[kiku007]

Originally Posted by hdus001

I have an OCI, so a working visa in India isn't a problem. (My employer requires valid working visas for any country that we work from, and the max time allowed overseas is up to 3-4 months as beyond that there are tax/legal issues)

The idea is to stay put at a place Mon-Fri (working 4 am-12 pm), and explore/move around to the next place in the weekends.

Interesting idea. Good luck with your endeavor.

I have a left-field question though.

4 months with 4 weekends/month gives you 32 weekend days. Granted in theory you have the weekdays for yourself after 12 noon.

Why not just take 4 weeks of leave and tour India without the burden of carrying on with your office work? 30 days all for yourself!

Don't get me wrong. You can make the working holiday plan happen. However, be mindful of the additional risks you are taking. A lost/stolen work laptop 10K Kms from home base is a huge pain to manage and remediate.

It's one thing to get your Supervisor/InfoSec/HR team to sign-off on,

• "I'm going to work from Mumbai, India in this address for 4 months. I have access to dedicated and uninterrupted electricity and connectivity." vs.,
• "I'm going to be traveling across India and will work from different places. This includes hotels, AirBnb, Co-working facilities etc., and I may not be able to give you the full list of locations and addresses straight away. I hope for uninterrupted access to electricity and connectivity.".

I reckon one of the key considerations of your plan is to first understand your Employer's, "Live and work anywhere" policy. What are the guardrails and how do you plan to comply when moving around?

[Axe77]

Originally Posted by kiku007

I have a left-field question though.

4 months with 4 weekends/month gives you 32 weekend days. Granted in theory you have the weekdays for yourself after 12 noon.

Why not just take 4 weeks of leave and tour India without the burden of carrying on with your office work? 30 days all for yourself!

They’re both very different experiences and very personal as to if someone wants to experience another country over 4 months spread out or experience it undistracted with work but for one month. Living and working remotely in a different place/s for 4 months also slows down (in a good way) the pace of absorbing the experience.

From a work standpoint too, every situation is different of course but I imagine it’s less disruptive for sometime to work remotely for 3 - 4 months compared to be absent entirely for an entire month. I wouldn’t let the fear of losing a laptop be overly relevant in such a discussion. As for remote work protocols, I imagine the OP would have thought this through with his employer.

[hdus001]

Originally Posted by GTO

Last I'd gone for an Alaskan cruise, I got fed up of eating western food 24x7. Befriended the staff which was majorly from India, and got my plate of simple Indian food every night (food they had cooked for themselves).

I can totally relate. We had a very similar experience on a Virgin cruise earlier this year. Wife got fed up of the usual food served in restaurants/food courts there. Just as you did, a few days in we had become friends with a few staff including restaurant managers who were Indian and eventually had special fare made for her most days.

Originally Posted by kiku007

4 months with 4 weekends/month gives you 32 weekend days. Granted in theory you have the weekdays for yourself after 12 noon.

Why not just take 4 weeks of leave and tour India without the burden of carrying on with your office work? 30 days all for yourself!

...

It's one thing to get your Supervisor/InfoSec/HR team to sign-off on,

• "I'm going to work from Mumbai, India in this address for 4 months. I have access to dedicated and uninterrupted electricity and connectivity." vs.,
• "I'm going to be traveling across India and will work from different places. This includes hotels, AirBnb, Co-working facilities etc., and I may not be able to give you the full list of locations and addresses straight away. I hope for uninterrupted access to electricity and connectivity.".

I reckon one of the key considerations of your plan is to first understand your Employer's, "Live and work anywhere" policy. What are the guardrails and how do you plan to comply when moving around?

I intend to plan most weeks to be 3-4 days, and utilize annual leaves to give myself some long weekends. Just didn't want to burn all the accrued leaves in one go. Besides, I wonder if I'd really like that long a holiday all by myself, with no responsibilities in between to keep me occupied. As someone else suggested maybe I should plan for a shorter term first and see how that goes.

I work as an engineering manager, and WFH is quite enshrined in our organisation, especially among the engineering team. A large part of our team is indeed overseas (Philipines, NZ) with mostly just leadership/management roles here so most of the work happens over Zoom/slack etc. Even within our Sydney office where I work, many people actually live well outside and can mostly only wfh. For eg, my manager lives in a beachside town about 4 hours away. This model works well for us so it's unlikely to change in the near future. The ways of working around wfh, asynchronous modes of communication, documentation, technical solutions to facilitate this etc that we've evolved over the years make this model work for us. (This is so only within the engg team. Other teams like marketing, finance, PMO, HR etc mostly work from the office, they are all much more social than us ) Funnily enough, on the odd day that I go into the office, I spend most of the time sitting by myself in a small conference room attending catchups/meetings on Zoom with people who are overseas or wfh

We've had engineers do short stints of wfh from overseas already. One reportee of mine worked from her hometown in India for a couple of weeks (I had followed through with her request to do this and had it approved by IT etc so am aware of some of the hurdles on the way), and another worked from Japan from his wife's parents house for a couple of weeks.

From an IT security pov, there are some rather strict policies imposed on those working overseas. This includes no storing of source code or documents or credential files/env vars locally (all of us use company-issued and administered MacBook Pros), so this only suits people who don't expect to do say heavy amounts of coding during that time, which I don't. However, this would be the first instance of someone applying for months at a time, that too travelling through various locations, I anticipate lots of questions from the IT team

[kiku007]

Originally Posted by hdus001

However, this would be the first instance of someone applying for months at a time, that too travelling through various locations, I anticipate lots of questions from the IT team

Thanks for the detailed reply. I appreciate it. The above part is exactly what I referred to. You might be breaking some new ground here. Good luck and hopefully you'll help to build the protocols around similar requests which might help others in the future.