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Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, unfortunate for us that you're stuck in Sweden, but I hope you're able to find a good next project!

Curious why you can't hire world-wide for remote workers.

A couple of things: one is that there is additional legal/compliance stuff to deal with for each additional country (EU might count as one, when it comes to that), but the bigger reason is that we wanted more overlap in working times. It's also less expensive when we do get together in person at headquarters in California (which has typically been 3-4 times a year).

As far as overlap goes, I strongly prefer working nights anyway. And you could get around a lot of legalities by hiring as a consultant and billing per hour, a friend of mine runs a company that I've occasionally worked through.

I honestly don't know why I even bothered to answer, but something about your post felt right and my intuition has served me well so far.

I'm afraid I don't have much backend stuff to show, as most of it is owned by respective customers. Privately I've mostly been designing my own scripting language embedded in Go [0] lately.

[0] https://github.com/codr7/gfoo

Neat language. Looks like a fun project, and I totally get that your previous work is generally owned by the folks you did the work for and therefore non-public.

I can ask when I next meet with my manager, but I can say from my nearly 5 years at Khan that engineering has not desired to spread out beyond the timezones we're in. I did work for Mozilla for 4 years, so I do know that it can be done and what the tradeoffs are like. This is just not a step we've wanted to take at Khan.

I did speak to my manager about hiring from Europe. She said that in order for us to ensure legal compliance, we work through a particular company. Doing so covers our legal bases, but also means it's very expensive for us to hire elsewhere.

Hiring remote workers at scale is super complex if you want to comply with local laws (and you must). Hiring contractors is easy but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee you will be in trouble one day or the other. You have to set up a legal entity in that country/state, provide workers' comp, health benefits, unemployment, comply with various laws on leave, vacation, medical, etc... This is quickly a nightmare and it is why true good remote companies hire only in handful of states/countries.

> but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee

What would be the reasons for that?

Many countries have laws that allow them to reclassify consultants who look like employees (ie the client dictates how to do the work, work conditions, hours of work, etc) as de-facto employees. This is why Professional Employment Organizations (PEO) have increased in popularity. They employ the 'consultant' and thus handle all local labor law, but send the consultant to the client. Typically a consultant will negotiate the hours and bill rate and the PEO will add some extra for the overhead costs.

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