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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I run a fully remote team of devs.

If you need to travel into a major city, that can easily be 45 mins each way. 5 days a week, it pretty much adds up to an extra day each week.

Then there's the benefits to hiring. You now have a global pool of talent to tap, and you can offer for them to live wherever they want. Plus a lot of people appreciate being able to see the kids to/from school.

And just general flexibility is useful. Why shouldn't you run to the shops for a few minutes while things are quiet? Or pay bills, do your taxes, etc?

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> You now have a global pool of talent to tap

I wish more places adopted that. Lots of "remote" positions are actually "same city / state / timezone". Which makes sense in many cases and makes things easy for HR... But finding a global remote job is pretty hard if you're not in Europe/US.

I actually wish there was a better naming convention. WFH vs remote? Remote vs global? Majority of the time looking for remote job ads seems to be filtering out things like "remote (but you need to be within 20min of our Boston HQ)" and "remote (US only)"

> Lots of "remote" positions are actually "same city / state / timezone".

One thing to remember is that every state a company has employees in is another state that imposes regulations, taxes and other requirements. So, depending on the size of the company it may be far easier to have 10 remote employees in one state than 3 in 3 different states.

Not that that addresses your core issue (about "remote" not being truly remote), but just wanted to add some company side perspective.

The US really would benefit from adopting an EU "single market".

(This is partly trolling but partly entirely true - the EU is aware of the difficulties of interstate business and factors in reducing them, while the US has lots of market-fragmenting rules, especially in banking and healthcare)

I'm not so sure about that. Having local power to enforce employee protections is a huge thing. My state mandates things like paid jury duty and extra healthcare coverage, would I really want to wait until the federal government decides we need that? It may never happen!

I'm going to pile on this point.

Each state requires different health insurance plans, so the employer would need to supply 50 different health insurance plans.

It would roll back local minimum wage hikes.

Forming unions would require national coordination inside of local.

Many states have extra protections for the workers, like California protecting IP generated outside of office workers.

National politics are very unstable and the rules and regulations for everyone would be under threat of change after every election that changes the balance of the president, the house and the senate.

I’ve had some of these discussions recently. Between butt in seat all day every day and globally distributed/work from anywhere there is a lot of potential variation which may be preferable to either extreme. For example, regular calls start to get hard beyond 6 hour time offsets unless one person is willing to regularly take very early morning or evening calls.

Likewise there’s a big difference between living across the country and dropping into the office once a week or so with other team members.

I've seen variations of this. I think this is to get around the problem of lack of core hours.

If you are in the UK and you have somebody in your team from NZ, then there is never going to be any overlap in working hours, which might work, e.g. somebody likes to work late/early or might not (people like to stick to business hours)

edit:

The ones saying (US only) probably don't want the headache of dealing with people in a different tax jurisdiction

Anecdata: I'm in the UK and have worked with someone from NZ, it worked really well. He was a designer and tester so when we came in the morning, he'd tested everything and left new designs to be built up, then handed over to him overnight.

It's more of a problem if half the team is UK and the other half is NZ.

I think a project on my company was run along the same lines as you mentioned but reversed: Testers in UK, Devs in NZ

Worked well but occasionally Test manager would stay late for a call, I presume that it was early for NZ guys.

I completely understand why companies may prefer some country/location restriction. I just wish that we had better names for those categories, so we don't waste each other's time in mismatched recruitment. And so it's easier to say "I'm looking for unrestricted global-remote jobs".

I work in an office but have to deal with multiple time zones 5 hours ahead in UK and 3 hours behind in Cali. Basically, I work in the morning for UK and night for west coast and take a long afternoon lunch, nap and workout.

> If you need to travel into a major city, that can easily be 45 mins each way. 5 days a week, it pretty much adds up to an extra day each week.

Doing the math on my commute time and realizing how much time I was giving up was a big push to look in to remote work. Not only the time it wasted(~9 hours for me a week, +/- for traffic), but that time wasted was probably the worst 9 hours of my week and I felt like it just dragged down the quality of my life in general.

How do you recruit? Where do u advertize?

I think the real problem is cutting down the initial 1000 CVs no ?

HN is the best place to find devs, without exception.

> I think the real problem is cutting down the initial 1000 CVs no ?

Yeah that's a time sink. Most applicants are unqualified. Good ones tend to stand out immediately though. Whatever you're after, you can find someone with the exact requirements you asked for.

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