[quad_eye_oh]

The advantage as I see it of being a digital nomad is that one gets paid US salaries and gets to enjoy foreign costs of living. For example, software engineers in Europe make less than half of what SV software engineers make, and salaries in Asia (outside of Shenzhen) are even worse. For example, Korean SEs start at 30,000 to 40,000 USD, and get raises at the same percentages as non-SEs. (This is why Korean companies tend to hire superstar Western expats into VP rather than engineer positions.) So on economics alone, digital nomads can have their cake and eat it too.

The nomadic half of the digital nomad comes as a result of national visa regulations: Outside of the EU, countries don't usually authorize long term visas unless you work full time for their domestic companies, so digital nomads enter on 90 day tourist visas and hide the fact that they are working for a company in their homeland. The whole practice is of course of questionable legality, and that is why they are nomadic: they can't stay for longer than 90 days.

Then as a result they don't get to go very native. Can't really learn the language and culture in 90 days while working full time.

[Jcampuzano2]

You may not be able to learn all of the culture, but if you're for example primarily living as a digital nomad in South America or other areas with a common language you for sure can pick up the language if you put in the effort.

I've lived my fair share of 90 day stints all over South America, and I did make the effort to learn Spanish. I started off 3-4 years ago with 0 Spanish and now I am non-native fluent. I can communicate clearly and don't have issues with speaking to natives and even have local friends in many of the places I have gone (I have revisited plenty of them more than once). I may not catch all the colloquialism of course, but I do try to learn them and the culture wherever I go (what is the local slang, preferred word choices, etc).

Unfortunately I do know a lot of Digital Nomads who unlike myself basically never learn the local language and stick to their bubble of other english speaking nomads. I think this is sort of a shame personally.

[quad_eye_oh]

Huh. I guess that is possible in the Americas, and maybe Africa, where multiple adjacent countries share a common tongue. I was thinking more about Asia where the national languages are more distict from each other as well as from English.