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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Well, other than the minor hassle that they need to know how to issue a W2 and get enrolled for workers comp insurance and pay their estimated taxes for them. None are super hard, but they are barriers for people who aren't used to hiring people, which is the case for I think a lot of self-employed people.

I only finally bothered to learn how to do it all last year when I needed some extra help with projects for my consulting company. Prior to that I just paid a contract CFO to deal with it because it's what you don't know you don't know that gets you sued. So either it's expensive to hire a CFO just for that, or expensive in your time to learn it all when your main goal is to actually get work done that produces revenue.

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ADP does this all for you for the low price of about $20/month/employee. It's even cheaper once you have more employees.

There are dozens of other major competing payroll services providers.

Why do people on HN expect others to learn PC or Internet security but themselves throw in the towel trying to learn relatively simple tasks?

I'm not complaining, it's just a barrier. I support regulation of things like this and am aware of ADP and Gusto. I am also glad that Uber and Lyft drivers will be compensated as employees if they are treated like employees.

But it's a mental leap to move from "just need to find enough clients to pay my bills" to "need to make sure the paperwork is right so I can pay someone to help me out".

I don't personally find it intimidating, but I've also done it before.

These (incredibly small) requirements you list for having a small number of part time employees have been legal obligations for more than 50 years.

So yes, you have to fill out 5 forms, and write 4 checks, every year for withheld taxes.

But none of this qualifies for “it’s sad, it’s getting hard to be a small business”. They’re just things everyone in the US has been legally obligated to do for part time employees for an exceedingly long time.

So I don’t get the tone of this thread.

People with business degrees get a ton of crap in tech circles (god knows I've sent my share of snark their way over the years ;) ) ... but at the end of the day, there is value to someone learning those things, and people have been successfully thriving for decades as you mention under the exact same obligations. I think tech generally seeks to reduce friction as much as possible, even to its detriment ... like someone removing some log from a worksite while cleaning up, only to realize it was holding up something else. The original intent of the thing is lost over time

I could be wrong, but I don't think my friends who got business degrees were learning how to fill out W-4s. They were learning things like "strategy" and "organisational behaviour" and apparently doing presentations every other week.

This, 100% this. It makes the move from a single person company to a 2 person company terrifyingly complex, particularly for those of us without a background in business.

It’s a literal chilling action on small business.

Terrifyingly complex?

We're talking about a Google search and a few forms...

...and completing all of those forms flawlessly, as a layperson, lest you open yourself to any number of lawsuits. Just the thought of it makes me nervous. It's why large companies have dedicated staff to dealing with such issues.

This is the weirdest thread I've seen on HN, just pay a little money to Gusto or similar to do this. You are talking about barely any cost to have someone else do it who does it all the time.

If you don't have the money to pay $50 bucks then do it yourself and just worry less. The chance you mess up is so low it isn't even a thing.

It's funny because all of these comments are ignoring the thousands of small businesses run by average people that have already solved this problem for over 30 years

All of the (objectively) stupid people I know who successfully own and run businesses with employees, and the people on this site clutching their pearls at the thought of having to fill out ~5 forms.

If you're unable to grow your business because you are scared about a step required to grow your business you aren't going to grow your business. Nobody owes you this. Risk aversion isn't anyone else's fault.

Most of them never solved it they just did "good enough" and haven't had any issues. Most people are open to solving things without involving the government or just drop the issue and walk away. Everything will be fine for until they get someone who's not ok with it then they get raked over the coals for what they thought was "good enough".

My partner entered into head of operations at a small company and had to learn all of this stuff on the fly [in Canada].

She's managed just fine as well. I've managed a department previously and had to deal with worker's comp matters and same thing. It's not very difficult to learn. It's a bit of overhead, sure. It's just part of the job of overseeing others.

> company terrifyingly complex,

And yet, somehow hundreds of thousands of small businesses, most of them in non technical fields whose owners I would surmise don't have nearly the average educational and/or technical skills that HN readership does, somehow managed to navigate it.

This isn't terrifyingly complex. You can work it out yourself, or pay a reasonable fee to someone to set you up. It's a business expense that any actually viable small business should be able to easily justify.

> literal chilling action on small business.

Well, I’m super libertarian and generally opposed to any and all government regulation, but… if labor laws are stifling small businesses, why have labor laws in the first place? The reason for this law is explicitly, specifically, stop businesses (small and large alike) from doing business this way; it’s not an unintended consequence, it’s entirely the point.

Gusto will handle it all. Though I’m not a fan and we’re looking to switch. The never gave us our referral credits and while it’s NBD, it definitely left a bad taste.

been looking into gusto myself. what are the alternatives in this space?

Well, yeah, because if we don't have these rules, part time employers won't pay taxes, their employees will have to pay tax penalties if they try, and they won't get insurance for workplace injuries. And these are bad things, so we make rules about them.

Now, maybe you'll argue that these are all steps that the government should be doing instead of the employer. And I agree, but they're done this way because there's a whole political aisle in this country dedicated to the proposition that the government shouldn't ever do anything. So someone has to do it, and in our scheme it's the employer.

> So either it's expensive to hire a CFO just for that, or expensive in your time to learn it all when your main goal is to actually get work done that produces revenue.

This attitute is exactly why those laws are needed. As a business owner if you want to hire some other human being to work for your company then it should be your natural instinct that wants you to learn everything that makes the life of that other human being easy to work for you, but because you have no intrinsic interest in actually educating yourself what someone might need if they work for you, that is why you have to be forced into learning that by law.

It's sad that all you care about is someone getting your work done, because it's still a human being and that legislation is there for a reason.

And that attitude is the reason we have so much overhead and useless garbage being produced instead of valuable labor. Just because I don't want to learn the intricacies of labor and tax law doesn't mean I won't pay my employees well and do right by them.

Just because you say you will pay your employees and do right by them, doesn't mean someone else will do the same ... for every one of you, there's someone who will happily exploit someone else, and whether it can be attributed to malice, or ignorance is irrelevant.

And now the people who were hired previously aren't going to have a job.

I hope that's what you wanted.

> As a business owner if you want to hire some other human being to work for your company then it should be your natural instinct that wants you to learn everything that makes the life of that other human being easy to work for you

Everything? That'd be thousands of pages of regulations to sift through and understand. So, no, there's no "natural instinct" to do that.

Kind of going overboard on the rest of it. They just want to hire some part time help, not staff a coal mine.

Wow! He just spoke of how what he actually misses is the relationships and th mentoring. He clearly is thinkin of the potential employees as people first. Your attacks seem emotionally motivated. Not all jobs are slave and master relationships. I cant imagine anyone is motivated to learn and keep up to date on the current labor laws regardless of their level of compassion for those they employ. At the small end of the business spectrum hiring events are much more often "my sister knows a guy who could do this for you and he needs a job right now, wouldn't you like to work 50hrs a week instead of 70?"

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