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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

In the meantime companies like remote.com and similar have sprung up, providing "employer of record" services. Basically they let you outsource the act of having a company in a given country and employing people through it, much like how Stripe lets you outsource the whole merchant account thing for payments.

It seems that whenever there's red tape, there's a business opportunity in paving over it and providing a sane interface on top of it instead.

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I would like to second this recommendation. We’ve been using remote.com and hiring internationally suddenly became very possible and we can’t be any more happy.

Before this hiring internationally was a pure nightmare to the point that we simply didn’t accept international remote developers.

Thanks Remote!

And how has that shell set-up been for your international team members?

In my experience, it added just enough of a layer of obscuration to perpetuate a caste system, similar to how full time temps and vendors are currently treated in tech. US FTE employees had full HR support while Indian subcontractors had really poor HR/payroll/benefits resources from Remote. YMMV

As someone currently working on the employee side of a remote.com setup, it’s been great.

They have a much better understanding of my local laws, tax systems etc than the US-based HR and Payroll departments at companies I’ve worked for in the past.

Hi , how do you get hired via Remote ? All I can see is services to hire for employers.

Remote isn't a hiring platform, it's a service companies can use to manage HR compliance. You get hired by the company, and your employment goes through Remote for compliance with local laws.

You get hired by a company that uses Remote (or Deel).

Or Pilot.co

Blame the employer, not remote.com. The employer decides what benefits they will pay remote.com to give to employees

Maybe you can compensate with higher pay?

This is similar to what Smart does in Germany (and Belgium I think).

They're hiring freelancers as employees, and take care of all the invoicing and tax stuff for them. The freelancers can focus on their craft as if they were employees, with no loss in autonomy.

My intuition is that bribes would tend to scale with the square root of the size of the enterprise, so working with a large company would reduce your overhead versus talking to the government yourself.

That is the business model of TriNet, paving over the hassles of operating in different US states.

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