
Ask HN: What Stops You from Switching Remote US Only to Remote Same Time Zone? - andreshb
If your company is Remote US Only, what would it take for your company to start employing people at the same skill level, with the same culture, language, same time zone, same experience, just not residents of the U.S.<p>Is it distance to fly into your HQ?<p>Guadalajara is closer to Bay Area than New York.
Medellin is just as far as Bay Area from New York.<p>Is it payroll and compliance?
Deel, Pilot, etc., are like Zenefits&#x2F;Trinet for Global Payroll.<p>Is it experience?
There are engineers residing outside of the U.S. in Canada and Latin America that work or have worked for Automattic, Auth0, Gitlab, AI Fund, NodeSource, Ooyala, WolframAlpha, Auth0, etc., They are all on linkedin.<p>I want to understand the variables that if changed would make it so your remote U.S. only company has employees that reside outside of the U.S.
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ajauntyshark
It usually means they have payroll and processes around taxes implemented in
the US only. They might be unwilling to take "contractors" who are actually
full time employees from other countries since in those scenarios they still
have tax obligations. For some countries in the EU, such as Germany, you're
unable to "contract" someone full time since the "employee" isn't actually
self-employed and it would enable them to deduct a bunch of tax items that
actual full time employees wouldn't be able to. In those countries, as a real
contractor you can't have all your income coming from one company. If you
apply this thought process to countries that are in the same TZ as the US, you
can see that HR would have to look into a lot of legalities in those
countries, keep up with the legalities, and calculate the risk of those laws
changing. I'm extensively using quotations because contractor/employee is
fuzzy in these scenarios.

This is coming from a Canadian that dislikes the "Remote US Only" clauses when
I see an awesome company hiring.

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tmaly
Seems like you could turn this HR issue into a company. I am sure there are
even ones that exist for the bigger countries outside the US.

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andreshb
Deel and Pilot are two of many doing this

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AnimalMuppet
For some, "US only" means they are working on government contracts, especially
defense. Nothing's going to overcome that one.

Others may be because, even if the flight time is shorter, international
travel is still messier than domestic travel.

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andreshb
Government contracts makes a lot of sense. International travel being messier
during a pandemic, especially flying into the US might be something people are
unwilling to do, but pre pandemic it’s just slightly longer line with CBP, not
really a material obstacle.

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smt88
I've hired and worked with many dozens of devs around the world. Some I worked
with for 10 days, others for years.

The only downside that I haven't found a solution for is communication. Even
with brilliant people who had been speaking English for decades, a lot gets
lost because of language.

It's hard enough to talk to other Americans about technical issues. It's
harder when the other person is losing small, important distinctions in each
sentence.

It's obviously not a dealbreaker. The benefits of hiring internationally
outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, no company I've ever helped build could have
succeeded hiring only Americans.

~~~
dakiol
Weird. Half Europe (IT industry) speaks broken English and everyone
understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple,
without fancy words and direct to the point.

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smt88
> _everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used
> is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point_

Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or
frictionless.

Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time
to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not
designed to express them.

Like I said, it's a problem between two native English speakers, too. It's
just _more_ of a problem when one of those people is missing chunks of
vocabulary or doesn't understand some of the small, impactful differences in
wording in English.

My business partner is Israeli and speaks excellent English, and we still run
into these problems sometimes.

~~~
blaser-waffle
"Nitty-gritty"

Damn near caused an outage because the offshore team didn't know that idiom,
and I didn't think about how they might not understand that. Told the not to
get into the nitty-gritty of the upgrade until we knew more about how the
customer was going to build -- but they didn't know what that meant and kept
trying to finalize router configs.

Even with fluency little stuff like this can kill. There is a reason NATO
makes everyone learn the same phonetic alphabet and radio transmission
patters.

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gshdg
Payroll and legal complexities is the big one.

I've also run into challenges around mismatches in cultural expectations of
how employer/employee or manager/report relationships should operate.

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blaser-waffle
We did at an old gig. Completely ditched the Indian offshore team for Mexico
City. Generally, was a good experience, or was at least better than
Tata/CTS/HCL.

The big changes were

\- timezone overlap; they were Central Time and working for East and West
costs weren't a struggle

\- vaguely similar holidays / no surprises because no one in the US knows when
Holy is

\- level of English was usually better with the Mexicans, though they often
had thicker accents; we could always find a Spanish speaker in the office if
there were any communication struggles

\- level of technical qualifications was usually better, in that Tata would be
obligated to find someone who can do [X], and experience has shown that
they'll find anyone, while the Mexican support teams usually had solid
technical chops.

We had some limited success with a team in Argentina too, but there were a lot
of tax and other logistical hoops. We had high hopes for the folks we reached
out to in Brazil but they were never really organized, and I gather getting
any sort of hardware into the BZ is expensive and complicated, plus they only
have like 2 real Telcos and connectivity was problematic (this was like ~8
years ago, so things my have changed).

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therm0
Why is it so bad for American companies to hire American workers?

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scarface74
Big Tech companies are only nominally “American”. They all have more revenue
outside of America than in America. We want other countries to buy our stuff
to so our pensions/401Ks can keep rising. So we shouldn’t be upset if they
also hire overseas.

Yes so realize that most people don’t get pensions. But if there is a public
pension shortfall, taxpayers are on the hook.

~~~
therm0
Only a couple companies listed by OP are Big Tech though. There are many
American companies that do not operate outside the country, but do outsource
work.

~~~
sg47
So you think there should be protectionism? Because the profits from
outsourcing are either going to executives or shareholders. Unless you fix
that problem, you are not going to get American jobs back. I actually agree
that outsourced jobs should be going to rural America rather than to India but
CEOs don't have any incentive to do so.

