9 ms·

Becoming a contractor

191 points by wofo 3y ago

wofo 3y ago
I wrote this article based on my last 3 years as a contractor with increasingly interesting clients (I'm currently doing open source Rust work for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt). I've found lots of inspiration here on HN throughout my journey, so I'm hoping my article continues the chain and inspires some more people! I'll be hanging around here for the coming hours in case anyone has questions ;) (btw free to write to me directly if you prefer; contact details are in my profile)
- bippingchip 3y ago
  Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    If you want to explore what consulting looks like without the risk of going it alone, consider joining a company that does consulting. It's a good opportunity to learn about the sales cycle as well as get a taste for what sort of challenges consulting provides while still being a FTE with benefits.
    - couchand 3y ago
      This is useful infotmation to learn, but I can tell you from having done all three that consulting for a shop is as different from freelancing as it is from an in-house job.
      - tstrimple 3y ago
        I guess it depends on how close you are to the sales process. I have had a chance to get a lot of experience working on proposals from a tech point of view and am involved in the pitch and negotiation. There is definitely carryover from those activities. But if you are consulting as a heads down IC and leave other aspects of projects and bids to the “business people” I can see where you may not learn as much that will be helpful as a freelancer.
  - wofo 3y ago
    I'm happy you liked it!
- phara0h 3y ago
  Super interesting to find out that you're a fellow Catholic! It's sometimes hard to bring up faith in IT spaces, I feel like most of my colleagues are athiest or agnostic. I always feel good when I see people mention God, as it reminds me that being God fearing and in IT is not mutually exclusive. Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!
  - wofo 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      Your belief or faith in God played a genuine role in the story. If you had evidence of a god playing a role in anything you could start your own religion :-)
      - wofo 3y ago
        I'm not going to engage in the eternal atheists vs believers debate, but I'm trusting here that my experience is based upon reality (i.e. I've found convincing evidence). I don't expect what convinces me will convince everyone else, but you and I will die some day and then we'll know (or if it turns out we no longer exist, at least we won't care :P)
        vouwfietsman 3y ago
        Using a word like "evidence" freely without rigour is a big part of the problem we are in relating to misinformation and mistrust in institutions. I ask without expectations that you refrain from using such words when talking about opinions, experiences or beliefs, so that we may protect our languages from further erosion.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Just wanted to give props for volunteer work. It's been my raison d'etre for decades.
  - wofo 3y ago
    I know it's a cliché, but it's true that you receive more than you give ;)
- angarg12 3y ago
  I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker. I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand. Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?
  - _huayra_ 3y ago
    You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check. I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.
    - angarg12 3y ago
      Unfortunately my L1 visa doesn't allow me to have any other source of income than my current employer. But definitely this is something to look into once I get a Green Card.
      - _huayra_ 3y ago
        Sorry for being unclear, I meant to just go through the process of seeing what you could get in terms of contracts as if you had already made the move, not to actually follow through and start any contract. Some of the "expat threads" I've seen on Reddit where people yeet themselves to the other side of the world and hope it works out only to fall flat on their face are pretty eye opening. By testing the waters with "proto-contracting" like this, you can at least give yourself some idea of what you could get were you to move. edit: grammar
scarface_74 3y ago
So he spent all of a very long term article describing how he became a “successful” contractor and refused to mention the one metric of success that most people care about - how much he got paid? This article was a waste of time without talking about was it worth the time over just being a salaried developer with benefits.
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  I would expect that the hourly rates for run-of-the-mill contracting in the Netherlands via a broker would be 80-160 euros - more for short jobs (less than a month).
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I am a contractor of sorts...at least, I don't have a regular job as a salaried employee. Compared to working 9-5, my hours are closer to part time hours and I get paid about a third of what I used to as a programmer.... Seems like I get paid less but...if you factor in all the additional time I USED to need getting ready for work, recovering from the 9-5 grind, commuting, I get paid about twice as much per hour as I used to. Plus, the ability to work whenever I want, chill at home in bed if I want, do whatever the hell I want because the ONLY thing that matters is the final product, is worth its weight in gold. Besides, I stopped caring about making tons of money, and would rather use my young years for fun stuff.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- wofo 3y ago
  I don't mind answering that question, but I'm not sure it has a place in the article (maybe I'll modify it later if I change my mind). My expectation is that in The Netherlands you could at most aim at 80k / year as a FTE (depending on lots of factors). Right now my workload is equivalent to 4 days / week and I'm earning about double what I'd get as an employee. Sounds like a good deal to me.
  - 3y ago
vladgur 3y ago
How would you say your income compares to total comp in your area according to levels.fyi. How do you compare to a salaried job at a FAANG type company that has benefits such as paid leave, paternity leave, retirement contributions(not sure if Europe has something similar to 401k), etc How many hours per week do you spend devoted to your venture: coding, marketing, finding clients. Based on your domain I’m assuming you have socialized healthcare, so that’s one less risk to consider.
- wofo 3y ago
  I don't know about levels.fyi (they want me to register / upgrade to see what salaries are like in Amsterdam), but I gave some more details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237 In short: I'm working 4 days / week (3 billable days, 1 overhead) and earning about double of what I'd otherwise get. Though obviously I'm taking additional risk. You are right that the healthcare side of things is covered.
  - rolisz 3y ago
    What is the 1 day of overhead? That's sounds a lot per week.
    - wofo 3y ago
      Here's some stuff that falls under overhead: writing blog posts (this one took me at least 10 hours to write), networking, sales conversations, keeping my own knowledge up to date. It's not consistently one day, but I'd say on average it is.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        That sounds about right. In fact for some types of billable consulting work, it's probably low. (It was a bit more complicated when I was an analyst because some of the non-production work was client service. On the other hand, a lot of the production work (call it writing) wasn't paid for. So, net, your billable hours per hours worked can be fairly modest.
lastangryman 3y ago
[flagged]
b800h 3y ago
For the Americans coming into this thread later today (or up very late), it bears repeating that "contracting" arrangements in the US vs. EU/UK are very different beasts. Historically in the UK, contracting was/is a higher-risk venture (medium term sole-client freelancing) which carried concomitantly higher salaries, and in some verticals (government, for instance), it has been very difficult to find good developers who aren't contractors. My understanding of the US is that typically "contractor" over there implies "consultancy worker" which is the staffing equivalent of shovelware. Please correct me if wrong!
- pipes 3y ago
  What is a vertical?
  - b800h 3y ago
    An industry segment - say Healthcare, Government, Media, Finance.
    - arthur_sav 3y ago
      Thanks google
      - FredPret 3y ago
        Ironically “vertical” is a very hard word to google
        tough 3y ago
        ChatGPT has you covered
        FredPret 3y ago
        Yeah, maybe if it has the original context. Although, there's no shame in asking one of the walking, talking neural nets that have traditionally been willing to supply clarification, especially when they created the bit of context that is the source of confusion.
whazor 3y ago
This is a very Dutch thing, where as a contractor you lose a lot of benefits like 25 holidays, paid sick days, pension, unemployment insurance. But overall you normally get more money, though also more stress. Compared to USA, Dutch freelancing is more like normal employment. If you get hired by an USA startup, you normally get a much bigger compensation and they often prefer you to be contractor as it fits better with overall HR/contract structure. Though there are in-between firms that would hire you like a normal employee with Dutch benefits, but you lose some money.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You loose the same benefits in Austria as well if you go contracting, and on top of that you need to have more than one customer per year, otherwise the tax authorities will consider you're contracting just to avoid full time employment and committing tax fraud.
  - valzam 3y ago
    Which is very strange since in Austria as a freelancer you are still required to pay into all the same social systems as a FTE right? Public pension, health insurance etc. In Germany you have the same "Scheinselbstaendigkeit" issue but it's a bit more understandable why the authorities care, considering that as a freelancer you aren't paying into the public pension system.
    - vjerancrnjak 3y ago
      Austria in general is very unfriendly to small businesses. The salaries are also heavily taxed so employees are extra expensive. All of the hiring attempts are just companies trying to pay you as little as possible and then contract your work to rich companies or government. But to me it sounds most Europe is like this. They do offer a 12% discount if you do not have any expenses (which you can barely have as a programmer) so eventually you can earn a bit more than being employed.
  - bjornsing 3y ago
    It used to be like this in Sweden too 20 years ago, but it’s been relaxed over the years. Now it’s pretty much unheard of that the tax authorities complain about “hidden employment” / “fake freelancing”.
Erikun 3y ago
Am I the only one confused by why anyone would want to go with Toptal considering what is written in the article?
- ogarten 3y ago
  Probably the pressure to find a project to work on. There are many platforms like toptal. Some screen their people others don't. They are all similar in that respect. Same goes for recruiters. Are there good recruiters? very positive but they are so rare that it's impossible to find them.
  - Erikun 3y ago
    I see the upsides, but am weirded out by the idea of being contractually obligated to remain ignorant of what the customer is paying for your services. Naively I'd imagine a competitor to Toptal could disrupt them by providing transparency and a flat percentage on top of the rate, but clearly there is something that makes that not happening.
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  There is no effort outside of the elimination interview that you have to put in to find a client. You don’t have to spend a minute to find work. Despite them pressuring you to put your rate as low as possible they still have a lot of room to negotiate with the client.
- nmfisher 3y ago
  I'm fairly certain that Toptal's "long selection process" is designed to weed out anyone who has other options, because they're harder to bully into putting their rates down. That turned me off, but at the same time, they do do the hardest part of the contracting/freelancing world - finding clients. If you're willing to jump through their hoops and accept a lower rate than you'd get on the open market, then it's a decent arrangement.
- cjalmeida 3y ago
  I've been both a Toptal contractor and a client. While they're an arguably high fee, they provide valuable services for the contractor, first and foremost access to high paying markets and clients. For a high skilled dev in developing countries this means rates that are still much higher than local rates, thus they tend to attract good talent. Also they handle all burocracy and ensure you get paid, very important when working overseas. For clients they provide very good corporate customer service, and generally do a good job of screening people. My rate of "bad" contractors coming from Toptal is low and replacing them is quick. And every now and then you find some amazing devs.
samsonradu 3y ago
One thing worth mentioning for EU’s IT industry is that there are large sectors like government which need IT services but can only work with contractors as hiring is not legally possible or extremely tedious. This means contractors get access to a larger market.
- wyozi 3y ago
  This also results in a relatively large number of IT consulting companies, many of which specialize in public sector service bidding. Certain large consultancies winning most of the bids and then under-delivering has pretty much become a meme at this point.
- negamax 3y ago
  That only causes Accenture etc. body shops to thrive in EU market. EU as a market is very government policy driven. Government contracts are lucrative but typical body shop pays 1:10 as compared to what they are paid. And then the "employee" also pays high taxes on the income. Not sure what can change it. May be more US companies should get contractor friendly in EU markets?
  - samsonradu 3y ago
    1:10 is a little harsh, quite far from the norm. From my experience body shops subcontracting freelancers pay 80-90% of the daily rate (BENELUX area)
brandensilva 3y ago
It is interesting hearing different perspectives going into this kind of work. My experience has been a bit different. I've never had a famine cycle in the last 12 years of doing front end development and product design. Part of the reason I'm sure is I've always said yes to challenging and desirable projects and risen to the occasion. The fear of failing helps me adapt quickly I'm sure as well to new technology. My clients often end up being long term clients I work years with. Income wise things vary year to year but I'm often in the $150k to $250k range in a medium cost area where my money goes a bit farther than the west coast. In order to push higher I know I'll need to put more effort into fine tuning my target market and value propositions. Also building more clout, becoming an authority in a specialized field, or investing more back into the business with marketing and sales would go a long ways. If I were to push into consultancy I feel confident I could push into the 250k to 350k range more but I am quite happy still slinging code rather than advising. I'm happy people find success in this arena. It's important that people have a good mix of choices that works for them so congrats to OP for finding your desirable path.
W0lf 3y ago
I am in my fifth year of being an independent software consultant/contractor. I live in Germany. I've had multiple gigs almost right from the start of being self employed. Almost always through one of the many recruiting firms. Reading his story, I do wonder though if my path is or has been somewhat special until now as I've heard many times now that being an independent software contractor (in the EU) is somewhat hard. I always had quite the opposite experience so I genuinely do wonder if I was simply lucky (until now that is. No one knows what the future holds). I did specialize in Computer Vision, Image Processing, C++, Python and lately more and more DevOps if this is of any interest and my previously described luck depends on this specific field.
- wofo 3y ago
  My case was made difficult by the fact that I was only open to 3 days / week contracts. And maybe also because I'm trying to find something outside of full stack development, while at the same time being decently paid.
gigatexal 3y ago
I just started a 5-hour a week gig and I am addicted. Imagine being paid for the hours you put in. Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense. Imagine being able to bill time adding questions to tickets to train ticket writers to write better tasks. And the kicker for me: imagine all the time you'd spend working on your craft in your own free time to better yourself and learn new skills now imagine using that time to do all those things and learn all those things but being able to get paid for it while working on jobs/tasks for a client. Contracting is amazing.
- moeris 3y ago
  > Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense. I think maybe you just worked at a terrible business. You experience contacting sounds more like my experience at my current job.
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    I was being a bit dramatic but I do seem to have to deal with a lot of empty or otherwise barren tasks in Jira that were created with a lot of implied information i.e tickets with just a title and no body or tickets with a title and very little information in the body.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  May I ask how you found this role? I find networking confusing I’ve been sending connection requests to people on LinkedIn to no avail
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    I got lucky. I posted on HN's Who Wants To Be Hired really looking for a new role but with a blurb that I was open to contracting and someone reached out.
  - gigatexal 3y ago
melx 3y ago
I'm currently looking for contract work around Python/Elixir web-based projects (hire me anyone?), so I thought I will give TopTal a try after reading the article. I put good effort into the application process - e.g. by ensuring my answers are exactly what they're looking for (the questions weren't technical so far). I then uploaded my up-to-date CV among other things they asked, and I selected my availability to "full time".... only to learn that I was put on some sort of waitlist - "[..] we encourage you to reapply after March 2, 2024." I think I'll pass on TopTal. The could tell me way before I applied their network has reached its capacity (if?). Or is that he "long selection process" the OP refers to in the article?
- rogual 3y ago
  Same experience here. And IIRC (it was a while ago), after happily hoovering up my CV and personal data, the rejection message was worded as if they were at capacity, not even that they didn't want me specifically. Could have said that up front, but of course they didn't.
  - melx 3y ago
    Ugh. Terrible tactics. Good thing I removed my email/phone from CV upon uploading it to them.

191 points by wofo 3y ago

wofo 3y ago

I wrote this article based on my last 3 years as a contractor with increasingly interesting clients (I'm currently doing open source Rust work for ISRG, the makers of Let's Encrypt). I've found lots of inspiration here on HN throughout my journey, so I'm hoping my article continues the chain and inspires some more people! I'll be hanging around here for the coming hours in case anyone has questions ;) (btw free to write to me directly if you prefer; contact details are in my profile)

bippingchip 3y ago
Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!
- tstrimple 3y ago
  If you want to explore what consulting looks like without the risk of going it alone, consider joining a company that does consulting. It's a good opportunity to learn about the sales cycle as well as get a taste for what sort of challenges consulting provides while still being a FTE with benefits.
  - couchand 3y ago
    This is useful infotmation to learn, but I can tell you from having done all three that consulting for a shop is as different from freelancing as it is from an in-house job.
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      I guess it depends on how close you are to the sales process. I have had a chance to get a lot of experience working on proposals from a tech point of view and am involved in the pitch and negotiation. There is definitely carryover from those activities. But if you are consulting as a heads down IC and leave other aspects of projects and bids to the “business people” I can see where you may not learn as much that will be helpful as a freelancer.
- wofo 3y ago
  I'm happy you liked it!
phara0h 3y ago
Super interesting to find out that you're a fellow Catholic! It's sometimes hard to bring up faith in IT spaces, I feel like most of my colleagues are athiest or agnostic. I always feel good when I see people mention God, as it reminds me that being God fearing and in IT is not mutually exclusive. Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!
- wofo 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm making an effort to avoid being preachy, but since God does play a genuine role in the story, people might as well hear about it (otherwise I'd be hiding crucial information to understand my decisions!)
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    Your belief or faith in God played a genuine role in the story. If you had evidence of a god playing a role in anything you could start your own religion :-)
    - wofo 3y ago
      I'm not going to engage in the eternal atheists vs believers debate, but I'm trusting here that my experience is based upon reality (i.e. I've found convincing evidence). I don't expect what convinces me will convince everyone else, but you and I will die some day and then we'll know (or if it turns out we no longer exist, at least we won't care :P)
      - vouwfietsman 3y ago
        Using a word like "evidence" freely without rigour is a big part of the problem we are in relating to misinformation and mistrust in institutions. I ask without expectations that you refrain from using such words when talking about opinions, experiences or beliefs, so that we may protect our languages from further erosion.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Just wanted to give props for volunteer work. It's been my raison d'etre for decades.
- wofo 3y ago
  I know it's a cliché, but it's true that you receive more than you give ;)
angarg12 3y ago
I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker. I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand. Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?
- _huayra_ 3y ago
  You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check. I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.
  - angarg12 3y ago
    Unfortunately my L1 visa doesn't allow me to have any other source of income than my current employer. But definitely this is something to look into once I get a Green Card.
    - _huayra_ 3y ago
      Sorry for being unclear, I meant to just go through the process of seeing what you could get in terms of contracts as if you had already made the move, not to actually follow through and start any contract. Some of the "expat threads" I've seen on Reddit where people yeet themselves to the other side of the world and hope it works out only to fall flat on their face are pretty eye opening. By testing the waters with "proto-contracting" like this, you can at least give yourself some idea of what you could get were you to move. edit: grammar

scarface_74 3y ago

So he spent all of a very long term article describing how he became a “successful” contractor and refused to mention the one metric of success that most people care about - how much he got paid? This article was a waste of time without talking about was it worth the time over just being a salaried developer with benefits.

throwaway4good 3y ago
I would expect that the hourly rates for run-of-the-mill contracting in the Netherlands via a broker would be 80-160 euros - more for short jobs (less than a month).
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I am a contractor of sorts...at least, I don't have a regular job as a salaried employee. Compared to working 9-5, my hours are closer to part time hours and I get paid about a third of what I used to as a programmer.... Seems like I get paid less but...if you factor in all the additional time I USED to need getting ready for work, recovering from the 9-5 grind, commuting, I get paid about twice as much per hour as I used to. Plus, the ability to work whenever I want, chill at home in bed if I want, do whatever the hell I want because the ONLY thing that matters is the final product, is worth its weight in gold. Besides, I stopped caring about making tons of money, and would rather use my young years for fun stuff.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wofo 3y ago
I don't mind answering that question, but I'm not sure it has a place in the article (maybe I'll modify it later if I change my mind). My expectation is that in The Netherlands you could at most aim at 80k / year as a FTE (depending on lots of factors). Right now my workload is equivalent to 4 days / week and I'm earning about double what I'd get as an employee. Sounds like a good deal to me.
- 3y ago

vladgur 3y ago

How would you say your income compares to total comp in your area according to levels.fyi. How do you compare to a salaried job at a FAANG type company that has benefits such as paid leave, paternity leave, retirement contributions(not sure if Europe has something similar to 401k), etc How many hours per week do you spend devoted to your venture: coding, marketing, finding clients. Based on your domain I’m assuming you have socialized healthcare, so that’s one less risk to consider.

wofo 3y ago
I don't know about levels.fyi (they want me to register / upgrade to see what salaries are like in Amsterdam), but I gave some more details in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359237 In short: I'm working 4 days / week (3 billable days, 1 overhead) and earning about double of what I'd otherwise get. Though obviously I'm taking additional risk. You are right that the healthcare side of things is covered.
- rolisz 3y ago
  What is the 1 day of overhead? That's sounds a lot per week.
  - wofo 3y ago
    Here's some stuff that falls under overhead: writing blog posts (this one took me at least 10 hours to write), networking, sales conversations, keeping my own knowledge up to date. It's not consistently one day, but I'd say on average it is.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      That sounds about right. In fact for some types of billable consulting work, it's probably low. (It was a bit more complicated when I was an analyst because some of the non-production work was client service. On the other hand, a lot of the production work (call it writing) wasn't paid for. So, net, your billable hours per hours worked can be fairly modest.

lastangryman 3y ago

[flagged]

b800h 3y ago

For the Americans coming into this thread later today (or up very late), it bears repeating that "contracting" arrangements in the US vs. EU/UK are very different beasts. Historically in the UK, contracting was/is a higher-risk venture (medium term sole-client freelancing) which carried concomitantly higher salaries, and in some verticals (government, for instance), it has been very difficult to find good developers who aren't contractors. My understanding of the US is that typically "contractor" over there implies "consultancy worker" which is the staffing equivalent of shovelware. Please correct me if wrong!

pipes 3y ago
What is a vertical?
- b800h 3y ago
  An industry segment - say Healthcare, Government, Media, Finance.
  - arthur_sav 3y ago
    Thanks google
    - FredPret 3y ago
      Ironically “vertical” is a very hard word to google
      - tough 3y ago
        ChatGPT has you covered
        FredPret 3y ago
        Yeah, maybe if it has the original context. Although, there's no shame in asking one of the walking, talking neural nets that have traditionally been willing to supply clarification, especially when they created the bit of context that is the source of confusion.

whazor 3y ago

This is a very Dutch thing, where as a contractor you lose a lot of benefits like 25 holidays, paid sick days, pension, unemployment insurance. But overall you normally get more money, though also more stress. Compared to USA, Dutch freelancing is more like normal employment. If you get hired by an USA startup, you normally get a much bigger compensation and they often prefer you to be contractor as it fits better with overall HR/contract structure. Though there are in-between firms that would hire you like a normal employee with Dutch benefits, but you lose some money.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
You loose the same benefits in Austria as well if you go contracting, and on top of that you need to have more than one customer per year, otherwise the tax authorities will consider you're contracting just to avoid full time employment and committing tax fraud.
- valzam 3y ago
  Which is very strange since in Austria as a freelancer you are still required to pay into all the same social systems as a FTE right? Public pension, health insurance etc. In Germany you have the same "Scheinselbstaendigkeit" issue but it's a bit more understandable why the authorities care, considering that as a freelancer you aren't paying into the public pension system.
  - vjerancrnjak 3y ago
    Austria in general is very unfriendly to small businesses. The salaries are also heavily taxed so employees are extra expensive. All of the hiring attempts are just companies trying to pay you as little as possible and then contract your work to rich companies or government. But to me it sounds most Europe is like this. They do offer a 12% discount if you do not have any expenses (which you can barely have as a programmer) so eventually you can earn a bit more than being employed.
- bjornsing 3y ago
  It used to be like this in Sweden too 20 years ago, but it’s been relaxed over the years. Now it’s pretty much unheard of that the tax authorities complain about “hidden employment” / “fake freelancing”.

Erikun 3y ago

Am I the only one confused by why anyone would want to go with Toptal considering what is written in the article?

ogarten 3y ago
Probably the pressure to find a project to work on. There are many platforms like toptal. Some screen their people others don't. They are all similar in that respect. Same goes for recruiters. Are there good recruiters? very positive but they are so rare that it's impossible to find them.
- Erikun 3y ago
  I see the upsides, but am weirded out by the idea of being contractually obligated to remain ignorant of what the customer is paying for your services. Naively I'd imagine a competitor to Toptal could disrupt them by providing transparency and a flat percentage on top of the rate, but clearly there is something that makes that not happening.
vjerancrnjak 3y ago
There is no effort outside of the elimination interview that you have to put in to find a client. You don’t have to spend a minute to find work. Despite them pressuring you to put your rate as low as possible they still have a lot of room to negotiate with the client.
nmfisher 3y ago
I'm fairly certain that Toptal's "long selection process" is designed to weed out anyone who has other options, because they're harder to bully into putting their rates down. That turned me off, but at the same time, they do do the hardest part of the contracting/freelancing world - finding clients. If you're willing to jump through their hoops and accept a lower rate than you'd get on the open market, then it's a decent arrangement.
cjalmeida 3y ago
I've been both a Toptal contractor and a client. While they're an arguably high fee, they provide valuable services for the contractor, first and foremost access to high paying markets and clients. For a high skilled dev in developing countries this means rates that are still much higher than local rates, thus they tend to attract good talent. Also they handle all burocracy and ensure you get paid, very important when working overseas. For clients they provide very good corporate customer service, and generally do a good job of screening people. My rate of "bad" contractors coming from Toptal is low and replacing them is quick. And every now and then you find some amazing devs.

samsonradu 3y ago

One thing worth mentioning for EU’s IT industry is that there are large sectors like government which need IT services but can only work with contractors as hiring is not legally possible or extremely tedious. This means contractors get access to a larger market.

wyozi 3y ago
This also results in a relatively large number of IT consulting companies, many of which specialize in public sector service bidding. Certain large consultancies winning most of the bids and then under-delivering has pretty much become a meme at this point.
negamax 3y ago
That only causes Accenture etc. body shops to thrive in EU market. EU as a market is very government policy driven. Government contracts are lucrative but typical body shop pays 1:10 as compared to what they are paid. And then the "employee" also pays high taxes on the income. Not sure what can change it. May be more US companies should get contractor friendly in EU markets?
- samsonradu 3y ago
  1:10 is a little harsh, quite far from the norm. From my experience body shops subcontracting freelancers pay 80-90% of the daily rate (BENELUX area)

brandensilva 3y ago

It is interesting hearing different perspectives going into this kind of work. My experience has been a bit different. I've never had a famine cycle in the last 12 years of doing front end development and product design. Part of the reason I'm sure is I've always said yes to challenging and desirable projects and risen to the occasion. The fear of failing helps me adapt quickly I'm sure as well to new technology. My clients often end up being long term clients I work years with. Income wise things vary year to year but I'm often in the $150k to $250k range in a medium cost area where my money goes a bit farther than the west coast. In order to push higher I know I'll need to put more effort into fine tuning my target market and value propositions. Also building more clout, becoming an authority in a specialized field, or investing more back into the business with marketing and sales would go a long ways. If I were to push into consultancy I feel confident I could push into the 250k to 350k range more but I am quite happy still slinging code rather than advising. I'm happy people find success in this arena. It's important that people have a good mix of choices that works for them so congrats to OP for finding your desirable path.

W0lf 3y ago

I am in my fifth year of being an independent software consultant/contractor. I live in Germany. I've had multiple gigs almost right from the start of being self employed. Almost always through one of the many recruiting firms. Reading his story, I do wonder though if my path is or has been somewhat special until now as I've heard many times now that being an independent software contractor (in the EU) is somewhat hard. I always had quite the opposite experience so I genuinely do wonder if I was simply lucky (until now that is. No one knows what the future holds). I did specialize in Computer Vision, Image Processing, C++, Python and lately more and more DevOps if this is of any interest and my previously described luck depends on this specific field.

wofo 3y ago
My case was made difficult by the fact that I was only open to 3 days / week contracts. And maybe also because I'm trying to find something outside of full stack development, while at the same time being decently paid.

gigatexal 3y ago

I just started a 5-hour a week gig and I am addicted. Imagine being paid for the hours you put in. Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense. Imagine being able to bill time adding questions to tickets to train ticket writers to write better tasks. And the kicker for me: imagine all the time you'd spend working on your craft in your own free time to better yourself and learn new skills now imagine using that time to do all those things and learn all those things but being able to get paid for it while working on jobs/tasks for a client. Contracting is amazing.

moeris 3y ago
> Imagine not being yelled at or ridiculed or told to figure it out if what you're asked to do is ambiguous or makes no sense. I think maybe you just worked at a terrible business. You experience contacting sounds more like my experience at my current job.
- gigatexal 3y ago
  I was being a bit dramatic but I do seem to have to deal with a lot of empty or otherwise barren tasks in Jira that were created with a lot of implied information i.e tickets with just a title and no body or tickets with a title and very little information in the body.
moneywoes 3y ago
May I ask how you found this role? I find networking confusing I’ve been sending connection requests to people on LinkedIn to no avail
- gigatexal 3y ago
  I got lucky. I posted on HN's Who Wants To Be Hired really looking for a new role but with a blurb that I was open to contracting and someone reached out.
- gigatexal 3y ago

melx 3y ago

I'm currently looking for contract work around Python/Elixir web-based projects (hire me anyone?), so I thought I will give TopTal a try after reading the article. I put good effort into the application process - e.g. by ensuring my answers are exactly what they're looking for (the questions weren't technical so far). I then uploaded my up-to-date CV among other things they asked, and I selected my availability to "full time".... only to learn that I was put on some sort of waitlist - "[..] we encourage you to reapply after March 2, 2024." I think I'll pass on TopTal. The could tell me way before I applied their network has reached its capacity (if?). Or is that he "long selection process" the OP refers to in the article?

rogual 3y ago
Same experience here. And IIRC (it was a while ago), after happily hoovering up my CV and personal data, the rejection message was worded as if they were at capacity, not even that they didn't want me specifically. Could have said that up front, but of course they didn't.
- melx 3y ago
  Ugh. Terrible tactics. Good thing I removed my email/phone from CV upon uploading it to them.