Freelance consultant in NL here. The consulting-firm rates can be much higher, but usually freelance consulting is much cheaper than employees. One of the reasons I went into this is I was working in both academia and in companies at the level where I was hiring for projects, and the ridiculous money that just gets eaten by overhead and middle management is absurd. If you hire a PhD and pay them close to ~40keur/year (NL is comparatively higher salaries for PhD than other places), you need about ~100k per year for that person. University bench fees, or corporate overhead, computing resources, insurance, pension. If you go up from PhD for 1 FTE senior engineer in a company it gets worse, they get ~60k before income tax, it costs closer to ~200k for 1 FTE (this is a real recent example for a project I am involved in). On top of that you need to give them a contract, so if you hire a lemon (which will happen at some point), you are stuck with them at least for a year. For me, and I think for some experienced project leaders, it makes much more sense to hire someone as a contractor per month, if they keep delivering, then keep them, if not, don't. If you keep them, maybe you pay 80k for the year. Another aspect is that the cost of a external person is just a cost, like buying computing resources/equipment for a project, it can be easier/simpler to factor into a project (as its not a continuing cost commitment) and depending on the arrangement, can be deducted from the companies VAT. Freelance consultants do their own admin, handle their own expenses, work from home (though so does everyone at the moment) so the hiring company just pays directly for results. To a new manager/project leader, prospectively, it can seem like a higher cost up front but that's only if you compare 80k to 40k which isn't fair or what you will see when you look retrospectively at the project cost. Consulting firms lose most of this benefit because they still have all those extra costs/commitments involved. Business is strange.
> they get ~60k before income tax, it costs closer to ~200k for 1 FTE (this is a real recent example for a project I am involved in)
That’s a pretty ridiculous overhead percentage. Even given all the taxes in the Netherlands, I have no idea how you could possibly arrive at that (given legally mandated stuff, obviously you can make it as crazy as you want).
Absolutely ridiculous indeed. That example is from a month ago for a medium-sized, research-oriented child company of a much larger tech company. They get a lot of funding from grants and collaborations so one could argue it as a way of funneling money from grants back into the larger company's pocket.
I have been trying to find/join/create a organization or group structure for research that would be more open/fair and less susceptible to corruption/waste but it's not visible enough of a problem to get support for it, and too new or odd sounding to get granting body to take a gamble on it.
A non-profit with everyone's salary visible, who work on delayed-release but open-source projects, seems like a good start to me, after all most of the research grant money is public money, it should be visible where it's being spent. Bounties for researchers/the pubic to fix active bugs. And a mandate that the code (or other work) gets released after ~2years no matter what. Commercially-paid early access and support. Harder to make a business around for sure but the amount of projects I have worked on, that don't get released as they are not profitable or the company/university are too lazy to make a profitable license/product around and refuse to just release the IP. I had one project that was patented and then the company is just sitting on it (for almost 10years now) waiting for a competitor to release something similar so they can seek licensing from them. It's heart breaking seeing all that work/energy/money just get locked up in a private gitlab repo to die when some of it can literally save lives or kick a field into the next step.
Can I ask you some questions about being a freelance consultant in NL? I'm a Dutchie myself. If you're up for having an online chat or IRL coffee [1] my email is in my profile.
I've been to a few of these "Hackers and Founders" meetups in Amsterdam before Coronavirus hit, and ran into interesting people who know about stuff like that. I love their strict anti-douchebag policy!
Café De Doffer or the Hacker Building might be a good place to meet up, once that kind of stuff is happening again. But I don't know when that might be.
>We were originally a group of friends who co-worked from different places across the city. We dreamt about getting our very own building so we could create our perfect work environment of likeminded people. So when the moment was right, we made that happen.
>Our group is pretty tight-knit but very welcoming to newcomers too. We have a strict anti-douchebag policy, which means we only have friendly people here who are open and welcoming.
Did both and consulting rates are indeed higher at face value but that is compensated by the risk. As an employee you will be paid if there is actual work or not, me as a consultant will be terminated the minute my work is done.
So if you are good in a field where there is demand, and you actually like doing negotiations & finding opportunities, doing your own bookkeeping and not forgetting your pension funds: go for it!
