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Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

In Amsterdam NL a backend engineer could expect 80-100 euros/hr. > 100 is also possible, but you may get into specialization territory.

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Also based in NL, "Amsterdam" area (Utrecht). As people have mentioned elsewhere, it depends. My current long-term (6+ months) contract is at €95/hr, working as part of a great team of developers on an Elixir backend, and being able to learn Elixir (which I didn't know beforehand) on the job. I have also done smaller projects (2 months), a bit more specialized, on the side for €125/hr.

By the way, I am not totally convinced about weekly vs hourly billing. In my case, hourly billing has worked well. I just make sure I bill for _everything_ I do for the client, also the time I spend learning stuff, and communicate clearly about it. People hire me because I can figure out stuff quickly, not because I know all there is to know about programming (though I do think I have a strong background).

Yeah, hourly billing gets knocks, but I think it's the right approach for a lot of circumstances. If I can control the shape of the engagement and it's the kind of thing I've done enough that I can reliably predict the work needed, sure, project pricing is great. But if you're just putting in work on a project somebody else is leading, hourly's the way to go, because that insulates you from all sorts of risks.

Where would one go and look for those kind of vacancies?

I think in the beginning recruiters on LinkedIn. Note however that like all parasites they will try to skim a lot off the top. Worse than that, some will try to lock you in and write in clauses saying that they should get a share of any other future contracts you might have - make sure to never sign smth like that.

Once you have a few 6 month contracts under your belt and you can get good references you can probably find things without relying on intermediaries.

You either connect to a freelance broker or you network your way into such things.

In my experience no advertises on job boards that they are looking for contractors.

And where do you find freelance brokers?

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