HACKER Q&A
📣 calltrak

Which type of jobs are good for Digital Nomads


Hello, I am a senior full stack developer and I want to now work as a Digital Nomad ( Travel and work:).

My current developer job is 100% remote. I have a daily stand up meeting each morning and I have to be on slack to answer other developer questions.

I would like to switch to another type of job that doesn't require stand up meetings or being on slack. Any ideas of how other Digital Nomads are able to do this?


  👤 newsbinator Accepted Answer ✓
There are multiple kinds of digital nomads:

1. Some make very, very little money by doing very, very little work. They don't need a lot to live where they live and their career ambitions are low.

2. Some work in sprints of 3~6 months, full time and crazy-busy. Then they do nearly no work for the other half the year.

3. Some run their own businesses and don't have to be answerable to anyone. They make between very little (far below US minimum wage) to high amounts of money (millions MRR).

I suggest you retain your senior full stack role, but find ways to go async. Don't hide that you're location-independent and timezone-shifted, but do hold on tight with both hands to your existing position (assuming you like the work/team and they like you).


👤 avgDev
So, I am in a position that would work well for you but I'm debating if I want to join a bigger corp. I would need to work for a SV based company as I don't think many companies in my area could match the pay from what I am seeing from recruiters most are coming 20k below.

I develop apps for midsized manufacturing company as an IC. Sometimes I need to spend a lot of time with managers to figure out how to make something because things are not well documented. However, at some point I just write code, update devops, write some emails, touch base and document. I kind of enjoy it. I get to work as a full stack dev building and documenting everything. I work extremely flexible hours. If I can't work one day I will catch up on a weekend. Some days I work for a few hours then go somewhere and get back to it in the evening.

There is rarely any rush, unless things are really urgent. Deadlines are flexible.

Finding a job like this may be difficult, the position kind of fell into my lap as I met the VP of the company in school. However, try to interview with smaller companies and tell them what you want out of the job. Smaller companies have a harder time hiring talented people as the big companies have the prestige and high salaries.


👤 pbmango
I would agree with most of the comments. Almost all companies have some component of their workforce still (always) remote. What it sounds like is you are looking for a more async work experience.

It seems like there are teams that have been public about using Loom etc. to make this happen smoothly and effectively and that could be a starting point. The more async the more you can flex time zones and that will probably help the "Nomad" aspect of your goals. We recently indexed a few thousand jobs for https://www.kiter.app/tech-jobs and it was hard to pick out NON remote roles still.

Best of luck!


👤 codingdave
It doesn't sound like you have the wrong job - it sounds like your team has a culture that doesn't fit your desires. There are dev teams who don't do standups, and who don't expect Slack to be real-time. I'd seek out those teams - the way I find them is to look for smaller companies, also to avoid job postings that are heavy handed on "Agile", and definitely skip any team who uses formal "Scrum".

I think most teams are Agile, but it is Scrum that gets religious about daily meetings.


👤 anm89
The kind of roles that are good are the ones that you can be honest with. If you have to constantly lie about your situation, it probably is going to blow up sooner or later.

So find somewhere that you can just tell that you're in Bali or whatever.


👤 thy77
Term life insurance. Resident license for whichever state you are in. Convert former residences to non-resident licenses.

👤 bitxbitxbitcoin
Newsbinator hit the nail on the head. Decide which type of digital nomad you want to be and cherish asyncronous opportunities.