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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

This whole immigration thing sounds like an excellent opportunity for someone to put together a better way to work remotely. We're all supposed to be internet savvy, why can't we come up with something better than skype and github? Is something better even required? Why the emphasis on getting people into the country? We're selling virtual presence solutions to industry and telepresence to doctors and we're trying for surgeons. IT is the easiest job to do from a remote location. I work with people every other day that I've never even met in person and I have never visited the co-location of a large chunk of the server hardware that I've worked with over the last couple of years.

Why the accent on physical presence?

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Deficient management skills.

And worse, management that won't acknowledge it's deficient.

Managing a remote team is a skill, or more accurately a set of skills. No, you probably can't do it well right out of the gate. Yes, you'll probably have to work harder at it than you would having a team in one open plan office. Yes, it will take you time to learn.

But if you're really being held back by a lack of engineering talent, if that's genuinely keeping you from being more successful, you'd be much better off if you put the time and effort into learning it.

Tele-presence has a long way to go, and the network infrastructure too, but it will obviously, eventually, get to the point where it's indistinguishable from being in the same room, minus the physical contact. But to your point, it's not even a given that would help much.

Even with that, you still suffer mostly from time zones. You're just not going to collaborate the same ways with someone on the other side of the planet. That just means barriers to entry and more opportunity for those brave enough to try and ultimately get a system that works for them.

I think there's a remote-work bias which isn't fully born out from the evidence. It helps if you can somehow start with perfectly trustworthy peers, because I think a large part of hiring local is keeping tabs and keeping control. If you already know people who happen to be remote, versus trying to hire someone you've never met before remotely, the former can work perfectly fine, the later is [currently] nearly impossible.

There's probably legal and tax issues to deal with too, but I'm going to hand wave assume they do not negate the potential benefits and could just as easily work out in favor of the foreign independent contractor vs. local salaried employee.

The time zone issue can be solved easily.find a south american country that is immigration friendly and open an office their ,recruiting from all over the world.

Why not Canada?

A lot of companies do that already

However, it's not as simple as it seems, you think "let's send everybody to Canada and then grow our offices there with all the foreigners we want" but that doesn't happen and you wonder why.

Maybe they don't want to outgrow their main offices, or maybe it's got to do with Canadian work culture

I've seen people being "parked" in Ireland before applying for their H1B

It seems to be quite common with movie visual effects companies. And the Toronto or Vancouver offices are often bigger than the LA staffs.

Of course, that industry is being priced down to survival levels.

That's partly related to the non CGI parts of movies often being shot in Canada because of cost advantages. In Toronto you couldn't walk two blocks without tripping over a film crew.

Snow.

I believe we have plenty of tools that do a great job of facilitating communication, project management and work activities for remote workers. What is missing is the willingness from companies to accept these workers, not the tools.

Physical presence means the host nation also collects the tax revenue. It also means that those workers consume products in that nation. An immigrant will go to movies, buy food, go shopping, and pay taxes in the nation he immigrated to instead of the one he came from.

A big part of it is timezones and language barriers. Unfortunately in tech, the big hiring pools of engineers are:

1. USA

2. Eastern Europe

3. India

4. China

5. Western Europe (Much smaller than the above)

And in this situation, usually the main office is in the USA, and sometimes the main office is in Europe. And then you have to synchronize with teams across very separate timezones. 5 minutes becomes 1 day and it become very frustrating.

Then on top of that, you have to deal with the culture and language differences that can make communications very difficult. You quickly start noticing people will organize into native-language social cliques very quickly and that can be a hard problem to manage. You can get to the point that you say you will fire them if they don't start communicating with other people in the company other than people in their native language.

Eventually with these remote workers, because of all of this separation, you'll want to eventually bring them into the main office. Then you have entire other suite of problems to deal with, since immigration authorities usually require you to go through a visa song and dance bring these guys temporarily into the main office that is pretty close to just importing them permanently into the main office anyway.

So to deal with this entire problem, they say screw it and try to import them into one time zone / black hole called the main office. Immigrating into one country starts creating a melting pot effect where their language skills improve, they integrate with the local culture and language of the main office better and you don't have timezone differences to deal with.

So you say, why not say remote workers but they have to be in the USA only? And there are many that do say that! Unfortunately, latin america just doesn't make a lot of software engineers, and you get laws like 'hire 10 mexicans for every foreign worker in your company' that prevent you from establishing an office in the same timezone at a place with freeform immigration policies, because it probably doesn't exist.

"Why the accent on physical presence?"

Big money over there will prevent big money in the US from hiring smart people over there because big money over there would rather sell those smart people (or their product) at a 400% markup. For example, this quote in an article about Google moving engineers out of Russia: "The changes in the political situation make it less viable, less feasible to maintain engineers here" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/12/google-closes-e.... It's simply about money and has nothing to do about fulfilling immigrant's dreams or "being in the epicenter of tech" or any of that. Tech workers are money generators and people are simply trying to capture that money.

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