I'm really happy Zig is gaining momentum. I do hope they can raise more money. If people are paid as freelancers, 50$ is a really low compensation. You'll have to pay health insurance, retirement etc. out of your own pocket. In Germany, the rule of thumb is if you're earning below ~70€ / hour as a freelance sw dev, it is better to be employed.
For how many hours billable? If you were comfortably billing 40 hours a week for 48 weeks a year that would amount to €134.400 / year. Assuming that Germany isn’t _that_ different from the Netherlands, good luck earning that while employed as an average sw dev. Insurance and retirement isn’t that expensive.
Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year.
Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number.
Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.
As a hired developer you usually get 30 days of holidays + 12 days (which is a bit more than 8 weeks). The year has 52 or 53 weeks, so you end at around 44 weeks instead of 48 weeks. That’s 123K€ per year.
Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks.
If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.
>Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year)
What? Do I understand correctly that "Google says" and you find credible that on average a person takes 18.4 sick days every year? That sounds high by at least an order of magnitude to me. Even if I took a day off every time I had a slight sore throat or a moderate hangover, I still wouldn't take more than 3-4 sick days a year most years.
You'll have to subtract an average of ~2 weeks of sick leave as well, which is unpaid if you're a freelancer. Thats 46 weeks.
Assuming 100% utilisation is a typical beginner's mistake. You will usually have some time you cannot bill, most importantly time between projects, but also customer acquisition and certifications. There are also types of insurance that you don't need as an employee. If you do the math, the conditions are not as favourable as they may appear from the outset.
I will concede though that a reliable long-term project such as being a paid Zig contributor is a special case, and might warrant some discount.
In Estonia, the employer's expenses are 1.75x of what the employee actually receives; 43% of the employer's payroll expenses go to taxes and other fees. I assume it's similar in other EU countries.
You can buy health insurance separately, but that doesn't excuse you from paying taxes if you're receiving income. And once you're paying taxes, there's no point to buy health insurance separately, as you will automatically qualify for "free" healthcare. The only time it makes sense to buy health insurance separately is if you have retired at a young age or you're cheating on your taxes.
Of course, all of this varies by country, but I imagine the percentages are relatively similar. Germany is a more expensive country, so I can see how 70EUR/h might be a reasonable number there.
True. You can skip the line here actually by paying for your doctor visit, but that also means you have to pay out of pocket for any further actions based on your diagnosis.
Indeed, but that's only really because we've underfunded it. It wasn't so long ago (last labour government) that waiting times were reasonable, and it wouldn't take all that much money to fix.
It still has one of the lowest per-capita budgets of healthcare systems in developed nations. If one wants to explain why wait times are high compared to other healthcare systems, that would seem a more obvious explanation than the single-payer funding model. I would agree that an ageing population is also a factor.
I haven't really experienced that here in Belgium tho I have heard of some long waiting now for certain specialists like orthodontists, gastroenterologist or others that were forced to partially drop work during the peaks of the pandemic.
I don't think you work 48 weeks per year in Germany (or in general, most of the EU). You have to subtract national holidays and vacation. The latter should be 4 weeks minimum (i.e. for a young person). At least based on what we have here, in Hungary. I think it goes up to 6 weeks. I'm pretty sure Germany is not worse off. In general you have about 220-225 working days a year (which translates to 44-45 weeks).
So that's about 125k invoiced income as an entrepreneur. It's not your salary yet. Again, depends on the country (you may have to pay lower taxes as a solo-preneur than what would be paid by someone employing you), but the employer usually pays more than what the employee makes in gross salary. Calculating with the Hungarian wedge, one of the highest in the EU, the net is about 50% of what the employer pays in total.
My guess is that it's probably equal to around 85-100k of gross salary. Definitely not bad (based on what I can see from here), seems to be on the higher and, but doesn't seem exceptional either.
Oh, well and you also have to account for downtimes as you'll probably won't quit before finishing your project (and if you won't, you'll almost certainly will have unpaid down times between projects).
Just to add some more numbers as someone who's done freelancing in Germany for 15 or so years.
200-210 days of billable work (30 days holidays, sick days, conferences, downtime, pre-sales etc.) also a 100% utilization is often unrealistic but in this case might work.
~40% taxes
~9.000€ health insurance / year
~1.500€ liability insurance / year
~15-20% pension savings (personal preference)
- various other business related expenses
Very rough estimates:
With 70€/h that'll be around 120k€ - 40k€ taxes - ~10k€ insurances - 15k€ pension = 55k€
That's not bad but also not an extraordinary amount and that's without any accounting for the extra risk, own hardware etc.
The article says that in the next two years they would like to get it up to $75 an hour and it cites the things you said as reasons why. So I believe they are in agreement with you
In Sweden the general rule of thumb is that as a freelancer you should charge 2.4x what you want to (or normally) net since you are responsible for your own vacation-pay, sick-pay, time between projects etc. on top of taxes and expenses.
That's great! I appreciate the full transparency here. I'm a GitHub sponsor for $5/mo, not because I actually use Zig (yet?) but because I'm interested in how this experiment goes.
Andy Kelley has been doing a lot of development very publicly (check Zig's issue tracker!) and I feel I've gotten some value just out of watching his process unfold, in terms of community interaction, prioritization of features, brief exploratory experiments, etc.
Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" in language design (though I realize this is very subjective), so maybe Zig will end up somewhere great.
This. I feel something similar. It is kind of way things are arranged, the simple layout of repository, or that on average zig src file has ~500 lines of code (for Swift/Rust, it is 65/80 respectively). So yes, it is all subjective. I also feel as if zig is like more time/money is spent on books and not on bookshelves.
I really don't understand the title changes sometimes. I have no idea who Jakub Konka is. On the other hand, the old title communicated that this hiring was the first for Zig, which gives me far more context, and a prompt for my next thought which was "huh, how does that work?" That value is gone now.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] threadI'm really happy Zig is gaining momentum. I do hope they can raise more money. If people are paid as freelancers, 50$ is a really low compensation. You'll have to pay health insurance, retirement etc. out of your own pocket. In Germany, the rule of thumb is if you're earning below ~70€ / hour as a freelance sw dev, it is better to be employed.
Got to start somewhere.
Firstly, job security has value. Even if you manage to bill 40 hours a week (or close; I think 36-38 may be more usual for Germany), for an entire year, that is still just 1 year. Who knows how many it will be the following year.
Secondly, how many freelancers actually do achieve that number of hours in a year. I don't have data but I would guess it is a small number.
Thirdly, benefits do have some value. Thankfully in many European countries (though definitely not all!) they're slightly less "necessary" than in the US, but they still exist and you can't consider a full-time employee's base salary in isolation.
Then you have to still subtract the days you are going to be sick (Google says 18.4 days on average per year) and the tile you need for administrative tasks.
If you work with a contract your workplace will pay half of your insurances in Germany, if you are self-employed you have to pay that yourself.
What? Do I understand correctly that "Google says" and you find credible that on average a person takes 18.4 sick days every year? That sounds high by at least an order of magnitude to me. Even if I took a day off every time I had a slight sore throat or a moderate hangover, I still wouldn't take more than 3-4 sick days a year most years.
The source of the 18.4 days has a lot of further information, albeit in German: https://www.iwd.de/artikel/krankenstand-in-deutschland-49865...
Assuming 100% utilisation is a typical beginner's mistake. You will usually have some time you cannot bill, most importantly time between projects, but also customer acquisition and certifications. There are also types of insurance that you don't need as an employee. If you do the math, the conditions are not as favourable as they may appear from the outset.
I will concede though that a reliable long-term project such as being a paid Zig contributor is a special case, and might warrant some discount.
You can buy health insurance separately, but that doesn't excuse you from paying taxes if you're receiving income. And once you're paying taxes, there's no point to buy health insurance separately, as you will automatically qualify for "free" healthcare. The only time it makes sense to buy health insurance separately is if you have retired at a young age or you're cheating on your taxes.
Of course, all of this varies by country, but I imagine the percentages are relatively similar. Germany is a more expensive country, so I can see how 70EUR/h might be a reasonable number there.
The downside of socialised health care is the extensive waiting lists for everything.
I live under the NHS, and while it's a brilliant system, I do understand those with the means wanting to avoid it.
So that's about 125k invoiced income as an entrepreneur. It's not your salary yet. Again, depends on the country (you may have to pay lower taxes as a solo-preneur than what would be paid by someone employing you), but the employer usually pays more than what the employee makes in gross salary. Calculating with the Hungarian wedge, one of the highest in the EU, the net is about 50% of what the employer pays in total.
My guess is that it's probably equal to around 85-100k of gross salary. Definitely not bad (based on what I can see from here), seems to be on the higher and, but doesn't seem exceptional either.
Oh, well and you also have to account for downtimes as you'll probably won't quit before finishing your project (and if you won't, you'll almost certainly will have unpaid down times between projects).
200-210 days of billable work (30 days holidays, sick days, conferences, downtime, pre-sales etc.) also a 100% utilization is often unrealistic but in this case might work.
~40% taxes ~9.000€ health insurance / year ~1.500€ liability insurance / year ~15-20% pension savings (personal preference) - various other business related expenses
Very rough estimates: With 70€/h that'll be around 120k€ - 40k€ taxes - ~10k€ insurances - 15k€ pension = 55k€ That's not bad but also not an extraordinary amount and that's without any accounting for the extra risk, own hardware etc.
A language ran by one guy to challenge the most popular language ever, epic mistake.
Andy Kelley has been doing a lot of development very publicly (check Zig's issue tracker!) and I feel I've gotten some value just out of watching his process unfold, in terms of community interaction, prioritization of features, brief exploratory experiments, etc.
Plus, he seems to have, I dunno, great "taste" in language design (though I realize this is very subjective), so maybe Zig will end up somewhere great.
This. I feel something similar. It is kind of way things are arranged, the simple layout of repository, or that on average zig src file has ~500 lines of code (for Swift/Rust, it is 65/80 respectively). So yes, it is all subjective. I also feel as if zig is like more time/money is spent on books and not on bookshelves.