The Rise of the Digital Nomad

krou writes "The Washington Post has a look at the rise of the digital nomad, workers who have shunned the idea of working in an office, or working from home. Instead, they've taken the next logical step in the evolution of teleworking, and work wherever there is a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, using tools such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter, to gain both primitive ('If I'm working at home by myself, I am really hating life. I need people.') and practical ('There is no hope for the road system around here.') benefits from this nomadic lifestyle. The need for contact with other people has driven some nomads to start working with others in public places and at strangers' homes. Other benefits from nomadic working include changing the scenery, and starting the work day 'long after many of their colleagues out at the cubicle farm have spent hours preparing for and getting to their workstations.' Coffee shop owners love the trend, and so do some employers, one of whom (an AOL manager), says: 'It's a win-win' because the employee in question 'is happy doing what he loves and from a business perspective, we gain valuable industry knowledge, contacts, and insights.'"

Comments

Workation

[KraftDinner]

Seems more like it's just people who want to feel like they're on vacation all the time instead of at work. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it. I just think the label "Digital Nomad" is a bit of a stretch.

Re:Workation

[crackspackle]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it. I just think the label "Digital Nomad" is a bit of a stretch.

I'd have to disagree. I have a friend From Quebec working here in The States doing various contract jobs, almost all telecommuting. He took one last year that required mostly evening work. What did he do ? He went to France so he could make it a morning job, and have his nights to go out and explore Paris like few non-natives will ever get the chance to do. When the gig ended, he came home to his house in Texas. He's out again right now still at work but staying with family in Canada for the summer to avoid the heat. I would say his work style is nomadic, and obviously he relies on the Internet to carry it out.

That said, I work from home too but I stay in one place. I know from experience it takes a quiet place to accomplish real work and I find being single, my home is even better than the office. Going to public wifi spots is not something you tend to do because it is to disruptive and even on the road, it's fairly easy to find cheap accommodations that are both quiet and have Internet access. Aside from that, the nice part about working from "home" wherever you make it is that breaks can entail useful tasks like starting a load of laundry or walking the dog instead of exchanging idle gossip over bitter coffee.

Re:Ive seen these people

[lessthan]

Please, cutting new trend? More like "Leeches find new ways not to pay for things." I see those types of people around the local coffee shop. Most of the time they don't even buy anything. I know a lot of people are going to blame the coffee shop for not securing the network for paying customers only, but human decency is supposed to fill that gap.

Remember one thing about telecommuting

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The datalink/wire/pipe/tube that lets you work from Starbucks, extends all the way to Bangalore.

If all you need is a VPN connection to home office to be productive, suddenly Indians and Chinese and Israelis and Irishman can bid for and compete for the same job. You may feel you are on top of the game and this does not pose any immediate threat to your job. Even if the job is safe, the salaries will be lower because there are people willing to do the same job for less pay, less benefits. Eventually someone will learn to do your job, do it better than you and will be willing to accept lower pay than you.

Unlike the H1Bs, these workers do not pay taxes to USA nor do they spend the money in the local shops and take vacations within USA. It is prospect of getting cheap labor from these countries that prompt corporate America to promote telecommuting. Remember that.

Re:Remember one thing about telecommuting

[Darkness404]

It depends on what you do though. For a lot of projects that involve designing stuff, usually people want to meet in person, sketch out a layout of the site and then I can e-mail them with the final results. That isn't going to get outsourced anytime soon because a lot of people want a physical person there to add accountability.

Re:Remember one thing about telecommuting

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If all you need is a VPN connection to home office to be productive, suddenly Indians and Chinese and Israelis and Irishman can bid for and compete for the same job.

This is true, but how will they get the job in the first place? When telecommuting so long as your code gets checked in and works, many employers are happy. Many of those same employers, however, will balk at hiring a coder they haven sat down and talked to face to face.

In the long term, however, there will absolutely be more and more work done remotely and put up for bids around the world to the detriment of people living in places with a high cost of living. Of course the whole outsourcing versus internal growth thing swings back and forth over time. The former provides more agility and lower risks in some cases, but also reduces in house talent, generates new, trained competitors, and shrinks headcount and accompanying power of managers within the company. If the only thing you have going for you over the average worker in the third world is that you're physically closer, well that sucks, even if it will be enough of an advantage much of the time.

Re:Remember one thing about telecommuting

[DorkRawk]

This is certainly true. If 100% of what you do can be done remotely, then there is nothing stopping your employer from outsourcing your job to a cheaper worker in India. But if you can do 80-95% of what you do remotely, but ALSO be able to come into the office every once in a while for a full team face to face, or visit a client if need be (without the cost of a plane ticket to and from India), then this really is a good value. Even if you're not in the office, a good manager knows the difference between an employee who's 50 miles away and one who's 5000.

Re:flexible ad-hoc projects is the wave of the fut

[CorporateSuit]

That's fine for people who don't want or need something like a "steady income" and projects for companies who don't care about things like a contractor's reputation. This sort of thing is good for people with either:

A) Large personal portfolios but small enough egos that they can fit their heads into a room with enough strangers to collaborate on a project that may take weeks
OR
B) Kids looking to start a portfolio or gain work experience.

An interesting concept, to say the least. If done with due dilligence, it could lend a hand with those who do this sort of thing in their off-time but cannot be bothered to market themselves. I wouldn't go as far as to say it will replace the cubicle for 95% of the world's digital gears.

Do Coffee Shop Owners Love It?

[SlashdotOgre]

The summary claims, "Coffee shop owners love the trend," but I believe that's a bit of an overgeneralization. From my admittedly very limited conversations with small coffee shop owners around the SF Bay Area, the general consensus I've found is that the people who make the coffee shop their office (sorry, "digital nomads" sounds stupid) take up quite a bit of space for a long period of time and don't order much. At places where there's a ton of space, it's not much of an issue, but in areas where space is a luxury (e.g. SF, Berkeley, etc.), the owners definitely seem to be a bit resentful. To be fair, it guarantees them some small consistent income throughout the day, but if they lose just a couple customers who would have bought lunch if there was room for them to sit, then they're at a loss. Also pretty much everyone I talked to has a story of some jerk who'd come and use their Internet access all day and doesn't even have the courtesy to buy a drink.

Just Don't Try This...

[Logical Zebra]

...if your job involves working with sensitive information.

Re:Ive seen these people

[mcgrew]

I didn't say anything about "cool", it's about shunning traditional aspects of society and being on the cutting edge. I'd say that's most of us here.

Re:Ive seen these people

[Brian Gordon]

The only reason they buy a mac is because it's a fashion icon. That's why you see them sitting on the library steps with the mac on one knee, and walking around in designer clothes with the conspicuous and awful white earbuds. It's because they care about public opinion.

Work [...] using tools like Facebook!?

[Angstroem]

I can see how Skype may assist in working, but it completely fails me where Facebook or Twitter would come in handy as *tools* for *work* for the vast majority of jobs.

Re:Ive seen these people

[PitaBred]

The coffee shop can always ask them to leave. It's not against the law to kick people out who are impeding your business. If it were, we could all just go down to Wal-Mart and skateboard the aisles all day.

Re:Ive seen these people

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

learn to read, man. he said: "most of the time they don't even buy anything" which would mean that they are inside the shop and without a cup of coffee.

this kind of leech does cost something, as they are using up 2 finite resources: bandwidth and a table. i have seen it myself and it pisses me off when there are no tables left and i bought something.

Coffee shop owners love the trend

[Culture20]

These people don't generate as much business as you might think. And they drive away business in fast food restaurants by taking up a whole table for hours.

Re:Ive seen these people

[Bakkster]

Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure to be built (the ISP), so those who access it need to pay for their usage. There's no such thing as 'free and public' as long as it requires an infrastructure.

Sure, we could turn the internet into a public work, but we'd still be paying for it (that's what taxes are for). Are we sure we want the FCC in charge of running fiber?

Re:flexible ad-hoc projects is the wave of the fut

[timeOday]

Dynamically forming new teams all the time won't work because you have to personally get to know people to know what you can expect them to do. Keyword searching of resumes doesn't really meet that requirement. It's not just a matter of satisfying potentially irrational emotions in humans (such as loyalty and trust), but also the fact that each knowledge worker has different knowledge. Even a sports team, doing a relatively simple and well defined task e.g. playing basketball, has to play together for a while to perform well together.

Depends on the definition of WORK

[icebike]

>work wherever there is a Wi-Fi or 3G connection, using tools such as Facebook, Skype, and Twitter,

Seriously, how much real work happens on ANY of these platforms?

They provide more distractions than help.

Re:flexible ad-hoc projects is the wave of the fut

[Kashgarinn]

"B) Kids looking to start a portfolio or gain work experience."

- I'll take B.

I dislike how this "news" is packaged as a strategy, I'm guessing that some wanna-be up-and-comer marketing droid took a good look at what he noticed he and some of his unemployed-but-looking graduate friends were doing, and thought to spin it as a strategy rather than what it really is.. people who can't get more than temp-work and are stuck in coffee shops to a) get out of the house so they won't spend time sleeping or playing WoW, and b)prettying up the fact that they're stuck in a coffee shop with nothing to do but browse facebook.

I would rather have seen this die than actually become news on slashdot.. This is a clear case of marketing-speak, and I was kind of hoping that recent events in the last 9 years or so would help people to stop this kind of non-news.