We've already been offshoring to Asia and Eastern Europe for decades now, and even though we should have a good handle on what does and doesn't work by now, I still see companies making the same mistakes, and either having to pull back, or just fail and be too blinded by hubris to figure out why.
They are not problem if you do hiring directly and select right people.
Biggest problem is that companies want to hire bunch of worm bodies and dump trash tasks on them.
Managers expect that they will be able to throw vague requirements and bunch of people who are not part of their company will figure out what to do. What is especially funny that bad things happen even with people inside companies when manager tries to just throw vague requirements at dev team.
It is also problem with big "software houses" where you hire bunch of people - nowadays people have good internet at homes are much more conscious and one can hire specialists directly from other country and skip BS providers.
Hiring directly in other countries is difficult for all but the biggest companies (who probably already have offices in those countries and have been hiring in those countries for years).
I work in Poland for company from the Netherlands and I know other people who have "single person company" that are working for companies in UK and US. I even did some work for company based in UAE.
You just have to spend time looking where to find such people. Then of course you have to do trial period to see if they won't flake out but that would be the same as if you would hire someone from US.
Regardless of any actual enforcement, most US companies don’t want to deal with the potential issues of getting tangled up in foreign labor disputes, or getting tangled up in foreign courts over IP disputes.
as someone in PST/PDT with a sleep disorder, its pretty easy to work with east coast people. i've had a boss in the UK before and it worked because he was okay with ending his day with a 6pm meeting his time. but working with people on india time is going to be a mess one way or the other.
This is patently untrue. See how well Shopify is doing in Canada.
> Canada is going to be an immigration station for people companies want to bring in but can't get US visas for. Its already a thing.
This is true though!
I'm skeptical given there's this entire content called "Europe" with tons of English speakers, even native speakers, living largely in a 9-5 culture with plenty of skilled, educated developers willing to work unconventional hours and the US has barely tapped into that workforce yet. Given there are many legal issues and gates, but it's not like the US and Canada are the only places with skilled developers.
Now it is the time to build real distributed teams where it is easier to hire a person from other part of the globe to be part of your team.
Working directly with them and not hiring bunch of warm bodies to dump trash tasks on them.
That's also the dirty little secret of digital nomad workers, that those of us that worked remote long before the pandemic already understood: these workers don't follow the law. How many of these people are correctly paying and filing their taxes for each country (or US state!) they work in? Probably close to zero.
Another place I worked had a policy you could best describe as "don't ask, don't tell." They didn't want to know if you were working from the beach in Thailand. As far as they were concerned, you were still in the US state that your forms say you are in.
The legal framework as well as benefits plans have a lot of catching up to do before some new distributed dawn occurs.