Why remote roles are region specific and not 100% remote? | Hacker News Reader

Why remote roles are region specific and not 100% remote?

5 pointsmoizrocky19 comments

I always wondered, because I'm based out of India and trying to secure a good remote role, why most companies offering remote positions are region‑specific—like remote roles only in the US or the UK. Why don’t they open the doors to the entire world when they’re looking for someone to work for them remotely?

Another pro of it is people from different parts of the world will require less pay comparatively. Time difference? That's a reall issue — but anything besides South East Asia or Ocenia countries could pretty much overlap.

I mean, I'm based out of IST, I can overlap EST all 8 hours and PST close to 5 hours.

If the blocker is some regulations, why not hire on contractual basis then?

Just some things I wanted to always learn.

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This is usually due to taxation and legal reasons. In the US for example, even a US based company out of, say, New York has to have paperwork set up with each state they want to hire in. So if this hypothetical company wanted to hire their first employee in, say, Texas, they’d have to do some kind of legal stuff with the state authorities in Texas to legally hire someone remotely there. Once that’s done they can hire more without much if any additional paperwork with the state, but that initial setup has to be done so they could pay employment taxes to the state. This goes for every state the company hires an employee in, based on where the employee does their work from. So if they later hired their first employee out of say California, more paperwork specifically for California.

Going internationally, particularly in today’s geopolitical climate, gets even more complicated.

It generally boils down to law, taxes, government issues when you get down to it.

We have some workers in other countries, and we have local companies for each of them due to all the legal stuff.

We also want to meet them fairly regularly, about once a month. There's just something about actual face to face that screens can't replace, both in terms of work but especially socially.

As such our remote workers are in our neighboring countries, so travel is not a huge ordeal and laws and regulations are similar.

I'm pasting my earlier reply to somebody else below. Would appreciate your thoughts:

The remote roles I have are all contractual. I mean, most companies want to save money — especially capitalism's capital — USA. What's stopping startups and other mid-scale companies from hiring employees on a contract that is listed as a "contract role" and not "full-time"?

Regarding the time zone differences, I overlap pretty much with 8 hours EST. Also, most roles require you only to either overlap 4 or 6 hours, at least that was my experience. The point I'm getting to is, I could even overlap with PST hours healthily unless I was based in somewhere like Japan, Korea, or anywhere in Southeast Asia or Australia.

I guess I should have mentioned we're in EU and not US, and we're small (~100) so we don't really do contracts but full-time employees.

I guess for short-term contract work, fully remote might not be a big deal, but we do notice with our remote workers just how much is lost by them not being in the office all the time with the rest of us. Of course again that's probably amplified by us being so small so we're all on the same floor, so might be different for a huge company.

But now, with all the layoffs, companies that are hiring likely have a much larger local pool of talent to pick from, so if they have even a slight preference for local workers then they can get what they need there.

I know at least for us we had a much easier time after the big layoffs, and managed to hire several very talented developers for positions that we had had open for years before that.

I am based in the US and work with a lot of people in India. I find the time zones to be a huge problem. All our meetings have to be crammed in the morning to accommodate the team members in India. It makes it very difficult to schedule anything, because everyone is so booked up in the morning, and the afternoons are missing half the team.

To match my shift, someone in India would be working from 6:30pm - 2:30am. They could technically make the sacrifice and do it, but most don’t want to. Also, if we have to work late, going a few hours beyond 2:30am is much harder than going a few hours beyond 5pm.

But as others have said, this isn’t the main reason. It’s all about taxes.

The remote roles I have are all contractual. I mean, most companies want to save money — especially capitalism's capital — USA.

What's stopping startups and other mid-scale companies from hiring employees on a contract that is listed as a "contract role" and not "full-time"?

Time Zones factor into that. They want to be able to operate 24/7 "follow the sun"-style, so they want to get people half way around the globe - who obviously can't come to the office.

Few companies these days actually offer full remote work in their own time zone - the allure of being able to "control" your employees by making them come into the office is just too strong and "productivity" is not something that can be easily measured, let alone discerned (not by the people who make the decisions, anyway).

Taxes, labor laws, and liability management.

In the case of India the time zone difference is killer.

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