Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001.

The software developer golden age was in the mid-nineties here in Europe, and then the rates and salaries have stagnated (but not the inflation).

Also, the contractual conditions are getting worse. We are now many times offered contracts with a termination clause of one week on the employer's side, and without a termination option the the freelance side.

This means that if you sign a contract of one year, and then on the first week you realize that the job is not what it looked like in the interview, you are stuck for one full year.

This is especially important as employers are not really transparent in the interview process, they will often not tell you what the job is really about, and the job description you have is either out of date or it was embellished to look much cooler than the day to day job actually is.

I can confirm that rates are a lot lower than what they used to be. Comparing what I earned in 1996 with 2018, the actual income at the end of the month is about 20% of what was there in 1996 for about twice as much work, and 20 years experience more.

For the contractual side, if you are in Europe, one-sided rules in such contracts are easily removed, since they are void by European laws.

It's the same with US companies insisting that you do not work for a competitor after contracts end but European laws actually then require the company to pay you for monetary loss or such clauses are void. Also has been confirmed in court cases.

Regarding lack of information or even invalid information before signing contracts: this is also grounds for annulling the contract.

Do you mean that in 2018 the income is 5 times less than in 1996, taking into account both lower rates and inflation?

Or 20% less today than in 1996, in gross terms? The problem is, now most freelancers are forced to create their own service companies (of one person), so the contract is between two companies and not between a company and an employee.

And in those cases, the rules are not the same, AFIK. I did ask a lawyer to get the contract reviewed in 2013 for a mission that I was baited into taking and then there is literally almost no programming involved and I wanted out.

The lawyer examined the service contract and told me that by the terms of the contract, I would have to either serve the service contract or reimburse the company for what they would lose. Maybe another lawyer would say something different, or things changed since 2013.

How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?

They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances.

All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.

My bet would be that the contract's early termination would lead to some heavy penalty that effectively forces them to continue.

I agree, its pretty close to slavery. Theoretically, they could sue you if you don't work, although what happens in practice is that if the freelance is really fed up and talks to the end customer saying they want out (which the hiring company does not want you to do), they want to avoid problems with the customer and they will replace you with someone else after a few months.

What they really don't want to do is to lose the billable position. In practice, a lot of people will just suck it up to the end of the contract and then leave, especially if the contract is less than a year.

What if you just don't show up for work? They fire you, right? Do you have to pay some big cash penalty? Or is the hesitance just that you can't get a reference for your next gig?

That would be a breach of contract and would activate whatever penalties the company had written into the contract.

Legally, they could sue you for the same value that they were charging the customer for your work until the end of the contract, which is the money that they lost by the contractor not working.

In practice, they will probably not do that as the HR team is busy with other things and the lawsuit might be bad PR, although a hiring manager that wants to get back to you for doing that might have the HR department sue you, legally they could do that.

This seems like it's begging for a test case to strike this down on humanitarian grounds. I can't imagine any western judge of any serious level (possibly some county judge in West Texas or something) would take seriously the claim that this wasn't a violation of basic human rights (in US terms, the 14th amendment, though I assume similar principles apply elsewhere), and that such contracts were unenforceable. IANAL and I'm certainly not a limey lawyer, but our notions of justice on both sides of the pond share a lot of DNA.

They are happy to convict drug users (even medicinal), so why would they be lenient on employers?

How are the two things (drug convictions and unfair labor contracts) related?

Human rights

They can't actually force you to work but the contract can definitely have really bad early termination clauses for the contractor which make it extremely expensive to break the contract.

Well that should be easy to fix. Just keep showing up at the office but don't do any work. It shouldn't take too long before your employer gets sick of it.

They can fire you on disciplinary grounds (you ruining labor discipline or they can even try and prove you are actively sabotaging them). And then you can be liable for damages in court.

Believe me, they know how to cover their backs.

Call their bluff.

In the US, one-sided contract clauses are supposed to be thrown out (judge's discretion though). If they can terminate free and clear while you cannot, that contract is very one-sided and I wouldn't personally sign that contract for any price.

Sometimes I think an international one-week walk-off by IT staff would do wonders for the worker-employer relationship.

An Englishman's word is his bond. ;)

Freelancers are not legally employees (they are contractors), this employee protection laws do not apply.

Paiment in Europe is often late, from 30 to 90 days. So if relations between the contractor and the company go bad, there's quite a bit of money that can be caught up.

If you quit, they will fire you

Depends in Ukraine the pay is very decent especially considering taxes side of equation.

Amend the contract before you sign it.

I started doing this later, but it can get complicated. If they have two freelancers that have passed the interview, and one is asking for contract amendments while the other is not, we can see what would happen.

But in general, if you insist that they add a termination clause of 15 days on your side, they usually do it although only after some insistence and negotiation, which if you have several interviews ongoing and are waiting for other responses might puts us in a precarious position.

I generally do this as a rule of thumb. Every engagement is a partnership between equals. I have the skills they want. They have the capital I want. We exchange on terms that suit us both or we don't at all. It also sets out the stall as to how the relationship will play out. I've been in enough contracts I need to get out of to save my sanity to know that it's not worth compromising on certain points. Everything on equal footing. The clause will always read something like "either party". There is no way they can legitimately argue against that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com