How I Work from Anywhere in the World
wanderling.co
wanderling.co
Enjoyed the article though, Karma was new to me and looks interesting.
Socialization of kids is a uniquely Western obsession, I think— not an issue here because it's a child-friendly culture with lots of social interaction. The average age in the Philippines is 22, much lower than in the US, UK, or Canada. That means there are children everywhere here my son makes friends easily.
As far as our friends go, we meet up with people wherever we happen to be. Sometimes we're in a place where we don't know anybody, but then we just beach bum around when not working.
Don't take my word for it. Better Business Bureau: http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-reviews/internet-a...
Plus dig into comments on their facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/getyourkarma/?fref=ts
I'm going to sound like a grumpy old man saying this, and maybe I am. Please, dear god, stop this war on thickness. I want my ports back.
Happy to answer any questions!
A lot of my Slack integrations these days are powered by Zapier, but for regular dev work + client management, I use simple integrations like Trello, Github, etc. The life-changing part comes from being able to communicate and get updates from the multiple teams I work with in a given day, across multiple companies and groups, in one app that also works on all of my devices.
In my Slack team, I've also set up some private channels where I pipe in things like twitter alerts, flight alerts, etc. so that helps too!
Essentials for me: Trello, Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, AWS, VirtualBox, Feedly, Pinboard, ExpressVPN, Skype, Adobe Creative Cloud, Toggl, Gusto, Mint
The remote options are better than local except in SF, LA, & Seattle.
That's describing one of my favorite sites World Time Buddy https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/.
What part of the world do you live in/claim residency in? The reason I ask, is because I live in the US. If you're in the US or EU schengen zone, you can live and work almost anywhere in that particular area with no legal restrictions. For instance, my mailing address is in California, but I can easily move to Florida or Nevada or some state without a state income tax. Check your company's HR policy, I know there are a few states I'm not able to work from due to my company's policies.
If you work in a foreign country, that's a whole new can of worms. My company doesn't have a problem with you taking a month off and working a few weeks in India, for example, since it doesn't really make sense to fly to India for just 2 weeks due to travel times and jet lag, and you don't want to blow all your vacation at once.
However, if you're thinking of living for half a year in Ecuador, for example, even if the time zones line up, the company probably won't be as cool about it if they know about it, in my case.
The reason is that you're kinda breaking your tourist visa. You're not supposed to be doing any work, and if you are, you're supposed to be paying taxes to the country you're living in.
Now, it's a ridiculous argument, as you're pretty much living as a tourist, not taking a job from a local, and putting money in the local economy. However, if that's how your tourist visa is written, that's how it's going to be.
Now, if you're working for yourself as a freelancer, they probably won't go after you too hard, mainly because the upside is so limited. You can only squeeze so much blood from a stone, and they'll probably spend more money prosecuting you/doing audits than you'll pay back taxes.
However, since you and I (appear) to be working for large corporations, they have much more of an incentive to sue you. They can tack on penalties, and threaten a huge accounting/legal team to "discover other irregularities" in the company's HR policies in hopes of a large settlement. If that's the case, you gotta keep the fact that you're spending longer periods of time overseas to yourself.
My manager is also in Seattle, along with our entire reporting chain being US based.
It's worked brilliantly. Our group is probably an outlier though, as we have people scattered all over world, and for most of my time here, we've been focused on open source projects like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.
In short - yes, even mega corps can handle remote workers.