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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I am from brazil, and I wonder why noone want to hire me remotely (not even in Brazil!).

I just don't understand all those "US-only" hiring.

Hi speeder,

I have hired a number of devs in Brazil for telecommuting work in the past. We've done a fair amount of mobile dev, but mostly it's HTML / JS single load apps, not usually native iOS, and mostly apps, not games. I'm not sure if that would be a fit for you.

If you're interested, send me a resume please, and who knows? I may not have anything right now, but things come up here and there. Best of luck.

That is quite opposite of my skillset :P

I make apps, but I am focused in games, and I use C++, C, Obj-C, Lua, Java...

I don't know JS at all.

I'm not hiring right now (I'm solo) but like to have your resume... finding devs is hard, specially on latin america (is my impression a lot of latin america developers don't know about odesk and sites like that..)

Brazilian here. I think it just ain't accepted here yet. There is a strong culture that "if you aren't at your table, you aren't working". (when the employee actually just wants to take a walk to get fresh air and maybe solve the hard problems that need creativity...)

Have you tried writing to the companies who say "remote" in the "Who's hiring thread"? What do they say?

Many of those that say "remote" also specify that it is US-only.

I am wondering why.

And I don't tried to actually get hired yet (I have a startup, that yes, is running out of money, but no, I won't give up that easily :P)

But I am paying attention, as plan D in case my startup fails in plan A, B and C.

It's not so much the U.S. employment issues as it is the international/cross-border financial transactions compliance issues. Cross-border payments are generally subject to significantly greater (tax) compliance requirements and the penalties for non-compliance are generally steeper than they are for purely domestic compliance failures.

When you have int'l employees, you have all that plus the additional headache of figuring out which nation's employment laws apply to your employee, and when, and in what proportion. Thus, a US employer might have to pay FICA/Social Security for a foreign employee, or it may have to pay the foreign nation's simlar such employment/payroll taxes. The fees for the legal/tax advice could easily be a multiple of the foreign employee's salary, as could the penalties for non-compliance.

It's much less paperwork and trouble hiring somebody who has a U.S. work permit when you're a U.S. company. No worrying about e.g. Brazil's employment or tax laws. That's basically it. Boring and unfortunate, but true.

It is a much better set up if the overseas worker can set up their own company, especially in the case of Brazil. Then the US company does not need to worry about any of this, they simply wire (via SWIFT) payments monthly, for example, and there is very little overhead to the US company.

In the case of Brazil, the worker is also better off in this set up in general, as they'll end up paying a corporate tax rate, which will be much lower.

In theory this seems like an excellent idea. But in practice its a bad idea, for the very same reason as doing this for all your US employees is a bad idea. Generally if a person works exclusively for a company on an ongoing basis then they are an employee in the eyes of the law.

Yeah I've even seen pushback hiring from additional US states as there is more paperwork if the company doesn't already have employees there.

Hired as an employee - yes.

Hired as an independent contractor - no. Then the boring bits are to do with the independent contractor who has to just satisfy the hiring company they are compliant with Brazilian laws

I'm hardly an expert in Brazilian law, but in e.g. the Scandinavian countries, the company must register itself if it is paying more than one such contractor, i.e. paperwork. I'm sure there are other compliance issues judging from how adamant virtually every U.S. employer is that their candidates have U.S. work permits.

I work from the UK for a US company. They are not registered here, I had to fill in some forms with the US IRS but apart from that it was plain sailing.

Job advertised on LinkedIn, Interview on Skype, contract by email, never actually met my co-workers. Its the future folks !!

What about oDesk? It's as simple as using your credit card.

Could you please link to the "Who's hiring" thread, I can't seem to find a recent one and I'd like to take a look, thanks.

Just search "remote" in http://hnhiring.com/

I did not know this existed =| Seems like alot of companies are definitely jumping on the bandwagon now

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

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