iExploder

thanks, this is what I did when invoicing to the UK. For W-8 BEN do you need to report income from sales of services in the US along with income from dividend / capital gains?

there is some abuse around long term employees acting as contractors in some parts of europe to get tax benefits. it depends on the country but generally speaking it is more beneficial to be a contractor because of high taxes on employee income in EU.

in germany for example, afaik, you can be considered employee if abusing this by providing services long term to a single customer (hence being considered dependent and not a free acting contractor), in austria the taxes for contractors are the same as for employees, this is my current experience.

in slovakia where I'm originally some people setup 1 person llc's and pay themselves dividends instead of drawing salary as an employee (dividends are taxed with much lower rates than salary income + there is no social or health care deductions on dividend income)

> You fill in either a W-8 BEN (as an individual) or a W-8BEN-E (as a company)

thank you for this info. Ive heard something similar with relation to dividend payments from US, which in the end might complicate things, but its a good indication of what needs to be done.

> From a US company perspective, you can do your work as an individual or a local registered business entity: you agree to gross terms, and that's what you get, and they have that as an expense.

this seems the most sensible

> However, many European countries require you to incorporate (at least a Ltd company) to gain proper "employment" and stop people from using contractor relationship as a tax loophole.

I'm aware of UK's or Germany's regulation in this regard, the contracts have to be limited in duration and contracting for one customer for more than 1 year or so is prohibited, is this what you mean? Otherwise I'm not sure what the loophole would be, it's standard b2b relationship in my eyes...

> The larger tech companies all have a presence in the EU, could you not contract with those?

my experience so far was working with small to medium sized businesses and this is where I felt the most comfortable. no experience with big tech, not even sure if they would want to employ me, probably not.

knowing how to invert a binary tree is skill you cant learn from an employed software engineer, a pathway to many entry positions some recruiters consider... overpaid

mate you think retirement age is 67, thats very cute of you. just wait for 20 years and see how many times this milestone will change with the way the world population is going :)

it might have worked for some people at some times. I'm just saying there is judgement, not substantiated judgement in my eyes, as willingness to go extra mile associated with reality of being a contractor should be seen as a positive, but often it may not.

time to grind job applications and be prepared to take a financial hit, be extra flexible and approachable, a doormat if you can really. its a numbers game at this point, wish you good luck mate.

this is a nice thing to tell yourself to feel better, however in practice people will judge you and the current market is not going to make that one bit easier.

being career software engineer is dead anyways, time to re-skill. /rant off...

I agree with Jon Blow, and Techlead has also interesting take on software development as a whole...

multiple forces at effect. investment drying up, the strong assumption AI will replace coders in couple of years, nobody giving a damn about apps because everything interesting is on tiktok / instagram and other social platforms.

the current big thing is content and clout and even that will be replaced by AI in no time. nobody knows what comes after that, star trek or terminator, take your guess...

when I finish one of these calls with these UK recruitment agencies I feel so sick to my stomach. they really are hustlers and grifters in the worst sense of the word. never again...

posting minimum salary is requirement and I guess the HR in those companies is so brain-dead the most they can do is comply and paste a few sentences.

a high salary in job posting can attract the wrong crowd, so it's also not very advisable to do and I understand companies who got burned by this and dont do it anymore.

in Vienna 55k in not a livable wage for someone who has aspirations of having a family. two people making each 55k is fine if you can be reasonably frugal with your life.

most I have seen publicly offered for senior IC is 75k. you can get more through connections or being an extreme outlier.

as far as EU is concerned, best tactic is to find a smaller German town for lower cost of living and join a company there as german industry and IT is spread our fairly evenly all over the place and there are quiet a few smaller university towns with desirable kind of people.

another idea in EU is to move to portugal or croatia or czech republic and contract remotely for western europe from there. language barrier being an obvious but not insurmountable obstacle. if you are US citizen I could imagine you could contract for US from eastern europe without problems as well.

exactly, stealing someone who is already employed feels much better because from the company's point of view you have already been pre-selected. it also gives you a leverage when asking for more $$.

don't hate the player, hate the game...

I dont really go for big tech, usually I target small to medium sized companies.

So for me when I want to work for a company with embedded / audio etc I just google who is providing such services in the location I wanna work at.

Once I found the target company and their website, a lot of them have "career" or "job" postings on there. If they don't I just send an email with an inquiry about currently open positions with my cv attached, sort of an electronic cold call :)

I don't like to deal with the middlemen I go straight to the source, Frank Lucas style of the software era if you will...

its not just Norway, a lot of recruitment companies based in the UK are focused on european mainland market, germany, switzerland, denmark, etc.. a lot of cowboys over there who figured out putting people into chairs is very profitable and scalable. some of them act as middle men and take a cut out of your salary. its really the new wild west over here.

easy, you put it right under your photo with your pronouns and twitter handle. exhibitionist don't have any qualms about such sort of behavior

the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7.

this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

lol you really are not afraid someone's going to press a cancel button on you? based.

lower your keyboards and surrender your coffee mugs. your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our training data sets. resistance is futile.

how its suppose to be done and how it worked for me in past in order of the most effective to least:

1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way)

anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email gets spammed with offers.

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

cloak and dagger my friend.. cloak..and..dagger

not sure here, from my experience the aftermath presents itself with a delay, usually in the home setting later that day

You can add me and I believe many more to the list, unfortunately based on my search on public sites it often states Remote US.

I assume one has to be well known expert in the field or have personal connections to secure such contracts.

well I'm not German and don't have experience running a business other that sole-proprietorship, but I often think about this as well. From my point of view the taxation, bureaucracy and cost of everything including hiring new people, the employee rights, hiring an accountant or lawyer, etc prohibits small businesses to start easily.

mentality might play a role insofar as access to funding might be concerned. from the IT perspective unless you have a very good idea, specific market need, connections and lot of $$ the benefit of starting a company to do actual work in Germany vs Eastern Europe + branch office in Germany for "optics" is not obvious to me.

Not sure whether this completely applies to you, but here are some of the things I wish I would have done during my time at Uni (I was not taking full advantage of this and just coasted...)

- look at your professors who are running successful companies or working on research of interest to you. reach out to them early, ask to do your bachelors or masters with them, be serious, hardworking and show potential.

- cultivate relationships with other smart people in your class, maybe you or them have an idea for a business or a project, work on it together, experiment, fail a lot see what works and what does not, you are young in fact you should be doing as many mistakes as possible to learn from them

- go on an exchange program abroad for a year or so

no need to hire anymore, everything of value was already done and the rest will be implemented by chatgpt in a few months.

the way I see it is there are 3 things to consider. confidence in test coverage, tolerance of the client and whether we charge by the hour.