Ask HN: Have tech salaries been stagnant for the past decade?

From my experience, most of engineers in Europe who want to make money work are contracting. Contracting money can be similar to what the FAANGs offer here (outside of Switzerland), but taxes are often lower and you don't have to debase yourself with multistage leetcode interviews and intracompany promotion games.

However, the US companies may start to up their game here salary-wise - I was recently contacted by a recruiter of a Tier 2 US tech company who said that the TC for a tech lead position in their branch in Poland is around 220k EUR. I hope this is a part of a larger trend.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The tax rules themselves haven't actually changed. What did change was who was responsible for deciding whether an engagement was caught by IR35 or not and was also liable to pay for the big tax shortfall if they were later found to have made the wrong decision.

It used to be the contractor themselves who determined the status. Now it depends on the situation but in many cases it will be the client. That has swung the needle from determinations often being too optimistic (some contractors claimed to be outside when they really weren't and hoped to get away with paying less tax than they should) to too pessimistic (risk-averse big clients aren't always assessing engagements properly and instead set blanket policies that put everyone inside even when they shouldn't be).

Neither situation is good for the contracting market and neither is what the tax rules say should happen. Both are the fault of successive governments for using such ambiguous rules about such an important tax question and making such poor provision for honest participants who want to get on with the job to know they're safe and doing the right thing as far as their tax obligations are concerned.

For genuine contractors who are working with decent clients and obviously aren't disguised employees the rules haven't changed and neither have the tax obligations.

But yes there are some clients who just throw everything inside IR35 as policy and also want to keep the same headline rates as before. Contractors working with those clients will have taken quite a hit. The solution is not to work with bad clients who try to dump their obligations on you!

Yes that's definitely happening. However this practice is on the radar of the relevant authorities and hasn't yet been tested in court/tribunal settings. It's clearly trying to circumvent the spirit of the rules by shifting responsibility that is now explicitly intended to rest with the client or intermediaries onto the contractor themselves. That may be unfair particularly if the client or intermediaries are also writing the contract and specifying the required working arrangements for an engagement as is often the case for contract work.

It seems likely that a test case will happen before long. The resulting decision may be of the form "LOL nice try Mr Agency now pay up". As with so much in this area the real problem is that no-one knows for sure. That creates a chilling effect across the whole industry and of course the larger parties with the bigger legal budgets have a natural advantage there.