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thenewnewguy

So, just to be clear, these are your complaints:

- You couldn't fire somebody who went on maternity leave

- You had to provide benefits to your employees, even temporary ones

Seems like the laws are working to protect employees as intended to me.

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It is really rich that those on HN who are paid 6 to 7 figures would seat on their high horse and disparage OP for complaining about labour law arbitrage from the perspective of an Nordic entrepreneur and yet would be the first to throw a fit if their jobs get shipped or outsourced to Mexico or some other emerging economy.

Funny enough, I just outsourced a bunch to Vietnam and am in the process of moving the rest to eastern Europe. The only part that will remain here is the sales division because that needs to be here.

So yea, looks like the laws are working as intended... amirite?

Where in Eastern Europe are you moving?

I wonder if Estonia is okay for startups?

In my city the IT sector unemployment is around zero point something figures, meaning it's quite difficult to find new qualified workers. I've even heard about cases of French and Belgian citizens moving to Eastern Europe to work in IT. It sounds crazy.

May I guess poland or bulgaria.

Ask them what they think about Immigration of software engineers to top it off!

And what the do when they can't exploit said countries as much if they institute stronger labor laws?

Frankly I welcome companies to try and outsource their work. It almost never works out well because they pay garbage rates and get garbage code back. I have zero concerns about software jobs being outsourced.

This is an /r/politics tier comment. Don't boil down someone's thoughtful and informative reply, based in their personal experience to some list that you crafted just to morally shame them. It's really embarrassing behavior that you wouldn't engage in face-to-face. Do better.

Agreed. It was a good comment, clearly relating his own experience.

I found it valuable.

I love this reply because it showcases how people hear so selectively and ignore facts. I guess relying on fiction is much easier.

Anyhow, I agree. Seems like the laws are actually working as intended as I have started to outsource to Asia. Your laws did wonders to protect the workers which they were "intended to help". Man this is way to fucking hilarious and sad at the same time.

Your <rant> is basically about you not having (or not willing to budget) enough money to cover the extra risk that the Sweden's work laws impose on your startup. When you think about it like this, the laws and your response to them work exactly as intended.

From Sweden's point of view, the positions you have outsourced will be covered by a company which is willing to pay the price of access to the labor market in Sweden. Which is not unlike a tax.

Did you budget for Sweden's taxes in your startup? Not doing that and then posting a <rant> that you suddenly have to pay taxes and that the existence of the tax code forces you to outsource to Asia would be quite similar to your post here.

They don't, because he will just straight-out never hire a woman again (though he cannot say that).

No system is perfect, and sometimes we need to acknowledge that unsavory unintended consequences do exist.

I recently went to a european country with similar laws and was talking to an american ex-pat woman running the tour I signed up for. She said when she first decided to stay a while in this country and started looking for jobs, people were asking her strangely personal questions like how serious she was with her boyfriend. Only after she took her maternity leave a few years later did she realize they were actually gauging how big a maternity leave risk she was going to be while not quite asking her that outright because that would be technically illegal.

The kicker is now she was running her own small tourist business, and she flat out said that she would think long and hard about hiring a woman in her 20's for the exact same reason. In this country she would have to pay a person taking maternity leave out of pocket for up to a year and the government would reimburse her a year or two after the person comes back. The issue was that for a small 3-4 person operation, losing a person for a year while paying whatever % of salary is a significant risk to the business -- she wasn't sure she could stay afloat while waiting for the government to reimburse her (plus this was a mediteranean government not known for german levels of solvency...)

None of this is to say any of this is right or just, but it's just a first-hand tourist story I got that shows it's difficult to create a system that works (at least if "works" is defined solely as "maximizing business growth"). Even if something is formally illegal doesn't mean it doesn't appear as some of the informal mental calculus, and an honest discussion about this would say "yes, these policies can impact business growth and have unintended consequences." The followup conversation no one in the US is willing to have, though, is should we really be fetishizing business growth above all else?

People who start new companies don't automatically have infinite amount of money. Or you think that if one is not insanely rich one has no right to start any business? This is so cynical to support regulation of small starting up companies and huge international corporations by the same laws, ignoring the scale. Only 1 company of 100 actually survive to become profitable. No wonder corporatism "wins" around the world. Though usually it's ignorance, in case of Sweden what they do to small business seems to be done intentionally.

Yeah, this really just made my positive thoughts on the law even stronger. Thanks for the clear breakdown :)

They're also the reason why Sweden has an utter joke of a tech industry while the United States are world-leading within the field.

Is Sweden's tech industry an utter joke, though? Stockholm and Sweden rank very high, both when it comes to old-style tech companies (Ericsson, etc) and startups. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-... "Stockholm produces the second-highest number of billion-dollar tech companies per capita, after Silicon Valley"

Also, tech salaries are quite high -- as a consultant, you make more than in London at least.

A first year student of some community college in the US is twice as good as the average developer here.

You think I am talking shit? well... I studied in the US and worked as a program director for a technical University based in Stockholm whose sole job was to output developers into the market in line with what all the hundreds of CTOs that I interviewed required.

Trust me when I say this, that article you linked to is pure PR bullshit. You can find the same article written about Paris, London, Berlin, etc. It´s all PR bullshit that people spin in order to attract foreign capital.

> Also, tech salaries are quite high -- as a consultant, you make more than in London at least.

at some point you ought to realize that what you´re saying is bullshit, and this sentence should have tipped you off to the fact that you´re talking out of your ass.

I don't understand your anger, but it's interesting that you've got such a completely different experience of the situation. FWIW, I've also studied in the US, and I've hired developers in Stockholm. There are of course both good and bad developers, but if you pay more, you tend to get better ones.

The article might or might not be bullshit, but there's a lot of highly valued tech companies per capita in Sweden, and I know for sure the consultant prices aren't bullshit as I've worked for quite a long time as just that. I'm usually not the kind of person that "talks out of my ass".

> A first year student of some community college in the US is twice as good as the average developer here.

I work closely with developers from both the US and Sweden, and this hasn't been my experience at all. If anything it's been the reverse.

What I can say though is that developers from Asian countries leave a lot to be desired. Which is funny as you've outsourced jobs to Vietnam.

At some point you ought to realize that what you're saying is bullshit too.

> At some point you ought to realize that what you're saying is bullshit too.

My previous startup was a tech one. The current one that is in Vietnam is for production and manufacturing of physical goods. The parts I moved to Vietnam are the manufacturing parts and the parts that moved to Eastern Europe are the tech parts where you can a lot more value for much less.

So no I am not talking shit, you just dont know enough about my specific case to judge it, yet somehow you have managed to do just that.

> a technical University based in Stockholm

The only technical university in Stockholm is KTH, I believe - is that what you're talking about?

> whose sole job was to output developers into the market in line with what all the hundreds of CTOs that I interviewed required

That's not how a university's role is usually seen.

So what is the point then? To spit out future academic researchers who write papers read by other academic researchers on postmodern literature?

Academia is a fraud, but to the extent that it produces useful employees it is at least socially justifiable.

I think the main point was that /u/wesammikhail seemed to claim a position that either didn't exist or was illconceived.

I had no idea the IT consultant salaries were higher in Stockholm compared to London. What kind of rates would an IT consultant be expected to pull in Sweden?

Assignments that are accessible by "anyone" at the consultant brokers are often listed around 750-950 SEK/hour, which means ~470 to ~600 GBP/day if you work 8 hours per day -- clients usually don't mind you working more though. Tax isn't that different last time I checked, but CoL is of course much higher in London.

you are forgetting however that the 750-950 SEK/h includes self-employment taxes (arbetsgivaravgifter) of ~30% + 30% income tax. That´s before all other taxes and fees.

This was essentially the whole point of my original post about consultants. But people dont get this. After all taxes are paid, you get something like 375-475sek/h if even that as this is the above average level of salary.

Compared to when I lived and worked in London, this is a joke. That´s before factoring in cost of living relative to income. You live a much better life in London than you do in Sthlm for instance so I am not sure where you got that last part from. Especially if you consider how massively fucked the Krona is right now

I'm quite aware of the taxes involved -- as I said, I've been working as a consultant for some time now. What you might be forgetting is that, with a company, you can plan your taxes better. Take out a minimal salary and put everything in an ISK and you don't have to pay any capital gains tax, for example.

You're also going to pay taxes being self-employed in the UK, and whether you prefer London over Stockholm is subjective; what you need to consider is the cost of real estate mainly vs statistical incomes, rather than anecdotes.

Regarding how "massively fucked" the Krona is, check this chart: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=SEK&view=5Y

Contracting in London is as good as dead come April

Haven't been following this too closely, but can I ask why? Is this because of some new tax rules implemented by HMRC?

Yes. It's a short term money grab that will have profound effect on financial services industry, pharma, construction, etc. After killing contracting in the public sector the time has come to abolish the one-man consultancy in the private sector. It's still there, but no client (esp. big companies) wants to put the risk of audit on themselves so they largely have a blanket policy of 'no contractors' in place come April.

They're pretty much the same.

According to my friends there, a programmer in Sweden makes SEK 30k - 40k a month, or $37-49k. Europe is a low-cost outsourcing centre which occasionally spits out bright people who run startups, just like China or India or Vietnam.

I have toyed with the idea of working in the US, and I'd have to make about two times the salary in the US to have the same quality of living as in Sweden. Three to four times the salary to have access to the same kind of medical care. Maybe.

Perfectly doable of course, for someone into tech. But just to put things into perspective.

Most employers (tech) pay 90%+ of healthcare costs. Worst case scenario you might be responsible for $6k per person per year if you heavily used the healthcare system.

Why would you need to earn 3x as much?

Because to get to the same level of care and to emulate zero copay, I’d need better insurance or more savings allocated for health bills. Also cost of living is MUCH higher near many tech jobs in the US.

Ignoring the cost of living, emulating zero copay and having the same level of care would cost you a few thousand a year. Not 2-3x your salary.

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