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.