311–320 of 446 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ain't gonna fight. Good luck.
I'm not fighting, I was just curious what you're basing your claim on. I disregarded your unnecessarily incendiary phrasing ( "software from Poland is such a tacky crap" ) completely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're not jumping around contracts regularly every 2 years in NL and are not billing the approximate annual wage for your role every year (assuming that you work the 40-44 weeks) then you're an employee and shouldn't be contracting. The market now is interesting - there are a huge number of low experience / low skill people flooding the market which has driven prices down for some very good people whilst also mak…
You should be billing a multiple of the approximate annual wage to offset the risks of freelancing. Twice is good, three times is better. If you can't do that you're much better and safer off to find employment so make sure you understand exactly what the risk/reward trade-off is for being a freelancer and set yourself up accordingly. Find customers that value you and make sure they pay and pay on time. A single hick…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't see why a company couldn't have one long-term customer. Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea. > Clearly having multiple customers isn't a reasonable requirement for a small company. On the contrary, it's a must. > Software engineering isn't like private residential plumbing - "sink drain unclogged, next please!" :) That's a strawman. Sorry, but if you have just one customer and you're de…
> > I can't see why a company couldn't have one long-term customer. > Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea. The way you phrased it feels needlessly patronizing (perhaps unintentionally), but more importantly, it does not really address my comment. I wasn't arguing if it is a good idea or not. I was responding to the argument that having multiple customers is necessary to be regarded as "truly" sel…
As for legal recognition: the only reason this is a thing right now is because the social contract is broken, in any other setting you'd be an employee.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get clients for tech writing, if I may ask? Are you maintaining a stable pool of companies and doing work as they need it, or do you always have to fish for new opportunities? I've been authoring sw dev books that target a niche audience, and I've done some writing for the company that develops the sw itself. I'm wondering whether to expand to other areas, too—I've got the feeling that 2024 is going to be…
As all articles I wrote under my own name (some are ghost writing) are implicit advertisement, most clients approached me after they read some of my pieces. Over the years I got a hand full of stable clients. Some want content every month, some every quarter, etc. Then there is word of mouth. The people I work with at my client companies are usually in the content business, so they need constant influx of quality con…
- I have a Business Analyst/Product Mgr background. I've never been a developer, but I can read code well enough and get a good idea of what's going on. Do I have a chance of breaking into this? How would I go about doing so (other than the obvious like trying to do it as part of my day job)? - Do you worry LLMs are going to put you out of business? - Very broadly speaking, could I make $150k doing this?
I am a self-employed furniture maker. I'm that guy who somewhat infamously no longer builds software[0]. About a year ago I moved my operations from a makerspace to my own shop. That's come with its ups and downs. On the one hand, I know which idiot last used a tool: me. On the other, I would no longer see other humans besides my wife most weeks. To keep sane I also work one day a week at a bike shop fixing bikes. It…
I'd love to hear more about this. I'm a software developer by day and woodworking is a huge passion. Alas due to full time job, kids and other commitments, I don't have much time for it at the moment. Did you start off with woodworking as a hobby? If so, has it affected your enjoyment now it's a job? What pitfalls did you find when you first started out?
I might be a little weird in that I started woodworking by taking classes to explore it as a possible career change. I took some evening classes, followed by some week-long classes to see how it would feel to do it all day for a full week. It's not directly comparable, but it was close enough.
Given that I got into this with the intent of it possibly being a job instead of going from hobby to career, I'm not sure I have a good basis for answering whether doing it for work has sucked the enjoyment out of it. I love building stuff, and when I get tired of doing one kind of project, I seek out other types. Sometimes I quote something lower than I otherwise would if it's something I'd like to do (or vice-versa). Honestly, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this for work.
The parts that do sometimes wear me down are the non-woodworking parts. Today I'm in front of my computer getting my books finalized to get a P&L to my accountant for our taxes. I can enthusiastically recommend FreshBooks for having excellent support, but damn, bookkeeping is not my thing.
Figuring out how to market the product is also a trick; I don't have a background in that, and I'm probably overlooking opportunities as a result.
Keeping a website up to date is sometimes kind of a hassle. My wife does most of the nuts-and-bolts work (because otherwise I'd get hung up on stupid stuff that doesn't matter), but I'm still very much a part of generating the content.
As for pitfalls, I guess the above has pretty well covered it :-D Figuring out the non-woodworking aspects is a continuous learning experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see why a company couldn't have one long-term customer. It's not unusual eg. in the building sector (where large construction projects, not unlike software projects, can take years to complete). Another common example is MDs - quite a lot of private doctor's offices are contracted by the National Health Fund, basically providing their services for the public healthcare that way. Clearly having multiple custom…
> I can't see why a company couldn't have one long-term customer. Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea. > Clearly having multiple customers isn't a reasonable requirement for a small company. On the contrary, it's a must. > Software engineering isn't like private residential plumbing - "sink drain unclogged, next please!" :) That's a strawman. Sorry, but if you have just one customer and you're de…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be quite risky where I am from, for both the freelancer and the employer. Being self employed, but only for a single customer, is false self-employment. If you get caught, your employer has to pay taxes and social security contributions retroactively for up to 4 years, and afaik both the employer and the freelancer are liable for the money owed to the tax office and social securities. If you are caught doi…
> Being self employed, but only for a single customer, is false self-employment This is exactly what happens in Poland and everyone involved feels very smart for cheating the system. That's also why software from Poland is such a tacky crap despite so many "talents". The software professionals have no leverage to push back, they only can walk away. The irresistibile benefit is that one can write off buying a car into…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
doesn't the 'company' itself also pay taxes on the income? For most solo folks in the US, the revenue flows directly to you. You could set up a more complex corporate structure to hold the income that you don't pay to yourself, but that corporation would itself have to pay taxes on the income too. I suspect there's not any real savings/benefit until there's enough 'leftover' money to start getting creative/flexible.
Company taxes are paid based on the profit. If you spend all the company income, on salaries or equipment or whatever, there’s no profit, and thus no taxes.
The biggest issue we've seen in software was the 2017 tax act, affecting software R&D starting in 2022. Depending on how you classify those expenses, you could have a sizeable tax bill, even without any 'profit'. But even hardware - that's typically going to be amortized over minimally a few years.
Bring in $200k in revenue. Spend $20k on hardware. You may only get to deduct $4k of that hardware expense in each of the next 5 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's also why software from Poland is such a tacky crap despite so many "talents" [citation needed] How do you recognize "software from Poland" anyway?
> How do you recognize "software from Poland" anyway? Whatever is created in all these nearshoring and outsourcing centers in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław. Currently mostly Azure, SAP, business Java and Angular.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're from a country like Germany, most of what you're skipping financially is the insurance cost that's covered by the employer (social security etc.) Which means you don't have access to the social safety in case you need it.
In Poland(since I'm also from here), biggest chunk of savings when working as self-employed is income tax and mandatory public retiremend fund. Most Software Engineers go B2B/self-employment route because not only taxes are lower, but savings from paying minimal public retirement are pretty big with higher salaries. We're at a point where most people in Poland do not believe in retirement system anymore, it's unsusta…
https://forsal.pl/artykuly/1415939,srokowski-tylko-3-proc-mi...