HACKER Q&A
📣 dionys

Compensation across EU/US and freelancing opportunities


I'm a Python backend engineer with around 5 yrs of freelancing experience. My current gig pays me £20/hr and since I'm living in a low COL European country, that's pretty good. The job might be coming to an end soon and I'm considering my options.

I want to hear your thoughts in terms of compensation. First, is £20/hr on-par with other companies based around London for my level of experience? Does it differ for employees/freelancers? Are there countries/specific industries across the EU which do remote work and pay well? Or should I focus more on the US market and specifically SV companies?

Thank you for your thoughts.

  👤 rubin55 Accepted Answer ✓
Insanely low theft-level thievery, crooks involved. ~5 years experience in popular programming language working on serious things for large environments/organizations should start at ~EUR 85, upwards to ~EUR 120ish in my experience.

Note: that's an hourly rate you're paid. A salary and the guarantees you would have as an internal employee are out the door of course. Similar employee salary rate for this role could be ~48000 to ~60000ish annually.

👤 wikibob
Wildly too low.

London is £650/day minimum.

Do a lot of googling all the information you need on contracting has already been posted. Check out Patio11.

👤 ElectricMind
what "low COL European country" means? Some kind of local slang?