I wonder if wfh creates any loopholes here, and they just select areas where there are no real candidate pools.
1. You choose newspapers that are least likely to actually reach people looking for tech jobs.
2. You post an small ad specifying the role in the most vague and unappealing terms.
3. There is some weird and inconvenient way to apply (e.g., fax- or snail-mail-only) that goes to /dev/null.
You can argue that it follows the letter of the law, but as a practical matter, the outcome is always that there are no US-based applicants for any H-1B SWE role, so something is wonky, right?
Here's one for Android Developer.
Must apply by snail mail.
If only they made a device (with an OS perhaps) where one could apply to such things electronically.
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow. I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
It's a lot less accounting work to have most of your workers in the same state. Imagine single workers or small groups in many different countries.
For instance, what labor laws apply? And who enforces them? And how, given parties in two different countries?
Does the company want to subject itself to some arbitrary country’s tax man or labor law enforcer prosecutions? Does the employee want to work under effectively zero labor protection? Possibly, but rarely.
It’s not even always possible, it’s very complicated to work remotely in France, for instance. The state cracks down on one person one client companies, and EoRs beyond being impractical (as they must adhere to drastic labor laws compared to the US) are in a legal gray zone.
The laws of the worker's locality is generally how it works. In the film industry, a production company based in LA might do a shoot in NYC- they have to follow NYC's labor laws since that's where the workers are and the work is being done.
The workers at the home base in LA have the LA laws applied to them.
>And who enforces them?
The local government.
The company has to adhere to labor laws in foreign countries (most likely plural if this is a general policy). That’s quite the overhead and opens you up to legal trouble.
The employee has to trust their government can prosecute or otherwise coerce a foreign company with no entity on their territory (otherwise they’d just get hired normally through the subsidiary).
LA and NJ remain two states of a common country and I'm sure that simplifies a lot of things.
Although none of this applies if the company is a multinational with offices in the employee’s country. But then that is offshoring rather than remote work.
If you bring them to America you've basically created a worker who is dependent on staying employed with you in order to keep their place
* same timezone
* easy to verify who is actually working on your system -- on the other side of a B2B VPN you never really know...
Any tech savvy person in NYC or SF would not be scouring newspapers for tech jobs and even if they are, they are most likely to be H1B or Greencard themselves.
A small town newspaper may actually make people apply to those roles.
But either way, people who likely to come through these ads can be easily disqualified just by adding a few technology stacks