Freelancers in my city are fully booked. Yet I don't want to hire somebody remote because the job requires people to work closely together in the same room on a regular basis.
I know there's a ton of "digital nomads" out there, travelling through cheap countries like Thailand, working from nice beaches.
But my city (Munich, Germany) is also very lovely, especially in summer. I cannot find any "marketplace" where digital nomads hang out, waiting to be attracted by an amazing company like ours. The typical freelancer marketplaces like upwork don't seem to cover my search requirements.
Questions:
- Am I simply missing a marketplace?
- Or is this an opportunity to take?
Why would any real digital nomad that could spend every month at a different place around the world want to get stuck in Munich in subpar and overpriced housing with only 2-3 months a year of bearable weather and deal with German tax bureaucracy (need to have at least 2 clients in parallel or be forced to register themselves as a single person business with all the increased taxes and no corporate veil), not to mention that it would take years to find just one real German friend for normal social interactions?
That's factually false and incompatible with your previous statement.
> could spend every month at a different place around the world
Germany is also the only place I am aware of where two colleagues sharing the same desk at the same company for 20 years still address each other formally in Höflichkeitsform all the time (this is absolutely funny to people from Netherlands).
Now, when discussing friendships, the picture is even more bleak. I have loads of foreigner friends, but 0.5 german friend.
Does it really?
Don't be cheap. Hire a consulting firm that specializes in your area if you need on-site help. Or, if you want to be cheap, learn how to support remote work.
Every time "digital nomad" comes up, there's an argument about "well that law is stupid, it deserves to be broken"... by foreigners breaking a law in some country they aren't a resident.
I wonder how many would be happy to also see the US/EU/AU etc also flooded by foreigners who turn up, and work illegally for ridiculously more than the locals do, without paying local taxes?
You get 1/4-1/2 of ongoing local rate for the same quality.
You be the judge of risk/reward ratio of course.
I saw this strategy working in Japan. Several IT companies have coworking space that can be used for ¥100 to ¥1,000 per day.
You don't care about digital nomads in ROW, you care about digital nomads visiting your city, you need a way to find and connect with them.
People can make much more money by doing that in London, which has proper/more flexible laws.
I think you could hire a consultant. There are some great consultancies in Germany that might be able to have the professional you need.
Of course, people try their luck and contract using their non-German companies, but I've read on some forum that at least one guy was prosecuted (as in criminal charges, not to mention the taxes owed + fines) by Germans for that.
A thing some people I know do is to fly into Germany every week for 3 or 4 days, stay in a hotel/airbnb, and then come back to home country (BTW, talk about carbon footprint of the tax laws...). This way, you have no residence in Germany at all, and also you're there for less than 183 days per year, so they really have no claim to your taxes. Of course, this "bedouin" lifestyle is not for the weak, and the company needs to be open to it (the partially remote work aspect) as well.
I’m sure a lot of the concerns other people raised re working rights and legal complexities are valid but it’s not fair to assume that no nomad would be willing to take a break and hang around Munich for a few months.
It would be nice if remote companies provided co-working office space for their employees / contractors. And at that point, you may as well hire two in the same place.
Edit: before someone complains "s/he said incorporated". Yeah, but are you really going to fuck around getting 4 local Thai staff for every "nomad" you want to sponsor for a business visa and work permit, only for them to fuck off 3 months later?
It defeats the purpose. You may as well just hire local staff - you can pay them less than a foreigner and still be above local wages, no visas, no work permits (well except your own, which having local staff would help)
google (and and the tech key words you like)
site:de.linkedin.com/in "munich area" freelance
Does this technology have a name? And can you explain why it's not reachable over a network?
