u/LowEntertainer3732

a few months back i made what felt like a reasonable call at the time, ended our remote-first policy and asked the European team to come in 3 days a week.

the thinking was the usual stuff about collaboration and team cohesion. our senior engineers in Berlin and Lisbon were the first to push back politely, said they'd been hired remote-first and wouldn't move, and i kind of brushed it off thinking we'd find a way to work it out.

then they started leaving (not all at once), but enough of the senior tier in a short window that by the time i looked up we'd lost more than half.

most went to fully-remote competitors who'd been talking to them for quite some time apparently.

the cost we'd projected was the commute reimbursement vs the coworking-stipend savings, which penciled out fine on a spreadsheet. the cost i missed was the cost of replacing senior engineers in that labor market, taking months and pulling in new hires at notably higher salaries than what we had.

we've gone back to remote-first and rebuilt the hiring stack from scratch, Workmotion is what holds the cross-border employment side together now.

we're also still paying for the Berlin office through Q3, which currently averages about 1 person per day (often zero).

i still don't know if RTO would have worked at a bigger company with more bench depth but at our size it broke us.

our PRD process keeps breaking at the same step every time and it's the synthesis after the calls.

our PM/PO works off Gong, Slack threads, and the screenshots eng drops in standup, and when the PRD lands half the source quotes are gone. been trialling BuildBetter to draft the first PRD pass directly from the recordings and tickets, then the PO sequences on top, but want to see what the stack looks like for teams further along.

what's holding it together for you guys?

moved to portugal last year thinking the digital nomad visa had me covered but it doesn't, not if your employer wants to hire you as an employee here.

the digital nomad visa gives you residence while working remotely for a non-portuguese employer or as self-employed with foreign clients. that's it! it's a residence permit and definitely not employment solution.

so if your company wants you on a proper portuguese contract they need either their own entity here or an EOR to employ you legally.

the other thing that threw me for a loop was the NHR tax regime, everyone still talks about the 20% flat rate on employment income for 10 years, but that got modified in late 2023 and effectively closed to new applicants in 2024.

new arrivals are looking at regular portuguese rates which go up to 48%, the golden era marketing is still everywhere online but the reality changed fast.

actually getting employed properly means you need a NIF (tax number, relatively easy), a NISS (social security number, way more bureaucratic), a locally compliant employment contract, and proper registration with seguranca social for income tax and social contribution withholding.

portugal's labor authority has also started looking more carefully at tech workers on contractor setups, so if you're working full time for one company with a fixed schedule the misclassification risk is real and growing.

my employer finishied up going through an EOR for my contract here, and we evaluated 3 options seriously (Workmotion, Remote, and Deel) before landing on the european-headquartered one mostly because they own their own entity here in portugal rather than subcontracting to a local partner, which mattered a lot to our legal team.

I have a proper portuguese contract now, pay taxes and social security here, and get all the protections under portuguese labor law. costs more than a pure contractor arrangement obviously but it's legal and sustainable long term.

Portugal is still a great place to work remotely, just go in knowing what the visa covers and what it doesn't.

anyway, i posted this because I keep seeing the same confusion in expat groups and figured someone here might be going through it right now…

boa sorte com isso!