Ask HN: Remote Full time non US/EU? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Remote Full time non US/EU?

10 pointsaskandtoss6 comments

I've noticed that finding remote work has changed. The world used to be much more aligned with remote work that wasn't geographically collocated By that I mean the extreme majority of roles appear to be:

1. Remote - but in the US

2. Remote - but in the EU

3. Remote - but in <x country>

I say this having been working fully remotely (coding, building teams, even as an executive) since 2010. Am I missing something, or do I just now know the sources involved.

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To give an example from an employer side, we do remote but we restrict roughly to the EU countries and the east-coast of the US (we do exceptions but only in really exceptional cases). We are incorporated in the US and use Deel for the other countries. There are two reasons we restrict like this: one is that we know that working across timezones gets difficult if there is almost no time overlap between business hours. And the second is that, even if Deel makes it easy to hire in a lot of countries, that's not everything. They don't cover, for example, stock options, and you need to respect the laws in that country that you have no idea of, meaning in practice that you'll spend quite a bit on lawyers to evaluate risks. For a single employee, it's usually not worth it.

The only issue is that 4 years ago, companies advertising as remote were remote because they thought it the better way to work and find talent globally from the start (think GitLab, Canonical, Hotjar...).

With a particular event of interest in 2020, a bunch of companies switched to remote out of necessity, and many have not moved back still. They generally employ from their base countries, they just don't require you to go to the office.

So, if you searched for "remote" job options 4 years ago, it meant one thing. While most of the same companies which were remote back then are still remote today, their job ads get lost in the 100x of "new remote" job ads.

Complying with local regulations is hard enough in the USA, with many details differing per state. Complying with regulations in other countries/provinces is asking for trouble unless you have substantial legal help.

I've been seeing a major influx of new companies entering into remote who are transitioning from the on-site model.

This may skew the results towards co-geographical preference for a while.

I figure though they'll eventually relax and things will go back to normal.

The reason for these are many but one is it allows the company the option of having the employee relocate to office if there are further promotions, and the employee elects to of course. Without trouble of Visas, and work rights.

It also allows for easy aligning of time zone, work culture and language. Staff also expect to work with similar pay/costs for fairness, so if you have a country excessively cheap with living costs it makes compensation difficult and unequal amongst other staff

I always imagined tax and employment legislation would be a burden.

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