Friday, September 28, 2012

Bizarre Job Offers

Every now and then I am getting some strange emails with all kinds of job offers.
Yesterday I got an email with the title: "URGENT: Invitation from Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology". I was flattered to learn from Vanessa, that the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology is interested that I will review some project proposal in the area of P2P networks.

So far nothing bizarre here. I continued reading and I got to the compensation part. I was glad to learn that "Furthermore, FCT pays € 70 per proposal evaluated, from which a tax deduction will be applied as required by Portuguese law." There was also an attached link with a 22 page tutorial on how to rate proposals.

The email was sent on Thursday night. I need to return an answer until Sunday if I am willing to rate the proposal. I am almost certain Vanessa does not work on weekends.

Any of my blog readers is Portugese? Let be conservative and assume assume there is 20% tax. We remain with 56 Euro. Which are 72$. Further assume I need one hour to read the proposal ratings guidelines and three hours to read and rate the proposal. So we are talking about 18$ an hour gig!

Now, let's be more realistic. Depositing a check in Euro and converting the money will cost probably 20$ fee. So we remain with 52$ gig.  Reporting a foreign income in end of your tax report will result in overhead of at least 50$ for the accountants. So we remain with a 2$ fee for 4 hours of work.

And now I ask Vanessa. Are you serious? Why don't you ask me to volunteer to review your proposal? It will be much cheaper for me.. :-)


I asked Vanessa to find out what is the applied tax. It may be that the income tax is lower than 20%. In that case all my calculations are wrong. And then I need to reconsider...

Any of my readers which have an advice what to do please comment ASAP. We have only until Sunday to deploy the wisdom of crowdsourcing. 

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