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Comment by cmews | Hacker News Reader

What is missing in this article is that most developers that want to properly get paid in the Netherlands switch to freelancing. There are a lot of freelance positions where they work a couple of years for 75-95 euros per hour and achieve the 130-200k yearly income (still not as high as silicon valley).

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Long-term freelancing, or I would call it B2B contract employee, is also the only way to work remotelly for abroad company.

Unfortunatelly EU has no means of cross-border employment yet other than establishing local subsidiary company. It is unlikely to happen if they "employ" a couple of people in various foreign countries. Company setup procedures and employment laws vary by country, salaries may vary by currency. It is just too complex at small scale.

Then the simpler solution is to use intermediary local contractors agency or just directly pay Euro invoices of long term freelancers.

It is legal but e.g. German companies prefer not to keep such contracts longer than 2 years. Why? That is another story...

There are payrolling companies that take care of all this. They have subsidiaries in every country, will give your remote employees all the things they have a right for according to the local laws, and send you an invoice.

For those who might be interested these companies are called Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs).

An example would be Velocity Global - https://velocityglobal.com/

As an extra data point: remote.com does this: https://remote.com/ (I'm not affiliated with them, just heard of them)

Same as in Canada I think.

In Canada (at least where I am) you basically earn employee status. I think it's the same in Germany ("Scheinselbststaendigkeit"). So you have to basically ping pong between two places or earn enough to just take a prolonged vacation until they can hire you back coz they like your work ;)

But then your final tax rate on that is more than half your income. Still worth it, but you have to take it into account.

This is not true because you can pay yourself 68k as normal income/salary and the rest as dividend which will lead to 40% tax rate. Which is still a high tax rate, but not more than half.

A-couple-of-years positions are definitely not freelance

They start with a 6/9/12 months contracts, but they extend the contract often in my experience. Freelancing is just charging your employer per hour with limited employee rights, but the period of the contract doesn't determine if something is a freelance job or not. Also the Dutch tax service isn't strict in checking freelance developers because they earn enough, but there is more discussion in the Netherlands for people that are being pushed into a freelancer position (Dutch people call this a `zzp'er`) for companies to lower the costs of the employer while the rights for the employee suffer.

"Position" implies you're salaried. A long term freelance career is more like a one-person consulting shop.

could you point out where is the best place to look for contracts in the Netherlands?

What works for me is Linkedin to be honest and recruiters will approach me or my Dutch developer friends for freelance contracts where they basically take a cut of the hour price (most of the time they take 10-15 euros/hour). Also being asked because of people that (pleasantly) worked with you is common as well and you could approach them to see if they need another freelancer for a project.

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