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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

The place I'm consulting for at the moment shut down offices for years due to the pandemic. Some people moved out of state and continued to work because there was no signal of ever returning to the office. Then last week they said everyone had to return to the office 3 days per week or be fired with no exceptions. We're losing an MVP on our team due to this. He now lives over 500 miles from the closest office.

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The way around this is to open an office just for them. It sounds dumb, but it meets the business requirement, and could also drive further recruitment around their location.

It seems like it'd be way more sensible and efficient to just make an exception for that particular employee (and maybe some other important ones). Though, in my opinion, the best option is to just let anyone work remotely as much as they want. Especially if you go years without ever indicating you intend to return people to the office.

I think I'm luckily grandfathered in due to working fully remotely for years before the pandemic, but if that happened to me I would absolutely start looking for a new job.

That can be more expensive than it appears at first, especially if it's in a different state due to taxes.

I've asked before if I can work remotely for a few weeks at a time and have been told yes, as long as I don't leave the state. In some places, just moving to a different county or city can trigger different tax requirements.

If you have competent accountants/payroll, this is no more complicated than anything else. There might be a learning curve to get things set up properly, but the rest is reasonably normal.

It can be quite complicated.

> State corporate or other business activity taxes can apply, if even a single employee is working in a state. In effect, if an employer did not previously have a recognized office in a state, but one employee starts working from there, this can trigger entirely new registration requirements and tax liabilities. It may be necessary to register with the secretary of state and relevant tax authorities, provide a registered agent address, and pay corporate and business activity taxes, sales taxes and employment taxes, including employee withholding. There are often state and local licenses and business permits as well.

https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2022/06/implications-of-w...

Sounds like business as usual for most accountants that do SMBs. Worse case scenario you do this 50 times. The same thing happens in the EU when an employee works in another country, only worse. Sounds like you’ve got it pretty easy compared to there.

I think you underestimate just how small most businesses are. In the US, something like 90% of businesses have fewer than 25 employees. Dealing with setting up in another state is a significant burden.

I don’t think you understand how this works. At some point, you will surpass the sales tax threshold[1] for most states. Then you’ll be reporting and filing taxes in that state anyway. Adding an employee in a state is not complicated by that point.

So sure, if you’re a company doing only local sales. Or a company doing less than 3-400k of revenue a year, this is probably complicated. Once you hit ~1m in revenue, there is probably AT LEAST one other state you are paying taxes to. Adding states should already be a defined process (or being defined) and an employee moving there is only a one or two lines different.

1: https://salestax247.com/sales-tax-thresholds-by-state

In the premise Consultant32452 provided, the employees had already moved and been working from different states, so presumably all of that would already have had to be done.

A lot of states made changes during the pandemic to allow remote workers. Those have all been ending over the past year and I assumed that’s what they were talking about.

What? I do not see how any state could not allow remote workers.

And all states have long required employers to register with the state government for tax purposes if they employ someone working in the state, as well as comply with the state’s labor laws.

I didn’t say that right. What I meant to say was that a lot of states allowed remote workers to live there without having to pay local taxes.

I don't think expense is the driving force here. It would be even less expensive to simply let the worker work remotely. The reason a company wouldn't do this is that it would send an unacceptable message about worker power. If some workers could get exceptions to a new unpopular rule, then why can't everyone? And if everyone could, why have the rule at all? This does not serve the interests of the company's power structure.

They tried this one of my client's office too, but the middle-management all stood firm that if they and their teams (I'm on one of the teams) would not be returning. And to fire even one person on any of the teams would mean certain death for the company since it only has a handful of developers and everyone has 7-14 years of in built knowledge. I am the most recent consultant hired, and I was hired in 2017.

They back peddled pretty quickly and switched it to anyone within 10 miles of the office has to come back. There is only 1 person that close. He's the "office mom" and he's been in basically every day since the pandemic started.

Even if half the teams hadn't moved further away, there is no way most of us would have gone back to commuting 2-4 hours per day.

That seems rather shortsighted to just assume offices won't reopen instead of actually negotiating a transition to fully remote.

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