Jakub Konka Hired Full Time

The guy hired, Jakub Konka, is living in Warsaw. I'd be surprised if he didn't take a significant pay cut from his previous job at Microsoft.

I didn't see where jakub is living in Colombia, where did you find that?

> If you were [...]

Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year.

Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number.

Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.

As a hired developer you usually get 30 days of holidays + 12 days (which is a bit more than 8 weeks). The year has 52 or 53 weeks, so you end at around 44 weeks instead of 48 weeks. That’s 123K€ per year.

Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks.

If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.

You'll have to subtract an average of ~2 weeks of sick leave as well, which is unpaid if you're a freelancer. Thats 46 weeks.

Assuming 100% utilisation is a typical beginner's mistake. You will usually have some time you cannot bill, most importantly time between projects, but also customer acquisition and certifications. There are also types of insurance that you don't need as an employee. If you do the math, the conditions are not as favourable as they may appear from the outset.

I will concede though that a reliable long-term project such as being a paid Zig contributor is a special case, and might warrant some discount.

In Estonia, the employer's expenses are 1.75x of what the employee actually receives; 43% of the employer's payroll expenses go to taxes and other fees. I assume it's similar in other EU countries.

You can buy health insurance separately, but that doesn't excuse you from paying taxes if you're receiving income. And once you're paying taxes, there's no point to buy health insurance separately, as you will automatically qualify for "free" healthcare. The only time it makes sense to buy health insurance separately is if you have retired at a young age or you're cheating on your taxes.

Of course, all of this varies by country, but I imagine the percentages are relatively similar. Germany is a more expensive country, so I can see how 70EUR/h might be a reasonable number there.

I don't think you work 48 weeks per year in Germany (or in general, most of the EU). You have to subtract national holidays and vacation. The latter should be 4 weeks minimum (i.e. for a young person). At least based on what we have here, in Hungary. I think it goes up to 6 weeks. I'm pretty sure Germany is not worse off. In general you have about 220-225 working days a year (which translates to 44-45 weeks).

So that's about 125k invoiced income as an entrepreneur. It's not your salary yet. Again, depends on the country (you may have to pay lower taxes as a solo-preneur than what would be paid by someone employing you), but the employer usually pays more than what the employee makes in gross salary. Calculating with the Hungarian wedge, one of the highest in the EU, the net is about 50% of what the employer pays in total.

My guess is that it's probably equal to around 85-100k of gross salary. Definitely not bad (based on what I can see from here), seems to be on the higher and, but doesn't seem exceptional either.

Oh, well and you also have to account for downtimes as you'll probably won't quit before finishing your project (and if you won't, you'll almost certainly will have unpaid down times between projects).

Which is nice in this case, but it still doesn't tell me what's interesting about this hiring.