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Comment by IlikeKitties | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for your concern but I'm in Germany so the situation is a bit different and only very few companies have been able to keep up with inflation around here. I've seen at least a few adjustments but would not likely find a job that pays as well as mine does 100% remote. Making roughly 60K in Germany as a single in his 30s isn't exactly painful.

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> but would not likely find a job that pays as well as mine does 100% remote.

That makes sense. The market for remote jobs has been shrinking while more people are competing for the smaller number of remote jobs. In office comes with a premium now and remote is a high competition space.

If you want to work 100% remote you could consider working for a US company as a consultant?

If a US company hires you in Germany, either you get hired by their German branch or a personnel service provider based in Germany; and thus get paid "competitive" salaries typical of the country. Or you need to have some kind of setup where you are a freelancer or such and you figure out the taxation and statutory insurances and such on your own, which I'm not familiar with (my freelance IT consultancy side-business is rather simple because of small scale and only domestic customers). That will probably work, and if you manage to get a senior Silicon Valley salary, you would probably come out ahead by a bit after taxes and insurances. But you would probably need good tax advisors to avoid stepping in expensive loopholes, and if you work more than 80% for a single employer, the tax administration will be on your case because false self-employment is a possible method of tax evasion and has been outlawed.

If the client you're consulting for has no presence in Germany then it cannot possibly be false self-employment, surely?

False self-employment is judged solely by whether you spend 80% or more of your worktime working for a single employer.

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