Problems With Working Remotely From India

Remote work is great for so many reasons. You get to work from wherever you want, you don’t have to commute to the office and get stuck in traffic. It is great if you want to travel the world and work at the same time. It is great if you have kids to take care of and parents to help at home. You don’t have to move to a different city. And many other such wonderful things. I enjoyed my time as a remote developer and still do.

But just like everything else, it too has problems. I will only talk about the problems of doing remote work from India, because that’s what I am most familiar with.

Proof of Employment

Most remote developers working for an offshore company are not officially employees of that company. Developers charge them monthly invoices. The company cannot provide developers monthly pay slips, form 16 or employee benefits. At my age, couldn’t care less about employee benefits (I should though), but I do care about pay slips. For most traditional institutions, pay slip is the proof that you have a steady source of income. Without that you fall into the category of self-employed. You can show your contract with the company and recurring transactions of income, but that won’t work. Pay slips are just too straightforward and easy for them, they just don’t want to deal with anything else. Try applying for a credit card without a payslip. You will either have to wait until you file multiple Income Tax Returns or maintain good balance for a reasonable time. And still your credit limit will be much lower than someone earning the same amount, but has a pay slip. For my visa applications, I had to highlight multiple transactions in my bank statements, provide certificates for my business entity, a copy of my really long consulting contract. Which government officer wants put efforts in going through all that? They would be happy to serve someone with a payslip and choose to avoid you who is confusing them with so much paperwork. A huge number of Indian professionals are first generation of office-goers in their family. They don’t have many proofs to show their financial stability. In that way, a pay slip, I think, would matter more than it does in other countries.

Visas

Remote developers would need to travel offshore to meet their colleagues. I have wasted a considerable amount of time preparing my visa applications. If I had someone to handle that for me, I would have been a much happier developer and put more of my time in doing software development. As far as I know, most MNCs in Bangalore, handle visa for their employees. I can’t expect a remote-first offshore company to do my visas for me, especially if it is small, which almost all of them are. They don’t know how to deal with this problem any better than you do. And honestly, doing this may be sub-optimal use of their time and it is better spent on something else productive.

Handling taxes myself

It is sub-optimal use of my time. My time is best spent on software development. By now I know a lot about taxing than what I did a year ago, more than some local CAs. Which is not a complement on me, but a remark on many CAs. Finding a good CA is tough. Finding the one you can trust is even tougher. I had to cross-verify things they were saying and often times, what they were saying would be wrong. Often instead of them giving me ideas on how to save taxes, I had to tell them and they nod yes. One of them had this grand idea of making me pay 35% tax (30% is max tax for the highest slab). I think I have finally found the right CA. But given the option, I would have chosen to learn none these and would have delegated this to someone else.

Loneliness

When you go to the office, you can make friends, talk to people and maintain your sanity. Sitting at home with no one to talk to, you get bored and insane. It could make sense for someone with the family, but that’s not the case here. A large chunk of Indian developers are in their 20s, avoiding marriage. Plus most of them are living in metros, far away from their hometown. So, your office circle is your primary social circle. They can try to go back to their hometown, but that place would not have good facilities and other developer peers. You could try going to some coworking space, but they are simply put useless. The problem with today’s offices is that they are so open, noisy, distracting and everyone just keep pulling each other into their solving their problems. I would be surprised if any real work gets done in a coworking space, because they are not optimized for productivity and collaboration. But why do you care, you want to go there to socialize anyway. Problem is that most of the coworking spaces are occupied by startup teams. They have their own circle and not need to socialize with other.

Unreliable Internet

Out of all the problems, this one can be most easily addressed. I had two wired internet connections (Spectra and Airtel). Sadly, there was metro construction outside my society. Most of India is developing rapidly. This is the story of almost everywhere. Construction is going on everywhere from metros to villages. Because of that they would break cable every few days. I have attended quite a few meetings on relatively slow wireless internet. Interestingly, my society was inside a tech park. They surely don’t have internet outages. Companies have separate connections that goes deeper and doesn’t get broken easily. Only if I could get that connection for my apartment!

No office

I know complaining about not having an office is so not remote-like. This is a problem nonetheless. Like it or not, but staying at home and working is not easy. I have weights and ropes in my room right next to my table, but I rarely use them. I end up doing more exercise when I wear my shoes and get out of my house at 6 in the morning. Most human habits are based on rituals. Going to office is a ritual that gives you a mental switch and ensures that you will work. Waking up early is the ritual. If you do it, you are much more likely to exercise. With a home office, it is difficult to balance work and life. Plus, most indian households are noisy, chaotic, sudden guests and in general not a great place to work. If you stay at home, someone will ring the doorbell, you will have to take your dog to pee, attend the electrician, give your brother’s friend his book back and many other small tasks just enough to stop you from long stretch of focussed work.

I think most of these are problems for the companies as well, since these things make their developers less productive. And fixing them will make more developers open to remote working. I am trying to solve some of these problems with remote91.in. Check it out and get in touch to solve them for your company.