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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

It’s basically how almost all freelancers get work in Sweden, via “consultant brokers”.

Basically a bunch of sales people whom you call and say “I want an assignment and I know X, Y and Z” and they hook you up with an assignment in exchange for 5-15% of what you invoice.

I’ve been using them ever since I started in 2018 and never spent more than 1-2 hours to land a 6+ months long assignment

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For real? How have I never heard of this? Is this a Swedish-only thing? That's super interesting, thanks for sharing.

Similar thing in Germany and Switzerland.

It’s a thing in most EU countries AFAIK. These guys are one of the biggest (but by no means the best): https://www.eworkgroup.com/en

The downside is they make it hard to enter the market as they gatekeep. And clients (especially bigger ones) don't want to deal with individuals at all because of the brokers.

They also sub contract to other contracting or consulting companies.

At the end of the day I'd say I'm quite insulted by the concept. They really treat developers like a commodity to be pimped out.

Meh, I make more than double take home money compared to the same job as a employee while not having to buy into the company “””vision””” and attend all hands and town hall meeting.

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i tried this once when i was in europe and they wanted to pay me 1/2 or 1/3 of what they were billing the client. and you had to work on site like an employee.

Same in Denmark.

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