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Comment by luch | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting data !

I for once would like to know why they refuse to hire contractors from Western Europe (is it a legal thing ?) :

  {"country":"*","contractor_factor":1.17,"entity":"GitLab BV"}],
    "countryNoHire": ["Iran","North Korea","Crimea","Syria","Sudan","Cuba","France","Italy","Brazil","Spain","Romania","United Arab Emirates","Sweden","Argentina","Philippines","Austria"],

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I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions.

But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack?

Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, etc?

Likewise, why would UAE be a problem, but not Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, etc?

Maybe they are too expensive. Austria has huge taxes for self-employed workers, especially if they are payed like engineers.

Romania definitely isn't too expensive :-)

Local employment laws.

They are totally not the same in EU, not to mention Latin America or Middle East.

Yes the Eu has directives about employment law which are implemented locally.

This is detailed in their handbook [1], [2]. TL; DR: For the EU countries it's mostly legal/tax reasons.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines [2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/

Must be related to employee rights, either something highly specific that is a dealbreaker to them (what would Austria have that Germany has not?) or it's a growing list based on precedence, likely full of permanently encoded biases depending on whoever was the initial candidate.

(edit: precedent, not precedence, if that wasn't obvious, sorry for the spam)

In Argentina, same pay for the same job is a constitutional right. If they hire someone here they would get a lawsuit asking for Silicon Valley payment.

It's mostly related to employment entity complexity vs. organizational demand for that location.

To operate legally as a business in most of those countries on that list adds complexity that leadership has deemed "not yet". Doesn't mean forever, just means, not yet. I've seen countries come and go off of the list.

Source: 3.5 years at GitLab.

Thanks. So it's a growing/shrinking list, because there surely are a lot of even smaller countries that would be added if something applied.

UAE has weird bans on many VOIP solutions, also VPNs are in a bit grey area - I guess that would make remote work too problematic with the tools they use internaly.

I ran into this while doing work for several companies in Oman, their state telecom provider is in a monopoly position for voice calls, and the VOIP ban is to push business to them.

They had some pretty ridiculous workarounds, like using teamviewer for its voice chat function.

Obviously legal.

When you sell physical stuff worldwide, nobody will be surprised if you won’t ship to some select countries because of local safety regulations, bad postal services or other local difficulties. When you hire people, these local difficulties increase tenfold, and I can totally understand why GitLab does not hire everywhere.

You may also notice that in most “first world” countries they hire through a proxy (listed in the same file), and it seems like in “no hire” countries they just couldn’t find a proxy yet.

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