What companies that allow teleworking?

Lots of folk in IBM work from home although they tend to have proven themselves first. There are loads of folk from across the world working there, and its not unusual for people from places as far apart as China, Italy, etc. to take a trip home and work from home for a week or two. As long as they deliver on their work, there shouldn't be a problem.

neilk32 wrote: »

Yep, I am living in Ireland at the moment. I'm employed as a contractor, I set myself up as a limited company and got an accountant to manage my taxes. I work for an American company, the salaries are much higher in the states. It would be very hard for me to match the money I'm getting now with a job in Ireland.

Stack Overflow has a careers section with a remote option too and there is actually a few Irish companies on there that would let you work fully remote.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true

I've been working exclusively from home as a contractor since 2009 here in Cork with a minor sojourn in Canada.

Well paying remote working contracts are much harder to find than on-site. As a general rule, I'll accept a 15% pay drop over on-site to work remotely, and another 15% if it's open source. Hence one reaches what Canonical (http://www.canonical.com/) pays for senior engineers which is a hefty one third reduction over on-site, but if you move out to rural locations with Fibre broadband it's a definite disposable income gain (less than 500 rent per month makes a huge difference, AND you can offset a chunk of that + bills against pre-tax earnings). And you don't waste time commuting of course.

Once you're established and well known to those Irish recruiters who specialise in remote working contracts, you shouldn't usually be more than three months between remote contracts. That time is for vacation and training though, just because you're not earning should never mean you're not at work every day upskilling. By upskilling, I mean contributing code to well known open source projects and writing books, not faffing around on google for the day.

My current remote working contract was found for me by http://www.qptech.ie/ who are based in Limerick. They find people internationally for multinationals and take about 15% of your day rate.

Regarding interviews, everything was also done over Skype and WebEx. It was a shoo in for me though as my name was recognised by my interviewers (presenting at a few conferences per year is an excellent way of dispensing with interviews, last time I interviewed at Google three of the interviewers knew who I was already).

Whether remote working is for the OP though is another matter. Many people have substantially psychological difficulty adjusting, especially initially. Getting the limited company set up and learning how P30's and VAT works (and getting your wife employed in your company etc) is all a steep learning curve.

I really wouldn't advice moving to remote contracting unless you have at least 50k in the bank to cover the costs of transition. At least initially you'll be underemployed for significant periods, and having to work low paid contracts (e.g. guru.com) to establish your name. You should think of it as being as disruptive as a complete career change, as it sort of is, there are very different skills involved than just software engineering - you'll need to become a businessperson. That means you become a service which needs to be targeted, marketed, and successfully sold for every contract you gain. You'll need to keep your costs low, learn how to run a business trading internationally outside Ireland with all the VAT and EU rules involved, and all the risk - including any bad health - will be 100% on you not anyone else. In short, it's not for everyone, and I particularly wouldn't recommend it if you are either older or younger. Older folk are too at risk of unexpected poor health, younger people haven't the experience nor discipline.

Hope that helps.

Niall