Remote developers do not have to only work on contract, sometimes better roles are available on a long-term basis, or permanent employment which may be more practical as an arrangement or for career progression than contracting.
Here are a set of terms for permanent remote development I have sent to a prospective employer. Of course, any such deal must benefit both parties and an employer wants stability and to build a team. This sometimes works, although our sprint basis for contracting works better, for some developers this may not be appropriate.
The main thing with perm roles is that I would need to be able to maintain my IP in my own projects in my company without difficulty. I do not want to throw away years of work or be obliged to assign it to an employer – so contract roles obviously are better for me. I worked out to successfully replace my daily rate with a livable solution a perm role would have to fulfil certain criteria: £XXk annual, the right to maintain my existing web business development ideas (which are cloud hosted) and clients (a small handful – really not much work – mainly support these days – but only in my own time!)
A two-year employment contract with mutually flexible terms would seem appropriate – when I take on an assignment – I take it very seriously. The opportunity to progress to be able to do significant time in remote development on company projects is also important as my partner has a house in Italy.
The other thing is simply the tech stack has to be progressive for me and my technical path needs to be good for the employer. Laravel and VueJS/Angular and/or GOlang, and/or NodeJS are areas of interest.
It needs to be a proper Agile environment and/or CI. I am happy to introduce modern methodologies to the company or act as a Lead or Second Lead or Solo developer with some dev ops responsibility. Lastly, it needs to be a role that I love or a company that means something to me.
I hope this clarifies. I do believe there are good contract opportunities in the market right now. And you never know – if you specify what you want there may be an opportunity for it.