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Comment by methou | Hacker News Reader

> They can’t get a visa. They live in another city. The contract terms don’t work for them.

I have to share my stories. For a position I’m a really good fit for at a company I’m familiar with, I asked a guy to ask a guy, and they said they would only hire in the US because the team is in the US.

For another position, they reached out to me. They can’t hire in Japan but offered relocation.

In both cases, I’m super grateful that people are willing to help, but I could sense that times have changed since 2023. Globalization is no longer that strong; many, many jobs are restricted to certain locations, such as certain cities in the US or India. I don’t know about the EU, though.

This gives me some hope that if I’m willing to leave Japan, I can get a good job.

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> Globalization is no longer that strong; many, many jobs are restricted to certain locations

It's not entirely clearly what time periods you're referring to, but when I entered the software development industry (Europe), almost 0% were remote, and it was virtually unheard of. Skype was just beginning to become mainstream around this time, and slowly more remote positions appeared, which culminated with COVID, and then slowly disappeared over time.

But today there is still a lot more remote jobs than existed even a decade ago, and a huge amount of remote jobs available today compared to two decades ago. Globalization seems to be going up and down but nowhere near as isolated as it used to be. But again, I think the perspective changes greatly depending on your reference here.

I suppose instead of remote, you instead have globally distributed but in-office, these days.

Even for remote jobs being in a similar time zone is important to avoid slowing down communication.

Yes, but I see the same thing being in Latin America, similar time zone of the US.

Go check the “Who is hiring?” thread. About 90% of jobs at US companies that are remote, are “Remote (US)”.

This is much different from a few years ago.

I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that there are many more American software engineers looking for a job, so there is plenty to choose from within the US (which seems an easier hire in terms of bureaucracy and cultural similarity)

It's just feels but I've had the opposite impression:

It used to be almost no remote jobs at all. With Covid a lot of the jobs that were US only became "Remote (US only)". And over time a lot more timezone restricted ones appeared.

ed: Had Claude put together a small analysis of it: https://bewelge.github.io/whoIsHiring/

So the share of US-only remote jobs seems to have been steadily increasing as long as remote jobs have been increasing.

Thanks for putting the analysis here.

I would say that the analysis is still underestimating the US-only jobs. It is common to not say it in the HN post, but when you check that actual job post page, you see it is US-only.

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