This is true of all contract notarization in Germany (even when buying a house, jesus that is a slog), and although it is a bendy-banana level silly thing that people focus on, isn't actually the biggest problem in company founding here. MUCH more problematic is unfavorable tax rules making equity compensation difficult, capital requirements, legal/notary fees, and an investor class that is notoriously skittish.
If you could solve all those problems and still had to go listen to the Notar recite the contract in a monotone, it would be a worth trade.
This here is the problem for most of EU countries.
We Dutch are proud how easy it is to do business here. Maybe, compared to some other countries. But starting a BV here and 1 month later finding a representative of a trade union (metal sector, which somehow semiconductors fall under together with car garages, petrol stations, steel factories..) and asking me to come to their office in person to explain what we do, and calculate how much their cut will be was weird at first. Of course being extremely busy with actual business, I forgot, and got a letter with an 100k Euros invoice attached. Apparently they assumed 15 employees with 45k gross salary, and thought this is a fair trade union contribution! When I didn't respond to that, while discussing it with our lawyers, they sent a fine over this invoice which made it 140k. This is all within 3-4 months of registering mind you! At the end the lawyers handled that, but yeah, what the hell..
These trade unions are notorious for that. I worked as a labor legal advisor and especially the unions for temporary employment agency start 'barking' and demand loads of money (even from years back). Sometimes it's not even clear which union is applicable.
You probably have all the info right now, but make sure everything is 'in line'. I mean, have your company codes at the tax authority match the applicable union match the actual things that your company does. Depending on the jobs of the employees, it might be smart to split the company into multiple legal entities.
All in all you can be happy that this happened within a couple of months. Finding this out when you're years underway and then having to pay millions... I've seen plenty of these cases.
Want to start a business in The Netherlands? Make sure to do a 'CAO check' first, think about how to structure your company (one entity? multiple entities? what job goes where?), and do these checks again once you pivot or make certain changes to the actual work that your company does.
The rationale for this is also pretty simple: somebody got to pay for all this nice social security. They say it's part of the risk of being an entrepreneur.
Yeah our case was strange because we develop chips and design software related to it. Belastingdienst categorized us wrongly as metalelektro, and we got this guys (Cometec) within two weeks of that. In the meantime we have applied this sector assignment to be corrected, which eventually happened while we were getting threatened into bankruptcy by these guys.
What I don't understand is, we got a lot of help from RVO, Belastingdienst etc before and during incorporation. Nobody talked about this! We got sone numbers from Belastingdienst about social security contributions per sector, but like 15% cut per employee wasn't mentioned once. To this date I don't know what legal basis do they have to ask for this amount of contribution. Nobody mentioned any law, or a decision by ministery of social affairs. Very strange to deal with this, because it's literally someone showing up and asking for money without telling even based on what.. It gave very strong gang vibes, which was surprising for me as I was always a member of a trade union.
Yeah, that stuff can be scary, I understand. It might almost feel extortionate. You had labor lawyers look at the applicable CAO and pension rules?
I quickly checked their website and it's a little unclear (so don't consider this legal advise), but their legal basis is probably the CAO. If that particular CAO has been made mandatory by law (which happens for certain industries that need tighter control from government, like temporary employment agencies), than it automatically applies to companies doing the exact work that's described in the CAO ('werkingssfeer').
It's a shame that RVO and Belastingdienst did not warn you correctly. The Netherlands does not want entrepreneurs, they want everybody cozy at their jobs at some big company.
Do you happen to be in or around Nijmegen with your chip development?
> The Netherlands does not want entrepreneurs, they want everybody cozy at their jobs at some big company.
Totally agreed. Those big companies in return get a lot of benefits from the government. Most investment in semiconductors for example are going into the already big, and let's be honest, not do competitive companies to keep the alive.
We're in the Randstad. Nijmegen is nice but together with old Philips its semiconductor ecosystem has declined quite a bit.
Individuals pay like 25-30 Euronth contribution, which is tax deductible. Employers can pay a lot, like 10% or more, which is often going to a social security fund.
That's crazy. Notarization in Estonia can be done entirely online using a digital signature, just like everything else here is done (including voting, getting married, getting divorced, filing taxes, opening/closing a company, etc). From all I hear Germany is still stuck in the 90s for some reason.
More like no one is willing to stick their neck out politically to argue for the positive public policy changes, or challenge regulatory interpretation needed to make real change. Plenty of people see the problems, and even want to fix them, and get stymied by political processes that abhor actually having to argue for change to electorate.
Germany is incredibly under developed in the digitalization plus the amount of red tape to do even basic things is also very large as well. Getting rid of these things takes a lot of will power and at the moment there is very little.
Germany never thought it would be in the current situation - decaying health care, pension system, cornerstone industry in decline, lack of digitalization, the list goes on. Massive reforms are needed, action is needed, but there is too much inertia in the system to change anything quickly.
Smaller countries like Estonia have the ability to be much more nimble.
Fun fact, the Bundestag is one of the most representative parliaments in the world thanks to MMP. Is the executive dysfunctional? Is it the federal split into 16 tiny states causing this?
If it was just a matter of size, similar/larger countries would be in the same state, and at least one of your smaller states would get ahead right?
Yes somehow they believed the 90s continue despite zero public investment. They talk about the dangers of debt for future generations, but they are silent about the infrastructure debt they are saddling their children with by not investing on any serious scale.
Lots of systems are stuck in very old ways of working and using humans as cogs. My American utility bill has a typo in my name that is not there in the online system through which I opened my account; a human in a back office read text from one app and typed it into another. Maybe there was even a piece of paper involved.
I agree. The notary process is a bit annoying, but it only costs 500-1,000 euros. Yes, that's not ideal, but if you're building a proper business, that shouldn't be an issue. You can typically get an appointment within a week, no matter where you are or where your company is registered. However, once the notary sends your documents off, it can take days or weeks for the registry courts to handle them. You have to register with ten other places yourselves, and there's no guidance. There are different forms and requirements, and the yearly costs just for a basic tax declaration are in the thousands. They can be 5-10% of early startup expenses for no good reason.
There are also some shady setups, such as a private company handling the company registry for the state. You have to pay this company each year to publish your books. Accessing that data still costs money, except for the largest companies. It doesn't help with transparency, but it is a public-private rent-seeking nightmare that (possibly) arose due to conflicts of interest among certain politicians (the company's CEO has a higher-level position in political party) and lobbying.
Per the Wikipedia article, an SE cannot be incorporated directly. It must be created out of one or more national, public (!) companies already formed under the law of a member state.
Not so much controversial, as evidence that you completely lack capacity for empathy and you should do some serious self-reflection. This is just a really vile and amoral view to hold.
People are being hurt by this, because "just pixels on a screen and bytes on a disk" can constitute harm due to the social function that information serves.
It's like calling hurling insults at someone as "just words" because no physical violence has occurred yet. The words themselves absolutely can be harm because of the effect they have, and also create an environment that leads to further, physical violence. Anyone who has experienced even mild bullying can attest to that.
Furthermore women and girls are often subject to online harassment and humiliation. This is of course part of that -- we aren't talking about fictional images here, we are talking about photos of real people, many who are children, being manipulated to shame, humiliate, and harass them sexually, targetted at women and girls overwhelmingly.
Advocating for the freedom to commit that kind of harm against other people is gross, and you should reconsider your views and how much care you have for other people.
Who knew users of HACKER news wouldn't be in favor of suppressing technology and exchange of information whatever it might be for mainstream morality reasons.
> we aren't talking about fictional images here, we are talking about photos of real people, many who are children,
is not compatible with what GP actually said
> it's clearly wrong when it concerns actual children
> No living creature was actually hurt when producing these images and cannot be hurt by them.
making these overly dramatic character attacks seem mostly silly
> you completely lack capacity for empathy and you should do some serious self-reflection. This is just a really vile and amoral view to hold.
> Advocating for the freedom to commit that kind of harm against other people is gross, and you should reconsider your views and how much care you have for other people.
GP edited their post to add that after everyone pointed out that that's what the entire thread is actually about and GP realised how disgusting they looked. Keep up.
This is false. They only added the "edit: " text, not anything I quoted. I know because I quoted the same in a now-deleted reply before the "edit: " text was added.
Everyone knows photos can be easily faked. The alarmist response serves no purpose. AI itself can be tasked to make and publish fake photos. Will you point pitchforks at the generators of the generators of the generators?
Fake content has a momentary fizz followed by a sharp drop-off and demotion to yesterday's sloppy meme. Fading to nothing more than a cartoon you don't like. Let's not, I hope, go after "cartoons" or their publishers.
Equating speed of travel with innovation is lame: a lot of work has been done in recent decades on making airplane engines more efficient, which makes air travel more economical both in terms of cost as well as C02e emissions per passenger (the Jevons paradox implications of that can be taken as read).
The whole post comes off a bit as someone who doesn't really understand the passenger air travel industry very well, and isn't particularly interested in changing that.
tbf whilst the lower cost travel we've got accurately represents what the market wants, it isn't exactly unusual to find industry insiders that want flight to be faster (they're just a little less likely to gush about how startups are "cleverly" working with regulators or describe Douglas as the last successful US airframer...)
I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.
Your sci-fi distopia flash fiction is compelling, but not actually on topic in this discussion.
"Think of the children" is weaponized for censorious purposes, but also the harms of social media are well documented (unlike many of the other moral panics fuelled by this phrase). Communication channels are becoming managed spaces, but by private companies not accountable to the electorate, not by the state.
I'm not sure a blanket under-16s ban on all social media is the right answer, but there are really good reasons why people support this that you need to engage with to have a useful discussion here.
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political motives is a prudent policy.
Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.
It's not that simple. It's true that a willingness to criticize and falsify established assumptions and skepticism toward arguments based on authority are part of the scientific ethos. It's also true that many scientists simply do what they've been taught to do, without questioning methods or taking an interest in the philosophy of science. But your last sentence is so sweeping that it would allow flat-earthers to be considered scientists and intellectuals.
What is being criticized here is an attitude that believes one is the only one capable of critical thinking and that everyone else is just an idiot who is already overwhelmed by the task of tying their shoelaces in the morning. This is simply arrogance and has little to do with constructiveness, let alone scientific ethos. You treat yourself to that little dopamine rush of saying “ackchyually” and then just carry on playing Bubble Shooter on your phone.
This is very common here on HN. And when this ultimately hardens into blanket skepticism toward institutions, you are closer to the flat-earthers than to the scientists.
In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts.
That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):
In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.
Have you not observed that science is very often politicized, filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-intellectual position is anti-skepticism.
Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.
I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.
> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first
While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.
And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
> And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
Being an expert always adds a big weakness: You get paid to do this so you are biased.
So no, they are not "just like everybody else", they have spent more time on it so they know some things better, but you can't get away from biases that comes from being paid to do something and that makes experts worse at some other things.
it can even happen in software engineering but takes different forms, someone outside sees the problem first because they are looking from a different perspective or due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case of their environment
> then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
On my iPhone 16 Pro + Airpods Pro, when I start the game (tapping on the screen when it says "Tap to start") I get a message saying "Airpods Disconnected", even though the Control Center on the phone reports them as connected).
Tried restarting the app, and disconnecting and reconnecting the Airpods with no luck.
I would add to this that in my experience, many teams actually perform better when co-locating, even if individual people on that team would prefer (or feel they individually perform better) remote.
Covid normalized remote working, but also didn't necessarily make companies and teams _good_ at it; I suspect RTO is easier than fixing the fact that your org sucks at remote work. It is hard to do well! it requires different strategies than just picking some software.
Partial/voluntary RTO also is the worst of both worlds: people coming in the office to sit on Zoom with colleagues who never do. Ultimately, I think RTO is a valid choice as a company, and a lot of orgs are coming to regret not messaging from the beginning that remote would be a temporary arrangement during the pandemic.
RTO may work as long as your teams are geographically co-located and return to the same office. In my experience, a lot of teams in recent years have been staffed without this aspect in mind, because with remote it made no difference. So now, even with RTO people still have to constantly sit in remote meetings / work rooms with the rest of the team in other office(s), and the benefit of in-person collaboration is still lost. Arguably, this "remote between offices" mode is the worst of them all, because remoting in from the office almost always results in an inferior experience compared to remoting in from a well-tuned home setup.
the reality is that nobody knows how to measure performance, and nobody does. it is all based on feels and a simple confirmation bias, rather than being backed by the research
In Berlin I enjoy exceedingly cheap daycare for my kids (80€ for 2 per month, would be lower if I didn't pay the optional extra costs), as well as generous parental leave in the year after a child is born, with salary subsidy from the state.
This is not an unusual policy situation at all in Europe, although indeed not universal.
If you could solve all those problems and still had to go listen to the Notar recite the contract in a monotone, it would be a worth trade.