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by idodevops 4863 days ago
I'm in Melbourne, Australia, working (contractor) on a project based out of Sydney, Australia, with team members working in Georgia (state, not country), Alabama, California and in the Philippines. In the past, I've worked (from New Zealand) for a company out of Finland, and (from Melbourne)for a couple of companies out of SF.

My main experience of remote work is that a 'normal' 8 hour day doesn't work - everyone needs to be a little flexible with their days and hours of work both for regularly scheduled standup meetings and for ad-hoc conversations with workmates. The oft-seen "US only" may be a timezone related concern.

I understand that international payments are seen as comparatively cumbersome, and (for employees, at least) the tax situation may well be more complicated.

1 comments

Actually that's something I would like more about, Isn't easy for a company to hire a contractor in other country?

I've worked as contractor for companies in the U.S and Germany, normally I would just send them a receipt and received my money without problems in my bank (I did have to take care of the taxes in my country).

My experiences with hiring and paying overseas devs have been pretty easy (I'm in the US).

We have paid using SWIFT transfers, which sometimes require a bit of work to set up, but nothing too onerous - it's like doing any complicated transaction at a bank. Once set up, the recurring payments are generally trivial - as you said, we get an invoice, send payment, and things are merry.

Tax-wise this is an expense like any other to our US-based company. Note that in this case the developers actually LIVE overseas. If somebody is in the US but is not a resident / authorized to work, then it's a whole different story.