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Comment by Dyac | Hacker News Reader

Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.

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Technology is not always the solution. If your employer asks you to affirm something, and you do that, and then cheat (because, let's say, cheating is technologically trivial), then you take a huge risk. A lot of people will not take that risk. It's enough to make example of 1 or 2 people who are caught, and the rest will fall in line in no time.

Is my opinion, the company is cheating the employee by paying them less for the same work just because they live somewhere else.

It has never worked differently. If you want to average out the pay you'll be paid much more closer to Bangladeshi pay than to SV one.

One side fully presented the terms at the start. The other lied. If you don't like the terms, don't accept them. It isn't like facebook is the only employer.

It’s more a legal thing. Companies have to follow the local labor laws and pay taxes to the appropriate states.

Not sure the courts will really care about your opinion when there was an employment contract in place?

You and the company still needs to know/decide which locale you get taxed in and which regulation to follow.

Even in California, SF has different payroll taxes and regulation than other cities in the area. Massachusetts requires employers to open a unemployment account in state. If the employee moves to a state the employer doesn’t have a employees previously, you need to register in the state and it might mean you have to now pay sales taxes on revenue in the state.

So unless you become an independent contractor and deal with this things yourself, the employer needs to know where you live most of the tax year.

More and more remote companies use PEOs. No need to incorporate in 50 states, you just pay someone else to.

I worked at a company that switched to a PEO, people seemed weirdly outraged.

We use it too, but doesn't change the fact the the employer needs to tell the PEO where the employee is located. PEO also have limits, like MA example, the company still needs to open the unemployment accounts directly with the state. Sales tax is another thing that you have to do directly.

My point was that main reason companies need to know where the employee is compliance, employment law, taxes and potentially IP protection. While the employer wouldn't care about the location because of pay scale, they still need to know for other reasons.

Until we can all live in some United Kingdom of the Internet, the unfortunate fact is that local laws apply to companies and employees when the employee resides in the jurisdiction.

Playing games with your employer probably isn't the best idea if you're looking for a long term relationship with them.

It's not just the company caring for their own purposes (although there's that as well), there are external requirements which depend on the employee location which force them to need to know. Such as which taxes and how much they are required to deduct and even which health plan choices are available.

Facebook probably has really good data on IP geolocation, probably much much better than anyone, both through data users willingly provide and data from attackers they are certain to be fending off constantly. They'll know you're on a VPS.

I wouldn’t be so confident as to think Facebook won’t catch me lying for years.

Don't you have to give them your legal address when you start working for them?

I believe Facebook could catch them if it wanted.

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