When digital nomads come to town
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
In the US, you can find people from nearly every state who believe that Californians are responsible for driving up home prices. This article feels like an international version of that same myth.
As for digital nomads, my experience hiring or working with digital nomads has been universally negative for many years. All anecdotes, of course, but every one of them treated the job like a side project that they’d get to whenever they had some free time during a permanent vacation lifestyle. Some of them produced good work if you could micromanage them enough to make sure they were actually working, but the rest of the time felt like a game of chicken where they were constantly trying to push the limits of how little work they could do or how many meetings (rare but important at the time) they could miss or have their “camera broken” while they obviously tried to half listen in from some vacation spot. I’m sure there are good digital nomads out there, but I’ve been burned enough time that I prefer not to work with them unless it’s on a well-defined contract basis with clear project-based fees.
That shouldn't be something to aspire to.
Devil's advocate: this is the direction we should aim toward as a society. Yes, the work still needs to be performed, but efficient workers should be rewarded with more free time for the same wage, because the purpose of life, the economy, and civilization itself should be to enable everyone to do whatever they want, as much as possible, and labor is only a way to achieve that.
By all means be an independent contractor and set your own hours and rates.
Or work for a company that allows part time workers.
But salaries workers usually have a schedule expectation (~40 hours or so in the US) and you’d be lucky to work for an org that does less.
I think you’ll need to start a company and do that as I think most companies would rather just make more money off increased productivity.
As for your other point...
It is easy to blame people as a class for their inability to meet your expectations, but I would encourage more self-reflection and not axing a whole group of workers because of some bad experiences. Here is an alternative view, because I think that it's important to acknowledge the evolving work-lifestyle balance that many individuals, especially digital nomads, are adopting today. Instead of prioritizing work over life, they choose to intertwine the two, enhancing their experiences and broadening their perspectives.
In engaging with digital nomads, they have largely come to a better understanding about work and life. They are not letting work get in the way of their living. The work you’re offering becomes a part of their life, rather than the defining factor. They tend to prefer environments where rigid structures and unproductive meetings make way for flexibility, creativity, and efficient communication.
Working with digital nomads requires a shift in traditional managerial approaches. Here are some recommendations:
- Effective Communication: Ensure meetings are purposeful and time-efficient. Adopt asynchronous communication, which respects the nomad’s flexible schedule and promotes a healthy work-life balance.
- Clear Goals: Communicate your vision, objectives, and deadlines clearly. This ensures expectations align and facilitates the digital nomad’s proactive role in the project.
- Flexible Schedules: Embrace flexibility in terms of work schedules. Trust your team to meet the agreed-upon deadlines, focusing more on the quality of outcomes rather than hours logged.
- Measurable Benchmarks: Establish clear, achievable benchmarks. This helps in maintaining a project’s momentum and provides a clear gauge of progress.
- Clarity in Tasks: Digital nomads value their time, hence it’s crucial that tasks are defined precisely. Ambiguity may lead to delays and misunderstandings.
- Realistic Expectations: Understand the work scope and timelines. Overestimating or underestimating these aspects can lead to frustration and tension in the professional relationship.
In order to foster a healthier work dynamic, consider the following:
- Trust-Based Relationships: Build trust by focusing on outcomes, not micromanaging. This fosters a sense of responsibility and ownership in the nomad.
- Meaningful Work: Provide stimulating and meaningful work. This encourages engagement and can lead to higher productivity.
- Experiential Opportunities: If possible, integrate opportunities for travel and new experiences into your work offerings. This aligns with the nomad’s lifestyle and enhances their work satisfaction.
In essence, it’s not about confining individuals to boxes, but adapting to their style of work and making the most of the unique skills and perspectives they bring to the table. When work and life coexist harmoniously, the results can be rewarding for both the individual and the employer.
If you can find a way to merge experience with work in an authentic way, you will have a better experience with these sorts.
Being respectful of time rather depends on the nature of the job. I'm remote but there are meetings where my expertise is needed and others that I chair - if I don't attend then I'm not doing my job.
The managers are hopelessly outgunned. For years they (we) bumbled along, and cut our employees a lot of slack. At least I did. At the same time, they cut us some slack too, for instance by figuring out the precise details of their own tasks, working things out with colleagues, and so forth.
If each employee has to be managed perfectly, then where are you going to get managers, especially without paying them more, and with the additional expectation that managers should be technically qualified? Screw that. Most of us came out of the techie ranks. I was happy to go back.
Opting for lower-cost developers might offer immediate financial savings, but it overlooks the invaluable contribution of engaged, innovative minds. Workers who are deeply invested in their work often bring forward solutions that elevate the project beyond expectations. While it may appear financially prudent to leverage low-cost labor, the opportunity cost—measured in terms of creativity, innovation, and productivity—can be staggering. I believe that an investment in highly skilled, motivated individuals often reaps significant long-term dividends. We’re all guided by our own perspectives, and while some may prioritize immediate cost-savings, others might focus on the long-term value of cultivating a motivated, innovative workforce.
To each to their own approach, might we all choose one that elevates our planet.
> In 2022, 2,305 temporary residence permits for Mexico City were granted to U.S. citizens
Mexico City metro area has 21 million people. And who can say what percentage of those 2.3k are digital nomads. Because you also have expats.
> Extrapolating from its user base, Nomad List projects that there are currently about 7.600 remote workers in Medellín
Leaving aside this is a gross estimation - 7.6k remote workers in a metro area of 3.7 million. Are all the 7.6k digital nomads or can they be local remote workers?
> Leaving aside this is a gross estimation - 7.6k remote workers in a metro area of 3.7 million. Are all the 7.6k digital nomads or can they be local remote workers?
Given Nomad List's target audience, I think they mean digital nomads from outside Colombia.
It's also very likely that the actual numbers are higher – I have met plenty of nomads in Medellín but, like me, many were not using Nomad List.
With that said on your second commentary about digital nomads, my question would simply be: Are they getting the work you expect done finished in a timely manner (comparable to others on your team)? If so, regardless of any other point, what is the problem? If not, then why didn't you address the issue quickly since you mention you're the one who hired them.
I do know there are some digital nomads who definitely minimize the amount of work they can do, but I still think the issue is with employers in general not being good at managing remote workers (not just digital nomads). If you don't set expectations or clearly communicate that they aren't working up to expectations, then of course they will continue to act in such a way.
Work is not my life, and I think that jars with the thinking of some others who prioritize their work over everything else. My honest opinion is that this primarily a failing of management and hiring you are speaking to. I do good work, and whatever is expected of me, and my manager is always happy. I make sure to do at minimum just that. But if I'm not doing that I would hope somebody would simply communicate that.
For me, it’s because I’m busy and this takes time. Being a good employee isn’t unique to digits nomads or not. But having to micromanage to correct problems is something I’d like to avoid as a manager. I have fantastic employees and do not experience this type of behavior and work on hiring people who are self starters and problem solvers not people who bill by the hour, work for an hour and bill 8 and claim it’s because I didn’t assign more work. I’d rather hire someone smart who figures out what they can do by maximizing their time themself that helps toward our broader mission.
I don’t want to assign tasks, I want to remove blockers and help expand impact. So I like to find more things to do, not finish things and then wait.
I honestly think a lot of office workers/remove workers who aren't digital nomads do the exact same things being purported with respect to amount of time actually spent working. They just may not in a fancy location and because you can visually see them it brings false sense of productivity.
That said, I'm not saying that I nor many others sit on my thumbs and do nothing if I have no tasks assigned. In my thoughts that is part of the expectations being set/what my responsibilities are (i.e. setting expectations/it being know that my job role is not a task mule). I agree that this can be an issue, but I also think this issue is not unique to digital nomads.
This all still seems like a hiring and management issue to me more than a digital nomad issue. How I see it is that if somebody is needing to be micromanaged and you don't desire that, remote or not, give them a warning/communicate and if it continues, let them go.
The point is that they’re not the same in practice.
Hypothetically, a perfect digital nomad would be indistinguishable from any other remote employee. But in practice, there’s something about the digital nomad lifestyle that incentivizes people to minimize their workload at the expense of their peers/manager more than the average employee: They’re traveling the world and want to get back to doing the travel thing by doing as little work as they can get away with.
Having someone in constantly changing time zones is also a pain for communication. Having them in constantly different backgrounds (often noisy or shared) is a challenge. Having them on spotty WiFi that cuts out and makes them unable to do their job is a challenge.
All of these things in theory could be avoided, but in practice it always turns out to be a huge hassle to try to mix digital nomads with a team that’s trying to get work done. About the only time it works out is when it’s for contract work where the deadline isn’t urgent and you’re paying a project-based fee that is agreed up front by both parties. This moves all of the incentive to do good work and deliver on time over to the nomad, which works much better with trying to balance against the whole world travel nomad thing.
> This all still seems like a hiring and management issue
Which is why I fixed it by declining to hire or manage digital nomads as FTEs. I only work on project-based contracts and it’s much more aligned now.
The idea that it’s the manager’s responsibility to extract work from the employee is exactly the mentality that I was describing: This mindset that underperformance is only the manager’s fault leads to a requirement of heavy micromanagement, but it’s exasperated by digital nomads who are extra incentivized to minimize their work/fool their managers so they have more time to vacation.
No, they are not getting comparable work done. That’s literally the entire problem I was trying to describe.
> If not, then why didn't you address the issue quickly since you mention you're the one who hired them.
Why do you assume I’m not addressing the issue? I specifically said it took heavy management interaction to try to keep them on track.
This is the same argument that always comes up: If they “get their work done” then what’s the problem? If they got their work done I wouldn’t care. The problem is that they don’t get their work done in a timely manner and/or they sandbag to exaggerate how long their work will take so they can do minimal work, thereby shifting the workload to their teammates who are actually honest.
Investor-landlords (especially if they are local) are also probably more keen to lay the blame at digital nomads' feet. Every guilty party loves a good scapegoat.
I suspect it's not entirely Covid diaspora and the handful of digital nomads pushed by lifestyle influencers.
Californicators driving up housing prices was already a meme in Portland in the 1980s.
But if a tangent, but I think this is the dumbest excuse ever. I wish people would just say they don’t want to turn it on. It seems weird when a programmer complains about this like it’s something outside their control. I’m sure it actually happens, but I’ve never had a MacBook camera fail and I have like 15 year old iMacs with the cam still working.
This makes people sound incompetent, especially when cameras aren’t required or anything.
I’m sure it does happen, but I don’t think I’m uniquely lucky. I bet the ratio of people who lie vs unfortunate as 100:1.
And consistent failure is just poor planning as I would get a replacement after the first few failures. If I wanted to turn on my cam, of course.
What I'm saying is that it's the type of lie that you can't know is a lie based on one person not having their webcam work.
It's like saying people who take 10 sick days a year are lying, because I've never taken more than 3 sick days. Of course, some people take sick days when they're not sick. But if, say, your employees in their 30s take twice as many sick days as employees in their 60s, it might be because people in their 30s are more inclined to "lie" about it (or use sick days for things besides being sick)
Been working together for 4 years now and we still only talk audio only.
That said, I can understand why you'd want it at the initial outset. In my case, the introduction was made by a mutual friend whom provided that guarantee of trust. (reputation is everything)
I admire their lifestyle but having experience with RSI I will never work somewhere that doesn't have a height adjustable desk, ergonomic seat and at least a laptop stand to raise it to eye level. Preferably an external monitor.
Assuming these people have an above average income for the region they are in, can't they afford to rent a co-op space somewhere that allows them to work in a healthy way with good posture?
In my specific office ("IT"), we have somewhat better conditions, with displays that can actually be set at the correct level, etc. Still, many people will just spend their days hunched over their laptops ignoring the screen in front of them, sit in chairs set comically low or high, etc.
If you're still doing this at age 50 then you'll be a lonely old man.
I do work at cafes every once in a while, but I try to make sure I am still performing my job well so that people don't get skeptical of my lifestyle/location hurting my work.
But I do find the gentrification causing each city to look the same sad, a neighborhood I visited in Mexico City looked identical the the richest shopping neighborhood in Denver.
Pretty sure there’s basically zero influence of digital nomads. It’s just kind of how things are.
I get that digital nomads might be annoying and boorish: people with 100x as much money as you, who don't speak your language and don't know anything about your culture, and live in a little bubble of luxury right next to where you are just getting by. That would make me mad. I could see rolling your eyes hard. But, are these arguments about them destroying towns and neighborhoods coming from a place of fact, or a place of emotion?
What changed? My current theory is the housing shortage. Means that all community benefits flow towards rent-seeking real estate owners, everyone else just gets squeezed.
Medellín has been a digital nomading hotspot since at least 2016. It is not “in the early stages of nomadification”.
Laureles is not a middle-class neighborhood.
Insinuating that the “gringo price” for an apartment is what a local (or even a gringo who can speak Spanish) will pay is dishonest.
And while I love paisas, it’s disingenuous to complain about the rich gringos when much of the current middle-class Colombian lifestyle is powered by Venezuelan migrant workers.
Most people couldn’t even dream of working remotely in 2016. Now, a huge number of people have it as a viable option. So although it may have been popular with nomads in 2016 the number of nomads has grown exponentially since then.
How would you classify it? I mean it's definitely not upscale as the article claims in the very beginning but it surely is one of the more decent neighborhoods. I guess it depends on one's definition of "middle class".
> Insinuating that the “gringo price” for an apartment is what a local (or even a gringo who can speak Spanish) will pay is dishonest.
Agreed, there is a gap in the causality chain here. Lots of places in the world have "special" prices for visitors but it doesn't automatically mean those prices will impact inflation from the point of view of locals.
Getting back to the article,
> A one-bedroom in Medellín now rents for the “gringo price” of about $1,300 a month, in a country where the median monthly income is $300.
they are really comparing apples and oranges here. A gringo tourist might pay $1,300 for a fancy apartment in a high rise in one of those upscale gated communities in Poblado. But 1) this price still includes a gringo surcharge, 2) most locals (i.e. the ones with the $300 income) don't live in such apartments, and 3) the few locals that do live in such apartments have a considerably higher monthly income.
"Oblivious middle class hipster types" is the likely caricature - but they are probably quite varied and less clichéd in reality; it presumably takes an element of individuality, imagination and courage to venture out like that, even where the privilege is also there.
Ugghh. If there's one thing that I hated when I went back to Colombia it's this. Waiters will now often ask you point-blank when you're paying whether you want to include a service fee (which is often ~20%). I hate the US tipping culture with deep passion and it's been painful to see Colombia getting americanized in this way.
The nomadic half of the digital nomad comes as a result of national visa regulations: Outside of the EU, countries don't usually authorize long term visas unless you work full time for their domestic companies, so digital nomads enter on 90 day tourist visas and hide the fact that they are working for a company in their homeland. The whole practice is of course of questionable legality, and that is why they are nomadic: they can't stay for longer than 90 days.
Then as a result they don't get to go very native. Can't really learn the language and culture in 90 days while working full time.
I've lived my fair share of 90 day stints all over South America, and I did make the effort to learn Spanish. I started off 3-4 years ago with 0 Spanish and now I am non-native fluent. I can communicate clearly and don't have issues with speaking to natives and even have local friends in many of the places I have gone (I have revisited plenty of them more than once). I may not catch all the colloquialism of course, but I do try to learn them and the culture wherever I go (what is the local slang, preferred word choices, etc).
Unfortunately I do know a lot of Digital Nomads who unlike myself basically never learn the local language and stick to their bubble of other english speaking nomads. I think this is sort of a shame personally.
Haha yes. If you can get humans to do that, solving housing prices is one of the less interesting things you can do. World peace and solving child hunger are just some starter projects if you could finally solve the coordination problems of large groups.
Techies can barely get together and decide which editor is the best, let alone decide on housing allocation or decide which types of schooling to allow in "their" neighborhood. Also an enforced tech-only community sounds super dystopian. Would you get kicked out of your house if you lose your job or change careers?
In my opinion, you can't micro-target your way out of gentrification and sky high urban rents/prices. The only thing you can do is to take away the ability of local communities to oppose high density, build a lot of dense housing where you outpace the population growth and build out in basically every direction, and then build commuter rail lines to connect areas as you build out. Finally though, the city/state has to be the one to actually pay the builders for the housing to go up, not a developer which is where YIMBY experiments have failed. A developer that both contracts for the construction and then sells the finished product has all of the incentives to add artificial costs and delays when a municipality pays them to generate new housing on the market, because every additional building they add marginally lowers the value of every other building they have on the market.
Also many unnecessary costs, such as parking minimums are govt requirements.
Housing can't keep up, local businesses have been replaced by same-y luxury ones, and longtime residents have had to move (or some just become homeless) because they can't afford it anymore. It's been a shame to see. Economic influx isn't always a good thing.
P.S. I have never been a digital nomad.
Of-course it could all degenerate like the mass tourism all-inclusives that are tailor-made to maximize environmental impact and minimize local economic benefit.
In any case remains to be seen how much of the zero interest + pandemic induced behaviors and economics will survive as the world reverts to some sort of new (ab)normal.
Which are the other cities? These two cities seem to be really high in Pieter Levels' small kingdom. But most of the housing problems in europe at least are caused by golden visas and Airbnbs. Nomads are a tiny amount in comparison
We have no stats on how many of those actually live in Portugal, but it should be noted that the Golden Visa holders only have to visit Portugal for one week per year and that counts towards the five years for citizenship. This was a major draw of that visa.
Not to mention, nomads are cheap people, most of them are traveling to lower cost places where they can avoid taxes.
i blame tim ferris and that weinerchuck guy.