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Comment by twelve40 | Hacker News Reader

fwiw my personal take is if 100% remote actually worked for the mainstream companies, all of us would have been outsourced to Kenya or Pakistan at 1/10th the cost instead of taking leisurely dog walks between the zoom meetings in Austin, but this simple thought seems to not have crossed the advocates' minds.

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That would assume timezone, language, legal, cultural, governmental, and infrastructural differences don't exist between countries. Outsourcing outside your country of incorporation is a completely different challenge compared to remote work within your country of incorporation.

as someone who has personally hired and worked with for several years teams overseas (e.g. an individual in Spain or a team in Eastern Europe), I'm not really seeing that challenge. If our small startup managed to pull it off, then those logistical problems are not quite as bad as they may seem.

You direct hired or hired as contractors? Your HR platform handled global benefits and payroll with little to no added effort or expense? There were no additional legal regulations or compliance issues you had to consider?

I could see a nimble startup pivoting in a way that can make it work. I can also a see large businesses investing in overseas at scale. I don't see smaller or mid-size companies able to reap the same kind of benefits as easily, unless they were setup with it in mind from the start.

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