."
$50 an hour is low for programming consulting in America in general, which is where Analogue is hiring. That doesn't mean I hate the Pocket, but it's worth just saying that it's not a competitive salary, and if you're in the US unless you have a very good reason you should think extremely carefully before you accept an offer like this, it's below market-rate. I think it's reasonable to read into that offer and say that Analogue is undervaluing the work that Endrift does (maybe not on purpose, but in practice pricing something below market rate is literally undervaluing it). I feel confident that Analogue knows what average market rates are for programmers in America. Again, doesn't make me hate Analogue or the Pocket overall, it's just a thing they did.
But the context of this conversation is a set of top level posts that are immediately accusing the developer of being entitled and of the post of being petty and mean-spirited. Who are we calling out here? You have a very different reading than me of what kind of HN culture is being demonstrated under this post. I'm not seeing a pile-on of Analogue from HN, I'm also not seeing a set of top level comments urging context or describing that this is a normal negotiation process -- what I'm seeing from people calling out the salary as under market-rate is that they are primarily either pointing out an accurate fact about US market rates, or stepping up to defend an author who shared their honest experiences of a US company offering them lower-than-US rates, and then immediately got called selfish/entitled for doing so.
It's a strange jujutsu that we're talking about whether or not people are piling on Analogue too hard as a direct child thread under a top-level comment that says the salary was good and that the post author has a problem with communication and empathy.
No offense, but if 100k CAD is your idea of the average, you might be tremendously underpaid. No one on my Canada team makes less than 100k CAD. They're all junior, some fresh from college, and the company isn’t even FAANG
Amount Is based on team members, friends and colleagues working at large established companies. I imagine price there may be more depressed than at small successful rapidly growing companies - but percentage wise, though they make minority of HN, boring dev jobs at large companies are majority of actual Devs. Canadian averages are notoriously hard to get but based on linked in and glass doors, there seems to be a lot of dev jobs well under 100k.
(fwiw, based on sample size of n=2, my friends who are Canadian Devs but on primarily American companies, effectively get American salary grandfathered. They both acknowledge its far higher than what they previously had and what they might get otherwise in market)
It is my understanding that e. G. UK is largely the same - development is a white collar office job like any other, not a rock star exotic occupation it appears based on HN to be in US.
Very cursory search shows median US developer salary (not average vocal HN audience salary:) to be 100k US and UK average dev salary to be fraction of that. These may or may not be accurate, but most dev jobs are far more boring and standardized than HN average.
Also keep in mind that contractor rates typically need to be 1.5-2.0x higher than salaried wages, since the contractor has to cover all healthcare+benefits themselves, plus whatever time it takes to find a next contract/gig/job when the current contract is over.
My understanding is the company wasn't paying for her time, it was paying for a job to be done by an ostensibly part-time contractor. I'm not sure how the deadline changing increases the amount of work that was to be done.
They are asking for a timed exclusive on a product that isn't part of the contracted work. Timed exclusive release rights typically cost significantly more than straight-up contract work.
- $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, right? That would have been just fine when I lived in Tampa, Florida, in 2000! In Silicon Valley in 2020, it is…not super great, let's just say. BUT!
- problem #1: "equivalent" is a dodge in practice, since actually it's, well, just $20K flat. WHICH LEADS TO!
- problem #2: the "extra six months" the article referred to the employer trying to add on after the fact did not refer to adding more money to the contract. Now we've gone from $20K for four months to $20K for ten months -- which is actually worse than the original offer -- and at this point we are handily back to "screw this, I'm gonna make more money slinging orange chicken at the mall".
tl;dr: the problem is not with the author wanting their time to be properly valued. "But building hardware is expensive, man" is not sufficient justification for this kind of nonsense.