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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

You can always apply for those remote jobs and ask for the same salary.

As someone who has always been on fully remote teams, I've found that ease of communication and time zones are a big deal.

If someone is harder to communicate with (English is a second language) or doesn't overlap with the rest of the team's work day and costs the same as a dev in the US, I may end up going with the dev in the US.

People who says pay should be about value provided are ignoring several things, including: 1) I have no idea how valuable someone is before I hire them, and 2) it's much easier to trust employees who are in the same legal jurisdiction as me (which has a value).

For example, I have two devs in South Asia who cost half of a US dev each, but they're also not very independent and they have very limited skills. They make a lot of money for their country and the price for the value is exactly right for me.

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This is my experience too. People, including myself initially, vastly underestimate the impact of a language barrier and time zone issues. I'm not in charge of how we hire where I work, but if I were, I'd happy trade 5 Asia-based devs for 2 U.S.-based devs. And the offshore folks I work with have solid skills, but the communication challenges and time zone differences really hamper productivity.

If you aren't able to estimate how much value somebody would bring to the team before hiring them, you maybe should oil your hiring process a bit. Also assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture

> If you aren't able to estimate how much value somebody would bring to the team before hiring them, you maybe should oil your hiring process a bit.

I can't interview someone for a few hours and predict how they will be as an employee. No one can.

Sometimes you hire people and are under-paying them, sometimes you're over-paying them.

> assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture

So are you saying that all countries have the same laws, and all those laws are equally enforced?

If one of my US employees embezzles money from a client using Stripe credentials, I can easily find and prosecute that person (as long as they're still in the US). Anyone US employee would know this and weigh it against their reasons for wanting to embezzle in the first place (if they have any).

If one of my employees in (let's say) Pakistan did the same thing, there is absolutely nothing I can do. I have no recourse. They would easily get away with it.

It is common and normal to trust people more when they're in the same jurisdiction as you and abide by the same laws.

You may underpay or overpay people, that can also happen with local people. I bet you don't leave much space for overpaying a foreigner if they are already getting 50% of what a local would get.

Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.

> I bet you don't leave much space for overpaying a foreigner if they are already getting 50% of what a local would get.

They are getting 50% of what a very senior dev would get.

They each make 4x the market rate for their country for this type of work (based on Upwork rates), which is 27x the average salary there.

> Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.

Thank you for the philosophy lesson. Do you have experience hiring people from many countries, or is this theoretical for you? It isn't theoretical for me.

What you are saying is exactly what I do. I trust all of my employees completely, but literally everyone who is betrayed made a mistake in trusting someone. I am not arrogant enough to say that my trust is 100% correct.

So how do I make it difficult for people to steal money? I rely on my country's law enforcement.

It is impossible to keep devs away from at least some sensitive data, like API keys. The "control" you're talking about is partly to hire people who have more incentive not to steal than to steal.

If that impersonal approach works for you and everybody is happy with it, that's fantastic.

I haven't hired myself but I have worked with people from all over the world with different backgrounds for many years and have had literally zero close cases of anybody misusing an API key on their benefit for whatever reason. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to do so.

And the control I talked about is security logging, monitoring, alerting systems, etc. I've worked for a banking company and also for a fintech one and all the money movement operations were duly logged and monitored. Literally nobody would risk doing anything malicious in an environment like that plus people are happy with their salaries

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