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Comment by 0db532a0 | Hacker News Reader

To be eligible for the 30% tax ruling, the company needs to prove that it cannot find an equivalent Dutch person. It isn’t a blanket ruling for any foreign person. Even if you do get it, it only lasts for n years. If you don’t, you will find that in light of the otherwise very high taxes and low salaries in comparison to nearby tech hubs, your one bedroom, 1450 a month apartment becomes a dream.

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Blue cards and HSM pretty much always get the ruling, it's definitely not any foreign person. I believe the 30% ruling lasts 5 years now, which also means that you would typically be eligible to be a permanent dutch resident. At that point, you'd have largely the same access to social services (disability etc.) that dutch people do and it seems fair to have equal taxes.

What would be the lower tax/high salary comparable in Europe? London has remarkably similar salaries and super high cost of living. (I hear Berlin has a cost of living that's exploding and generally lower salaries.)

Hamburg checking in at 930 € furnished. 15 minutes from the city center. My salary is 3.200 a month after taxes. I have a blue card.

Looks pretty comparable to salary + cost of living in Amsterdam.

https://thetax.nl/?year=2018&startFrom=Year&salary=66873.6&a...

Blue card minimum salary included in the above link. Hard to know if you'd come out ahead given local cost of living, but you can also probably beat the blue card minimum for your salary in the Netherlands. I know a couple people who make > 100k euros (some contractors, some who have made it pretty far up at bigger companies.)

I’ve lived and worked in both NL and London for significant lengths of time.

You are wrong about taxes. In the current tax year, 70k in one year in London would give you 4052 per month after tax. In NL, you would get 3668. That is no insignificant difference. You can verify this by using an online tax calculator.

I also don’t agree about the difference in cost of living. To dispel the most common trope, half a litre of beer in Amsterdam is at least 5EUR, and in London a pint (just over half a litre) is 5 pounds, about the same, given differences of currency and units. Eating out is strictly cheaper in London, and of higher quality. Some supermarket items are more expensive from my experience.

For a one bedroom flat not too far from say, The City or Old Street, you’re paying at least 1200, and maybe 1400 for something of higher quality.

On jobs, I have personally been hard pressed to find anything near the same variety and range of salaries in Amsterdam. There is a reason why so many Dutch programmers move abroad.

To attempt to add a bit of rigor to the discussion, here's what Numbeo thinks about the cost of living. They have 70k Eur in London as being about the same as 62.5k euros in Amsterdam taking into account taxes[0].

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

I definitely agree that there are more/interesting jobs for a lot of people in London, but I think that's changing. I think the other hard part for Dutch programmers is that the education system seems to be quite good, leading to a pretty deep talent market for a somewhat shallow hiring pool.

I do have one bit of terrible news: I think you've been overpaying for beers in Amsterdam. ;)

[0] One phenomena I've noticed is expats/immigrants tend to get better deals on housing because they have less cultural baggage about which areas are "nice" and can often see with clear eyes which areas are actually nice and which are actually bad.

Your argument isn’t rigorous in that it assumes salaries are the same. A programmer earning 70k in London would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent in Euros in Amsterdam. Also as someone who has spent a good bit of money in bars and clubs all around Amsterdam as a student, and not just as a tourist in the red light district, I don’t know where you’ve managed to get beer below 2.50 apart from one or two self-professed anarchist establishments, so I don’t know how rigorous a source Numbeo is either.

It's tough for me to know how engineering salaries stack up, I'm only hiring in Amsterdam and haven't looked deeply at what London markets look like. At least at the high end, they tend to be relationship and individual market driven. At a macro level, payscale has some interesting comparisons here with N> 250 each.

Software Engineer:

https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

Senior Software Engineers (N> 400 for both)

https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Senior_Software_Eng...

https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Sr._Software_Engine...

For beers: I think you're looking at the "Grocery section", Beers are priced at 4 euros in the "Restauraunt" zone. I will, in actuality, buy you a delicious <4 euro beer at one of a few bars around our office. I don't know how many other consumer indices are backed by a personal guarantee.

We’re comparing London and Amsterdam, and then you come up with a source that compares countries.

I’m also going to have to take you up on that <4 Euro half litre of beer next time I’m in Amsterdam.

> where you’ve managed to get beer below 2.50

At vending machines in train stations. When I was there, cheap Belgian beers were about EUR 2.50.

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