“Odd, how ‘work from anywhere’ really means ‘work from anywhere in the country.’”

It’s how countries, taxes, visas work. If you’re self-employed, trying to work from *any* country in the world: it’s LOTS of admin.

If you’re employed, it’s just as challenging for your employer.
It’s pretty much only the tech industry where we’re privileged enough to be able to work from almost anywhere.

This does not mean we can ignore national regulations. And countries impose heavy admin and tax burdens on employment, rarely ever optimizing for remote work cases.
There are more startups acting as ‘middlemen’ to employ people in different countries. @deel and @remote are examples.

But by nature these setups are limited (you’re employed though a middleman) and they do not shift liabilities for the company to follow all local regulations.
Also know that B2B contracts - a company employing another company (even if it’s a 1-person one) is straightforward, even across countries.

This is why hiring contractors abroad is much simpler - and preferred - over hiring *employees* in another country.

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Feb 17
Manager: "Your bonus this is $X."

Dev: "Umm... it should have been exactly $3X."

M: "No, the target is $X."

D: "No, my recruiter said I would get at least $3X."

M: ".."

D: "I have it in writing."

That manager was me, and this was a story of being burnt by a rouge recruiter.
The recruiter did put it in writing... in an email from the company domain, never shared with anyone else at the company.

This was about a year earlier, and the recruiter was long gone by then. Having left with the reputation of "The King of Closing Candidates."

Now I knew how.
So when you hear the advice "get it in writing", make sure to get it in writing AND COPY YOUR FUTURE MANAGER or other non-recruiters at the company.

Rouge recruiters exist, and getting it in writing will only help expose this unfortunate fact.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 16
"I work in the UK at a company that announced 'Work from Anywhere'. I want to move to Spain/Italy/Portugal. They told me my compensation would drop 35-40%. What are my options?"

Honestly: nothing, beyond either staying put or leaving your company. This is deliberate from them.
Situations like this will become far more common as companies decide on country-adjusted compensation or paying the same across regions.

They know they will lose people.

To find companies that pay well, even remote, I wrote an extensive article here: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/finding-the-…
And I'm adding that it is not unreasonable for large companies to do this.

If they did not adjust your UK salary: they would need to pay everyone in Spain/Italy/Portugal at UK levels. From their end, that would make zero sense.

Instead, they will hire people in those regions.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 12
Some people think I’m anti-Adyen. I’m not.

I’m pro EU startups/scaleups/publicly traded companies, including Adyen.

It’s a just a tragedy how their leadership does nothing while other businesses to hire away so many of their best engineers… all while recording record profits.
I’ve been privately taking with managers at Adyen who were seeing large attritions on their team. I told them they need to move up aggressively. Shared how much others are paying.

These eng managers believed me, but their leadership instead relies on outdated comp data. 🤷‍♂️
This article has been circulated so much within Adyen at all levels.

They know what the numbers were a year ago to be a top tier company and what market dynamics are (numbers are higher since).

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engin…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 12
“Quit your job to make money online” is gaining momentum. But most stories are of people selling you their own courses.

The reality is you need to build a profitable business to make a living if you quit. Right now there are more cheap B2C marketing channels with social media.
We’ll see an explosion of profitable online small businesses built on top of cheap social media as a distribution channel. There’s an opening for this strategy for the next years.

But it’s not easy & the majority will not succeed (unit economics & attention economy economics).
The economics for “tech creators” (those quitting a sw eng job) is tough.

To make $300K/yr (a sr eng comp at a big tech in US) you need ~ 3,000 customers/year if you sell something for $100/year. That’s ~30,000 leads at a 10% conversion, and 3M impressions at a 1% conversion.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 12
Something that should terrify Adyen, on a collision course with Stripe:

In 2021, Adyen hired >100 software engineers. Yet, by the end of the year their eng headcount stayed almost the same.

Stripe hired hundreds of engineers in 2021, almost doubling their eng headcount by EOY.
The root cause on the differences? Compensation, on the surface. The mindset of maximising profits and minimising people expenses (Adyen) vs investing in the future (Stripe).

Adyen also pays on a lower tier (bottom of Tier 2), Stripe top of Tier 3: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engin…
To give very specific examples on the compensation differences. Same position, similar skillsets, engineer in Amsterdam, total comp (base salary + equity + target bonus):

Sr engineer: Adyen €125K/yr, Stripe €280K/yr.

Staff eng: Adyen ??, Stripe €400K/yr.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 11
Adyen is a company with €500K/year revenue per employee and €314K/year profit per employee.

They have a 63% profit margin, making €630M EBITDA on revenues of €1B.

And they complain of "young companies with deep pockets" paying developers a lot more than they do in NL.
Adyen business is at Netflix, Google, and Mastercard levels of profitability. It's a money-printing machine.

But instead of paying for software engineers like these companies do, they try to hire the same skillset, but at a steep discount and are surprised it's hard to do so.
Sources on Adyen's numbers:

2021 H1: 61% EBIDTA adyen.com/press-and-medi…

2021 H2: 64% EBIDTA cnbc.com/2022/02/09/ady…

We're talking about a company that could triple pay for all its staff of only 2,000 people and still be protitable.

Instead of complaining... follow the market?
Read 6 tweets

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