I know of many developers who finally escaped and I mean really escaped, the kid in Siliuri billing a US SaaS company in dollars without asking any manager for a relieving letter, and I have this sinking feeling the escape window just closed behind them.

I have never dealt with FEMA paperwork in my life which is why this new October 1 rule hit me like a bank circular written in another language, and I read it the way I read legal things, slowly and with rising irritation because I know who ends up paying for every new line in it.

Back in March 2020 I wrote about the economics of a remote developer and the numbers then felt like a ladder out, since the newbie hustle on Upwork and Fiverr started at $5 and crawled upto a few thousand dollars a project at something like $20-$40/hour if you bid your nights away, and the mid-career switch through Toptal and X-team paid $30-$100/hour for 120-160 hours a month, and the top-dog distributed jobs paid $30K-$300K/year as a contractor who was really part of the tribe. In plain English; you could route around the local job market entirely and get paid what the work was worth.

And you had to route around it because the local economy has been really poor at generating real jobs for years, and most jobs that do exist pay so poorly and come with such pathetic work culture with screenshots every ten minutes and nine-hour logins and managers counting keystrokes, which is the same sickness I saw back in 2014 in attendance.gov.in where the dashboard did async false inside a timer and hung your browser every 8 seconds. Thats making sure your browser hangs and you stay watched at least once every 8 seconds.

So here goes; from October 1 every little services invoice with a date on or after that day is now export paperwork in the eyes of Delhi, even your $200 Fiverr fix and your $800 monthly retainer from one client in Austin who pays over Wise, and every one of those has to exist somewhere on an RBI portal before your dollars count as legally received, with a bank in the middle stamping and matching and issuing some electronic certificate which you need for everything later. Its so sad to see the same babu instinct at work where the solution to dollars coming in is to add friction until fewer dollars come in.

Honestly, think about who this crushes first because it is never the big IT services guy with a compliance team and a CA on retainer, it is the solo kid doing logos and WordPress fixes and the girl doing UI on Upwork between college classes and the mid-career dev holding two small retainers to avoid one horrible full-time boss. They now have homework every single month for every single invoice, portal plus branch plus error plus resubmit, and banks which never answered a support ticket in under three days are suddenly the gatekeepers of whether your October money is legit. Most times these folks were already working 3-4x the billed hours because bidding and client-chasing eats the day, and now Delhi wants a cut of the remaining hours too for paperwork which produces exactly nothing for the client.

And thats because documentation in this government never stays just documentation, since there is no point photographing every ant walking in unless you plan to tax the anthill later. I unfortunately have not been blessed with a good gut but I have seen this movie with goods exports where first they map everything invoice by invoice and client by client and then comes the argument about which slab it falls under and who owes what on money that used to just land in your account and pay rent. The freelancer who bypassed Infosys and TCS to work directly for the world is now visible month by month in one database, and visibility in this system has a habit of turning into a notice.

What-if the whole point was to push the small guy back into the local pen, because the local pen with its low pay and attendance trackers and horrible bosses suddenly looks safer than dollars with paperwork and penalties hanging over them. Technology always works for good and the leader always claims to be right, so watch who calls this formalisation and who pays for the formalising.

Work is worship, but worship now needs a queue token 🙄.

Yell at me on Twitter if your October invoice is still waiting for a form number, I am @troysk704.