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Comment by dpau | Hacker News Reader

recent somewhat related article discussion:

Remote work means anyone can take your job https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337857

For small businesses and small startups it's still non-trivial to hire out of state, in terms of legal and tax overhead.

Ignorant here and sure this varies per state, but what are some of main the legal or tax challenges?

Some states have worker’s compensation monopolies so you have to buy it from the state.

All states require that you register as a company there and pay taxes.

There are PEOs like Justworks that act as the employer and file taxes for you. But you still have to register first and then assign the company to the PEO.

In short it varies a lot and that doesn’t take into account things like local laws on compensation.

I say this as a founder of a remote-first startup registered in 12 states.

What's the situation like if your employee opens a company and invoices you like a consultant ? I do this in Europe (admittedly I don't work for a single client exclusively) but it seems like the path with least friction for tech workers.

In that case it's very simple for the company paying but much more work for the employee since they are the ones responsible for taxes. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I've found many employees don't want to do it. They need to make sure they are either paying their estimated taxes quarterly or be saving a significant portion of their income.

That also doesn't address that it is significantly cheaper for group health insurance in the US vs. individual. As a company I can be paying $400/mo vs. the employee who would be paying $2K for similar coverage.

Interesting not what I'd expect with a PEO. Any sense on whether JustWorks requirement is because of law or because is best for JustWorks?

It’s because of laws. PEO handles some things but states being what they are have exceptions.

It’s unfortunate because this system encourages hiring remote offshore contractors.

Yeah, I was surprised when I found out this is how it works. When I first signed up with a PEO I assumed it was all taken care of. But then they handed me a big list of states I needed to register with and all the very antiquated processes each of them uses.

You need a healthcare plan or plans that covers employees based there (some HMOs are regionally focused for routine in-network care).

They can if your skills aren't unique.

Very few people are unique, so what's the point in mentioning that in a tiny sentence if you're not going further with it? Perhaps the insight comes... one reply later?

Very few people in any industry have a truly unique set of skills. And in jobs that can be easily remoted away like software, that quantity is even less.

There's not too many of us with truly unique skills. And even those can usually be covered by different combinations of employees.

Unique in this context doesn’t mean absolute uniqueness, it means your skills aren’t widely available.

The world needs experienced Go developers for an example. Being able to hire one remotely may increase the available pool of Go developers you can hire, but it doesn’t make them cheaper. That’s because hiring remotely also increases the number of employers chasing the same few Go devs.

Most employers aren’t quite sure what they’re paying for so it hardly matters if your skills are unique anyway.

Even those without "unique" skills can typically be taught and the company still comes out ahead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com