Clojurians Log v2

> because they don't understand how US labor laws and payroll/taxes work From a time-zone perspective I get why companies want to have people from the same area, but payroll/tax-wise: why not just set up a contractor agreement and send an invoice each month. Employee pays taxes in her/his own country, done.

@borkdude, I'm working as a contractor for Gravie, a Clojure health care USA startup, and I do exactly that. Maybe the USA companies do not want to dedicate some effort for this or they don't know the process? I just had to fill some forms and got ready

Even the time-zone argument is a stretch, one could see it as a benefit - infrastructure maintenance, work that requires downtime, or risky deployments can be handled with minimal impact.

This feels like compensation shaming and makes folks less likely to post their jobs unless they meet some arbitrary bar set by members of this channel. We could probably do with less snide comments and instead seek to understand by asking questions e.g. where this role is located?

@rahx1t as the one who posted the snide comment, I agree. I was wrong to do so and demonstrated parochial bias when I did. I’ve not deleted it because of the excellent conversation it has engendered and because sometimes it’s worth leaving ones mistakes public.

@borkdude There are good reasons for companies to have full-time employees rather than contractors (and vice-versa) so a US company looking to hire employees is not going to want to engage contractors.

Is there a difference between freelancing and contracting?

btw, I've been contracting with a US company for a few years now

Some US companies are fine engaging contractors/freelancers/whatever. But many US companies want full-time employees and won't/can't go that route.

(there are also issues in various countries about engaging a contractor for longer than a certain period of time -- in the UK, it certainly used to be the case that if you kept a contractor engaged for more than a certain amount of time, they pretty much had to be converted to an employee... although there were some (dubious) workarounds for companies determined to keep contractors engaged long-term; I don't know whether the same applied here in the US, but we've recently had legislative pushes around contractor vs employee classifications for the "gig economy" companies so, again, I suspect there are restrictions on long-term contract work in many sitatuations)

@seancorfield I sometimes worry about that. I also asked my accountant if this will become an issue, but he says that NL is currently not enforcing this law and it mostly has to do with employers forcing their staff into freelancing roles so they become cheaper and easier to get rid off.

I do want to hear if someone had problems related to that, so I can prepare for any bad stuff coming my way...

@borkdude It's been 20+ years since I worked in the UK but I know several of my contractor friends who've run into this and had to disconnect, work for another client for a short break, and then reconnected with their long-term client in order to get around this (I think some companies manage to get around it by assigning long-term contractors to different budget centers within the company from time to time). My clients in the UK were nearly all short-term (less than six months) so it was never an issue for me (and in the US my clients have usually been three months or less, so I've no idea whether it's also an issue here).

@seancorfield Do you know if this is usually the problem for an employer or also for an employee (except having to take a break, which I would be ok with)

I mean, in NL, when they would actively enforce it, it would probably mean the employer have to pay more taxes and insurance because the employee was in fact an employee and not a freelancer (independant)

Forced break: hello open source for three months :-D

@borkdude As I recall -- and you're pushing for some old memories here! -- it was a problem for both in the UK since your status as a contractor allows you to claim all sorts of tax breaks that you can't as an employee (and companies also had benefits of not having to deal with payroll/benefits for contractors and, usually, being able to run contractors out of different cost centers and/or budgets). The Inland Revenue took a dim view of contractors who claimed those tax breaks but otherwise behaved like a long-term employee 🙂

@borkdude Are you a contractor using your own company or as a individual? I've created a company in Brazil (it's very cheap here) where I'm the owner and they have contracted my company with a weekly rate, the taxes also are much better. I guess this way you are more protected, but, yeah, I'm not aware of the Europe legislation.

@pfeodrippe In my country you can work as a "independent without employees" which is an individual who works for companies by sending invoices, but isn't hired as an employee. You can also start an Ltd. (BV in Dutch) and pay yourself a salary from this BV, so then you are an employee of your own BV.

And you will then invoice the other party from your BV.

That's the most certain way of not getting trouble with the tax services

but currently I'm an individual independent contractor

@borkdude when I was doing this while living in Canada, my accountant encouraged me to take even small side contracts in order to avoid ending up being treated as an employee for taxes. That wouldn't have impacted my long term client in the US at all I don't think, it would just have meant that I wouldn't be able to deduct expenses and other freelance buffs would go away. They also told me that it probably wouldn't come up for the first couple years.

right

One issue might be countries which don't have tax treaties. With the US you can file a W8-BEN and they can avoid with-holding taxes

but I think that requires a mutual arrangement between tax authorities

not sure about that though