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Rage wrote: "monthly", which is a view that I do not even understand the usage
I even use monthly on my phone.
Works fine if you don't have more than a few meetings a day/month 
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We have been working in Home Office for the last two years now, which means every interaction is done over the phone (as opposed to max 10% before). I have between 5 and 20 meetings a day, which indeed makes the monthly view useless. I often have 2 or 3 meetings in parallel.
Interestingly, this also slowly impacts my health : my eyes hurt because phone=MSteams=document sharing=staring at the screen, and normal work means staring at the screen. 10 to 12 hours on the phone in a day is psychologically exhausting - I am completely off power at the end of the day, more than back then when I run from one desk to the other to directly speak with colleagues. And there is no point in going to my workplace, since the few times I did, I was alone there, so back to phoning to everybody, but from a different place, with additional commuting - not interesting.
I do not miss the 2 hours commuting a day, but full time home office does not seem healthy on the long run. I wonder how you freelancers are coping with this.
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Rage wrote: I wonder how you freelancers are coping with this
I'm not sure what you mean with this.
I know freelancers who work from home, but in a team, just like you, except they earn about three times your salary.
I also know freelancers who work at the office, in a team, just like you before COVID, except they earn about three times your salary.
And then there's me, I work alone most of the time, in a private office in a building that I share with other tenants.
For me, it's 15 minutes by car or 45 minutes by bike (my preferred commute) and I rarely work from home.
Also, I earn about three times your salary 
Bottom line, freelancers do pretty much the same as you, except for a lot more money, but also more risk (contract ending without a new job, falling ill, etc.)
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I was talking about the missing of social interactions, but obviously most of them are in teams, either physical or virtual.
I doubt about the salary though, because that would mean the company would buy their services for between 300€/h and 350€/h, which is a crazy amount of money - maximum externals I have in my projects are around 120€/h and they are real experts in their field, average is around 95.
Or you are working on three projects at the same time for 80€/h in each project - in that case, yes, the figures must match, but it is well deserved money in regards of the crazy amount of worked hours...
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You make €100 an hour as an employee!? 
That's crazy and frankly, I don't believe you.
Let's say you're making €5000 a month as an employee, an average month has about 21 work days, or 21 * 8 = 168 hours.
Then your hourly wage is €5000 / 168 = €30.
€5000 is pretty much already, but maybe you have a company car or whatever, so I'm guessing the average programmer makes about €25 to €35 an hour.
And as you say, the average freelancers makes around €95 (although €5 - €15 often go to middle men).
So freelancers earn somewhere between two to four times as much as an average employee.
An average employee costs and employer about 1.5 times their salary, so around €40 to €50 an hour.
So employees are cheaper, until they get sick, or you want to fire them.
Employees earn less, but they get perks like paid vacation and sick days, holiday pay, social security like unemployment benefits...
There's pros and cons to both, both for the employee/freelancer and the employer.
Also, if you say a freelancer has to make €300 an hour to make three times more than you, that means you earn around €15.000 a month, but you also get all the perks of an employee.
That would be crazy and would put you right into the 0.1% of richest people in the world!
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Sander Rossel wrote: You make €100 an hour as an employee!?
I wish ! But no, I was talking about buying services from free-lancers or free-lancers companies (what you called middle-man), which I actually currently buy (as a project manager) between 80€/h and 120€/h, without taxes (about 20% more). I do not know how much is left to the free-lancer in the end... So to compare with it, I took what I am costing to the company, which must also be around 100€/h. The factor is 1.86 in my employer country, so this means ~55€/h and all taxed deduced (27% social and 35% income) around 25€/h net, which is what you estimated.
But the salaries are more than 5k in Germany, they are public and regulated by syndicates, here the grid:
file:///C:/Users/sdt2bue/AppData/Local/Temp/2018_02_06_MuE_TVe_Entgelte_u_AVo.pdf
SW Engineers are typically in the last five levels (so 13 to 17) on page 7 which you multiply by an experienced based factor between 1.1 and 1.3 determined by your employer, and you get this yearly between 13 and 14 times depending on local primes, so for a just graduated first job, this would be 4780€ x 1.1 x 13.5 = 5915€, so the company gives you 5915*73%=4318€/monthly, so about 33€/h or 22€/h after income taxes.
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Rage wrote: here the grid:
file:///C:/Users/sdt2bue/AppData/Local/Temp/2018_02_06_MuE_TVe_Entgelte_u_AVo.pdf
I don't think I can access your C drive 
Rage wrote: salaries are more than 5k in Germany
With such salaries freelancers are probably only slightly more expensive than employees.
They still make more money than employees when all goes well, mostly because they have no social security (taxes) and they can deduct taxes.
Freelancers are a huge problem here in the Netherlands by the way.
Not all freelancers make a lot of money, but they also don't contribute to the social security taxes, so when they lose their job they have no financial buffer, but they also don't get social benefits.
It's a huge risk because ultimately those people have to fall back on the minimum social security payment, which is even below minimum wage.
Also, the social security benefits only work when everyone contributes, but with all those freelancers, less and less people are contributing.
One of the reasons we have so many freelancers is because our laws make it nearly impossible and very expensive to fire employees.
So, many employers just hire someone as a freelancer so they can let them go whenever they want.
Not in IT, because IT staff is hard to come by and generally more expensive as a freelancer (which is why many IT staff is going freelance, which only worsens the problem).
But postmen, for example, have all been laid off and hired back as low paid freelancer.
Same in security and health sector.
My cousin couldn't keep a job in security for more than three years (the maximum of temporary contracts an employer can give you before they have to hire you for an indefinite time).
All his employers were satisfied, but they didn't want to risk hiring him so they laid him off for six months and then called him back for another three years.
The problem with that is that it's almost impossible to get a mortgage if you don't have a contract for an indefinite time.
He earned way more than his girlfriend, but when it came to the mortgage his salary was worth loose change.
He switched to another sector altogether.
And then there's another problem... When you hire a freelancer and they work for you exclusively, you may find that this freelancer now has all the same rights as an employee, but with his freelancer salary.
That's why you don't hire freelancers directly, but always through some agency or only for a few months...
Yeah, the social security system tripped so hard employers are now looking for loopholes and the laws that were supposed to protect employees are now hurting them 
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I can run multiple instances of Outlook ... usually by mistake. Would be surprised if they didn't sync.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Wordle 278 3/6
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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My first ever...
Wordle 278 5/6
🟨🟨🟩⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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3 for me too:
Wordle 278 3/6
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟨
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My first ever ...
Wordle 278 5/6
🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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Wordle 278 5/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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Wordle 278 5/6
🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨⬜🟨🟩
🟨⬜⬜🟩🟩
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Wordle 278 5/6
⬛⬛⬛🟨🟩
⬛🟨⬛⬛🟩
🟨⬛🟩⬛🟩
⬛⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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I think I know what your first guess was! Are you sending us a hidden message? 
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Haha, that's my go-to starting word, served me well so far!
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5/6
🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
This was close
GCS d--(d-) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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One of those lucky days.
Wordle 278 2/6
🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
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My little outfit I'm a part of was trying to get a prototype fabbed so we could present something for our end client to bang on, but the company fabbing the board keeps pushing the deadline out and out. Chip shortages. It's now a month since we were supposed to receive the boards.
So now we've take to creating wire wrapped prototypes like this is the 1970s.
Why? So we can build the elephanting board with parts we can buy off of Amazon - somehow they never seem completely out of stock where WROVERs are concerned.
Not only that the delays mean less work, meaning less income for the past month, and just it's no fun all around.
If you asked me a few years ago if I ever thought a chip shortage would impact my work I'd have laughed.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Couple of decades ago, we were using a combined battery backed RAM and clock module, all in a single chip - worked for years, and years.
Then TI bought the manufacturer as it was quicker and cheaper than building a new fab and axed the whole product line. Overnight the chips became unobtainium, and we bought as many as we could find (my boss was on holiday so I just spent £70,000 of his money and told him when he got back) then had to redesign the hardware to make a plug in module to replace it out of discrete components. Which meant doing our first SMT design to fit in the physical space, which lead to a complete switch to SMT in just over a year.
PITA, but the alternative was no product to ship ... and that would have been serious.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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ouch!
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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My first thought was Vinegar with Sea Salt chips -- then I thought - oh, she means hardware.
(What happens when I'm dieting, I guess.)
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