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How did you calculate the 30 EUR per hour? Does this include paid holidays, sick leave, training, etc? Is it paid 12 times per year, or even 13, 14 or 15 times?
by andix 2y ago
How did you calculate the 30 EUR per hour? Does this include paid holidays, sick leave, training, etc? Is it paid 12 times per year, or even 13, 14 or 15 times?
A freelancer can actually only work around 10 months per year. 1-2 weeks are national holidays, 4-6 weeks is holiday, 1-2 weeks sick leave.
Freelancers also only get paid when there is work to be done. There are gaps between projects that need to be included in the hourly rate. Training is done unpaid. Freelancers usually also provide some flexibility to the customer: the project is cancelled by the end of next week, the freelancer doesn't have to be paid anymore. Terminating a regular employee probably comes with a severance package of 2-6 monthly salaries, and maybe even a legal dispute.
Edit: Also hiring freelancers is much easier. Just hire them and fire them if they don't do their job as good as expected at any time. With employees it's more difficult to fire them if they don't perform as well as expected, but don't behave in bad faith.
- mettamage 2y agoI get about 60K per year including a bonus, so that's an estimate. What I didn't factor in is vacation and sick leave. Vacation is 6 weeks. Sick leave, well it's the Netherlands so one could be sick for 2 years. If a freelancer would pay for an equivalent insurrance would cost about 500 euro's or a bit lower (so 6K per year). So to make it more equivalent, I'm assuming 2 weeks of being ill, 6 weeks of vacation, so 10 months of actual work which is 1680 hours (168 hours per month). 1680 hours at 150 euro's is 252000 euro's. Deduct the 6000 euro's insurrance off of it and you get 246000 euro's. So eyeballing this if I want to steelman, it'd be: 200K for the freelancers, and an employee costs 100K. As another comment mentioned: it's fair and/or makes sense when a freelancer doesn't have work all the time, but when the work keeps rolling in it's at the very least a 2x, of which you get to keep more as well as I haven't spoken about deducting all kinds of stuff (laptop, phone, etc.).
- andix 2y ago60k sounds like a rather bad salary for a SW engineer in the Netherlands.
- mettamage 2y agoAccording to [1] it sounds about right actually. I actually make a bit above of what I should be making with 4 years of experience and a computer science master. [1] https://www.nationalevacaturebank.nl/salariswijzer https://www.nationalevacaturebank.nl/salariswijzer
- user32489318 2y agoYou’re making very rooking mistake of thinking that your salary = expense to the employer. Employer already pays at least 40% over your salary for “social” taxes. Excluding all the stuff you mentioned earlier, you can safely assume that you cost 60€/h excluding all the benefits, holidays, extra pension contributions etc.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mejutoco 2y agoOn top of that, the freelancer might provide their own equipment. They might get paid days, or months, later too.
- andix 2y agoI've never got paid time off as a freelancer. Sometimes I was allowed to join company paid trainings on my free time. But it's also a plus for the company, they hire a trainer and give the extra spots to their freelancers. No cost, just benefits (better trained freelancers).