'I have worked from home in 78 different countries' | Hacker News Reader

'I have worked from home in 78 different countries'

bbc.co.uk

Personally, I no longer understand the attractiveness of travelling. It is nothing but stress, fatigue, confusion, waiting, queuing, no sleep, overpriced EVERYTHING,

Airplane cow class is mild middleclass torture, (1st world torture?)

Due to height, I cannot find a single comfortable position in a 0 class airplane chair.

I am not even particularly tall.

I do admit to unhealthy jealousy when I see people who fit well and go to sleep.

For me its trapped, uncomfortable, noisy, shitty food, rude co travelers, for 12 hours. I usually bring a couple of paper books, but there are only so many consecutive hours I can spend reading.

Paper books rule because you dont have to power them down, worry about running out of power, dont weigh much. and I can find space for it on the flip down tray. I have never been able to fit a laptop on that tray, much less have enough space for my arms and hands to type away.

And that is before I even get to my ultimate destination.

More often than not the hotel rooms are quite uncomfortable compared to home. (and that is spending $$ on a "western style" hotel room).

That said it may be a function of age and being on the spectrum.

The frustrating thing for me is that travelling has become a form of status building / making oneself interesting.

I am back on dating sites again and it pains me that travelling is still on top of most profiles' priorities. I was last on about 12 years ago and the profiles look very much the same.

Working from home is my favorite place.

For me the main reason for this type of lifestyle is the fact that I dislike cold weather. When winter comes to my country, I'd rather move to Canary Islands or somewhere else where temperature is still in the 70s. Sightseeing, which I do mostly on weekends, is just a bonus. Also, my trips are relatively short (max 5 hours on a plane), and I do not change countries often.

That is exactly what I do. A month in the Canary Islands in January breaks up the winter and makes it a tiny bit more bearable. I do it for 3 if I wasn’t having to double my accommodation costs (mortgage + Airbnb) for the duration.

98% of online dating profiles these days:

>I like dogs, travelling and eating food in restaurants

Wow, such a great showcase of your unique and quirky personality!

Wow, trite cynicism on social media for others; such a great showcase of your unique and quirky personality.

Social media is an open sewer of low effort demands of the world to serve individual sensibilities, revealing the apes are not as civil and inclusive as their philosophy has lead them to believe. I love it.

When people say they enjoy travelling, they mean they enjoy the destination - I don’t think anybody enjoys the plane ride.

If you’re going to focus on the plane ride and the expensive hotel, I can see why you don’t enjoy it.

I enjoy travelling because it means seeing how other cultures work, how they had different governance systems throughout history, different ethics, different music, different food, attitudes to money, cuisines, literature, humour, and definitions of beauty.

Then there’s the people, go on a few dates, fall in love (or just a short term lust thing), different cultures produce vastly different forms of love and intimacy, from different physical beauty to different interaction dynamics.

Ive see construction that’s 1500 years old, painting that are 1000 years old, spa pools filled with wine, music with instruments that I’ve never heard before, a smile from a man who doesn’t know who he is, free food from a street vendor who I just made laugh with a dark joke, a volleyball game on a Spanish beach and the sun on my face in a lush green park in Berlin.

That’s why I like travelling

To each their own. Traveling isn’t about the act of traveling, that’s miserable for almost everyone, it’s about breaking out of your routine. Sounds like that’s precisely why you don’t enjoy it? Nothing wrong with that.

Personally I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on overnight trains, in random bars and in far flung corners of the world. I can’t imagine my life without it.

I rewrote this a couple of times because I am trying to not come out as a put down. It is not intended that way. I am just curious.

Everyone lives in a bubble of some sort most of the time. Work, family, friends, sports,

Do you think then that most people who are interesting can be found on trains and obscure bars in far off places?

Or just that the "bubble" that is your more daily life just isn't conducive to meeting interesting people closer to home?

Or it might be that you meet people with some of the same priorities as yourself when you do meet follow travelers.

People with radically different life experiences tend to be interesting. Traveling, by definition, makes you more likely to run into those kind of people.

My last trip took me to Georgia. As someone that immigrated from Russia as a child, meeting Russians that are debating a similar decision today was eye opening - they have the same hopes, dreams and fears that we had 20 years ago. In the US, I’ve never felt understood in that respect.

This is one of many. I can’t imagine my life without those experiences.

The problem with combining travel and work is that the travel part suffers, and the work part suffers.

When traveling, i like to spend my energy on the travel, not stressing about work.

I guess it depends how stressful or demanding your job is and how much involvement your employer expects from you. There are plenty of people with very lax jobs where they're basically on vacation anyway, except getting paid for it, especially at big bloated companies, might as well go "work" in some interesting places.

One of my friends has the dream job. He gets paid to ask his offshore team in Vietnam every day "how's the work going and when is X gonna be ready?" so that he can forward these answers to his own bosses in Germany lol. Perfect job for traveling while working.

Let me guess, his official job title is "Scrum Master"? :)

I think the dream is that, when 5PM hits, you'll be somewhere (hopefully) exotic and exciting straight away. And I guess one just needs a few days if moving places, to get settled.

It’s hard when you don’t have enough PTO. I’ll go across the world for 2 weeks and spend 3-4 days “working”.

Everyone knows what’s up, it’s barely classified as work. But it allows me to adjust my body clock and due to the time difference I fuck around for the entire day anyway.

Travel ranges from visiting a new thing every day to living somewhere longer term.

The latter works no different than a job in your home country except that you are presumably in a more interesting place (to you) when you’re not on the clock.

For me, that’s a cheap beach in Mexico.

I've been working remotely for years. My wife and I have family scattered all across the US. Once or twice a year we'll take an extended road trip. You can make it from one region (west, southwest, pnw, etc) to the next in one weekend.

I drive on the weekend. Make it to a hotel, family members house, or pitch a tent if it's summer time. My wife and kids visit and vacation while I grind it out in a hotel room or coffee shop.

Before I hit the road I always stack up as much offline work and documentation as I can in case cell reception is poor and I let whoever I'm working with know I'm traveling just in case the car breaks down on one of those weekend hauls.

It's a lot of work, but it's much cheaper, much more laid back, and much less stressful than dealing with airports. It's really nice to not have to worry about flight times. Not to mention, you meet _way_ more interesting people when you're laid up in some off-the-beaten-path town. Wandering the country with no particular timeline feels like a little slice of Americana.

Honestly, traveling like that has restored my faith in humanity. We've had car problems, illnesses, storms, and other fiascos over the years. The number of decent, caring people from all walks of life that come out of the woodwork to help a stranger is heartwarming. It makes you realize that most people are mostly good.

"I have the biggest carbon footprint of all my friends"

How do these people stay out of the constant meetings per day. Sitting with a "glass of wine" whilst working would get me fired also. It must be a fairly liberal job, maybe a freelancer with rigidly defined scope or self employed.

I can't imagine running a business whilst never being in a fixed time zone must be a nightmare for your employees that want to get a hold of you.

Personally for me staying in AirBnB's / hotels almost all year round sounds like torture. I like my own bed and I don't sleep well when on holiday.

Probably a writer or journalist.

I’ve worked at companies that actively encouraged alcohol consumption while on the job, it was strange.

Meetings are just time management. You tend to not be teleporting around the world to random time zones every week. Maybe your 7am meeting becomes 9am and months later it’s at noon for you. Or maybe it’s at 5am now, so you ensure that you are ready for it.

It’s very manageable and not something that should ruin your ambitions if you want to travel.

Personally, I never want to go back to an engineering job where i’m in constant meetings.

Internet connectivity is the main thing that's prevented me from going down this path. Zoom meetings and file transfers really suck up a lot of bandwidth. But a lot of hotels have more casual internet. And many places that would be amazing to visit are quite rural. Perhaps something like Starlink will become a good solution for this?

Starlink became available in my small beach town and definitely made a lot of jobs more practical there for travelers. It’s changing things for sure.

I still wonder what the legalities of this sort of lifestyle are? I tend to assume they don't face problems just by virtue of lack of understanding and it being fairly uncommon?

You just need to make sure you are not violating any travel visas.

Most regions you tend to be allowed to stay 3 months in a 6 month period on a tourist visa, so as long as you aren't overstaying, you are fine.

The only problems you would face are when leaving a country, if you overstay you may be not welcome back and/or fined.

On entry to a new country, the border agents will be the judge if you are welcome or not.

And are you sure all countries allow you to "reside" there and work, even though your clients are outside of the country, and the payments are being made into a foreign bank?

I think grandparent's question is legitimate. In most cases the authorities probably don't care much how tourists (or, people with tourist visas) spend their time, but I also wonder if all these nomads follow the letter of the law to the dot -- which would be a feat with the laws of 78 countries.

Most certainly not following the letter of the law, but it also just doesn't really matter. Don't overstay and don't tell them you are working when you try to enter on a tourist visa and its not really possible for you to have any problems. If you do, just leave without making a fuss.

Things become more complicated if you decide you want to stay permanently somewhere while working remotely. Then it depends on the country and how much crap you're willing to put up with.

Just don't say you are visiting for work if you are entering on a tourist visa and you will be fine.

If someone is working remote and they could be working from anywhere, technically they aren't visiting for work

_exactly_

Somewhat ironic that they don't mention the fact Brexit makes this illegal in a bunch of places.

So 'home' would be hotel room in this context I expect.

Have they filed tax returns in 79 countries?

Is this a legitimate concern?

I would typically think not, unless you are staying somewhere for over half the year, you aren’t establishing residency anywhere and are typically on a tourist visa.

Not yet. Tax administrations have very little means to collect taxes for the income generated by remote workers on their tourist visas so far.

Should tax be paid for working while on a tourist visa? I think not. You're already renting, buying food, etc and contributing to the economy which those businesses pay tax on.

What you're spending is irrelevant.

Read the tax codes of the countries you visit, and most likely you'll see that you owe that country tax for the work "arising from that country". Check with the lawyer from that country and most likely you'll see that "arising from that country" includes sitting with laptop in hotel and working.

Due to double taxation treaties most likely you'll end up paying the same amount of tax plus hassle/expenses for filing return in the visited country and for getting the foreign tax deducted from the tax of country of your residence.

And of course visited country has very little means to measure your earnings and collect tax from you.

It should be, but I suspect most people fly under the radar.

My brother in law worked as a tax accountant and business management professional for many different entertainers before becoming CFO of an niche business management company. Sorting out the taxes for Michael Jackson and the crew for the Bad Tour and later the Dangerous Tour was a huge undertaking, especially since with the latter Michael was donating his estimated profits to various charities as they went country to country.

He's met lots of different folks over the years, but his meeting with Sheryl Crow was due to Michael: she was a background singer on the Bad tour and came in to try to understand the tax documents he'd prepared for her. Also, Slash (who was on the Dangerous Tour) is a pretty cool guy — my BiL went to a number of gigs to be sure the money was being spent "correctly" and hung out with the talent and crew quite a bit.

One important thing to consider is GDPR and other privacy laws. Sometimes your contract simply disallows you bringing your work laptop to certain jurisdictions if you carry personal information on it. As far as I know even your Outlook inbox counts as such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com