Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest

Re:Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest by tluyben2 on Monday September 14, 2020 @03:15AM (#24467663)

That is the same in NL and DE, however, I have never worked in an office and I have been professionally coding for 30 years, mostly for Dutch companies. The ‘secret’ (it is not a secret and it works in Austria too) is to start a limited (or specifically not a 'freelance') company; 30 years ago I borrowed 20k guilders to open it (which used to cost 18k alone) and have cards, leaflets and style for letterheads etc made. Companies hire companies, especially if it looks professional. The company always had 1 employee for 30 years and I never had issues allowing to work wherever; even for large corps like ING, Kluwer and so on.

Also, a guy I hire on upwork sometimes made well over a million in the past years via that site, sitting in his house in ukraine. Without a company or anything like that; in modern times it is not so hard as it was.

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Re:Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest by ChuckNorris89 on Monday September 14, 2020 @04:59AM (#24468177)

You have a cool story and thanks for sharing it but how much of that is survivorship bias? Also, out of professional curiosity, how many clients did you get in Austria.

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Re:Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest by tluyben2 on Monday September 14, 2020 @05:20AM (#24468253)

> how much of that is survivorship bias?

No idea; it's only anecdotal obviously. But not unheard of; it used to be quite normal in Germany to have small (1-2 person) GMBH's to get rather large contracts for big corps and if you have a 'real company' suddenly no-one expects you to rock up monday morning at 9. In the Netherlands it still works well, as it does in Portugal and Spain; other markets I do not know.

> how many clients did you get in Austria

1 around 17 years ago. But, at least from friends and limited experience, so excuse my personal ignorance, I understand that Austrian business is not very different from eastern germany business and I have (also had) quite a lot of clients there. I have more in the western part, but the eastern part is different in etiquette and I had the same, I guess conservative' feel 17 years ago with the Austrian company (trying to find what they are/were called).

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Re:Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest by ChuckNorris89 on Monday September 14, 2020 @05:52AM (#24468411)

But how did you get your customers to just let you be remote from the get go?

Here it would be impossible as, due to the culture, trust is made only through in person meetings. Nobody will just pay company for services without face-to-face meetings and on-prem presence.

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Re:Freiburg: Germany's futuristic city set in a forest by tluyben2 on Monday September 14, 2020 @06:24AM (#24468585)

There are many consultancy bureaus that don't visit. You need to have a face to face (end 80s/beginning 90s there were telephone calls, but indeed you would not get it cross the line like that) meeting(s). I still do that now. But after you discussed basically the ideas, you can go home to build the software. They don't accept that from freelancers sometimes in NL or DE either, but from 'serious companies' they do. I have not had any case where I had to sit in the office; sure, visit once per few months, but that's it. And driving/train-ing/plane-ing that is a small price to pay (company pays ofcourse).

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