Minor correction, Endrift is a woman

I stand corrected. Apologies.

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.

Specialist knowledge. Hard problem. Company is located in Seattle.

Someone capable of doing a good job on this can make FAR more doing something else. $20K is a joke.

And yet someone did it. So either someone took the lowball or they paid up in the end.

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.

> 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.

100% it wasn’t even worth the effort of asking for more. I’ve tried that, it’s just humiliating. Their offer was openly disrespectful. If more engineers were brave enough to walk away from abusive employers like this it would be a better and more equitable industry.

I’m amazed how long it dragged on.