Belgium is very similar in that regard. Our politicians are very talented in turning what should be straightforward processes into complex bureaucratic puzzles that require at the least an advanced degree in accounting to solve. So frustrating as it's holding SMEs back.
I was lucky enough to experience a 2 year long project in which everything that went wrong was blamed on the developers. Project managers breathing down your neck, feeling so pressured you barely dare take a bathroom break, the whole shebang.
Quit working for them and now I'm a freelance dev.
They asked me to get back on the project and I said fine, that'll be €700/day. After some grumbling they realized they had no other option so they agreed.
The project is still failing due to bad management but I no longer care. I believe to now feel the same sense of calm around chaos and failure like you do.
A lot of developers have real mental scars from bad projects like this, because they get duped into thinking it's a matter of personal pride to see it trough.
It's not. Your primary concern should always be personal health.
Well, cobol is special of course. The more specialized you are... But for a generic c++, java or c# or web dev I would say you can't charge specialist money at all in the EU.
Well it's a negotiation. Those guys succeeded at asking for 2500, but you would start at a number they are guaranteed to say no to, and work your way down.
Like the going rate for a senior here is 900, and a good senior is 1200+. So your starting offer would be at least 1800, probably 2000s to round it up.
Which is the high end of your zone of possible agreement (900-1200) plus 50% for danger money, plus a few hundred to round it up to 2k.
Then you see what happens when you throw out the big number.
It would be the top range (if at all possible) for a developer working as a permanent employee. Usually the only way to make this kind of money is to go self-employed
Heh, as a salaried dev who gets 1700 - 1800 Euros per month (so around 90 Euros per day) after taxes in Latvia, some of the numbers in this thread are pretty sobering, even if you take the costs of being self employed or taxes into account.
If you take the run of the mill Java dev salary here, the net value is somewhere between 900 - 3000 Euros or so, across all levels of seniority [1]. Really makes one consider the benefits of working for companies in other countries, assuming that there are no cultural or time zone issues that cannot be dealt with.
Or, you know, to acquire skills that are high in demand but relatively low in supply.
There are some great remote work opportunities these days. It might be worth starting to look at other European countries who are hiring.
Take Ireland for example. You're not going to be making US level money but I'd say you could easily double what you're making now and there's the potential to go much higher than that.
Yep, and it seems like the pandemic largely showed that there are quite a few jobs out there that can be done remotely with decent success in many environments.
Well, at least as long as the culture fit is there etc., admittedly remote isn't for everyone, but on the flip side, geography/commute being less of an issue for the remainder of people is great!
From the Stackoverflow survey, it would be below the national average (the mean), but I don't think there's actually many regions that pay the national average. SV pays more and most of the rest pays less.
Keep in mind consultants don't get 401K plans or many other things, AND they have to save about 15-20% of their income as "in between jobs" money, in case they don't line work up.
If you earn 30% more than a salaried employee you are barely breaking even most of the time.
Hold on, 700€ x 215 days worked (you don't count vacation time when freelance) = 150 500. Now, give it half to the taxman, and you're left with 75 250€ / year.
And that's without the expenses, extra healthcare coverage, insurance etc.
So pretty average when you considering that junior developer salaries are within this reach in EU capitals.
I used 4 weeks, and by my experience that's generous (not talking about paid leave - all the freelancers I know are workaholics and don't take much leave, but maybe that's a US thing).
5*48 = 240 days, which works out to around 84000 EUR. Or 120,000 EUR - 30%.
Regardless, 700 EUR/day seems in the ball-park for a generic all-around developer.
£500/day is the absolute minimum for developer/DevOps outside London, £600/day much more common and including the cheap end for London. Senior is more often £800/day. You don't see values above that advertised, but people do obviously negotiate higher for specialist work; I have seen a mainframe developer charging £1500/day (on the low end of his range). Anything higher than that has always been a large consultancy rather than a freelancer. In my specialist niche I'd be asking for £1500/day top-end, expecting £800-1200 with negotiation depending on flexibility.
Even allowing that junior salaries reach this high (that's in the range for a senior in Berlin at least), that would be the PRE-TAX figure. Remove 40% (again, approximate taxes in Berlin, potentially more if you pay the "church" tax) and you've got 45150€, a significant difference.
I prefer to be paid based on how valuable my work is to the employer, not the cost of living wherever I happen to be or even my personal financial needs.
Sure, so do I, but when I tell my manager I'm worth X amount, he'll say that's just not where local salaries are at for my job category and responsibility.
Implying that other developers in my area are available for less than I ask.
I mean, if a person is able to extract 700€ per day, kudos to them but that's still above the 90th percentile of senior developers in Europe.
What do other companies say? "Nah you're not" is a pretty standard response to "I'm worth more than this" but consider the source. For some reason many companies would far rather let a good employee leave than raise their pay to market rate.
I had a buddy do exactly that. His manager told him he was already paid above market. Inside a month he showed her that she was wrong and we had a gaping hole to fill in the team.
To give a point of reference, an employed senior engineer in mechanical/aerospace in western Europe makes about 250-300€/day, before taxes. So 175-200€/day after taxes.
Amazon's orientation and internal culture is structured to make one think that it is a matter of personal pride and worth and if you do not align you are worthless.. it is a mind F** for fresh college hires.. I like to think Amazon is the tech industries' Pedo***..
Maybe. Last I checked, the tires on F1 cars are optimized for traction at actual racing speeds (when they get hot and stickier), which means that at low speeds F1 cars actually have much poorer traction than one might think. Only matters on turns, presumably, and 40km/h might be slow enough that it does not matter, but I'd really want to see some experimental data before deciding on anything that happens so far out of a vehicle's intended-use envelope.
Could you? Here[1] is Richard Hammond driving an F1 car on Top Gear, and he says it can't go slowly, safely - no downforce, no heat in the tyres, no heat in the brakes. If you're coming off a lot of fast laps into the pit lane they will still be warm, if you try to drive it at 40km/h all the way they won't be.
Hammond is correct, however the term "slowly" in an F1 car would refer to speeds like 60–100 km/h. Note that the pit lane speed limit is generally 100 km/h during a race. I picked 40 km/h as it's a speed which even the hardest rubber tyre would not present difficulty retaining traction even without the aid of any downforce.
And indeed, if my memory of Hammond's experience is anything to go by, the F1 engine may not even be able to handle being driven exclusively at such slow speeds without stalling out.
It suggests that the 'cupping vessel' be "between 7 and 9 fluid ounces (207 ml to 266 ml), with a top diameter of between 3 and 3.5 inches (76 - 89 mm)"
Coincidentally: it’s also the only programming language I know of where someone has written a lengthy blog post about how I’m in fact, not too dumb to comprehend it.
I didnt think about how hard Haskell is because I never forced myself to learn it. It just didnt interest me. With Java or C# I can make so many things with minimal friction. The other language that people talk about being hard is Rust. I am going to assume theres blog posts about it not being hard.
I like that with Go or Erlang everything I learned 5 or more years ago has still stuck to me. With D I can be effective quickly. With Rust I struggle a bit. Rust is probably great for building a web browser but doing backend web development feels way more work than Go or even Python (CherryPy). Haskell I dont even remember a darn thing anymore.
