I believe the typical solution for the paperwork problem is hiring people as freelancers/contractors. From the company’s perspective they’re a vendor that sends

I believe the typical solution for the paperwork problem is hiring people as freelancers/contractors. From the company’s perspective they’re a vendor that sends an invoice, from the worker’s perspective they’re a business handling their own taxes and whatnot. This works extremely well and everyone is happy. Even a low US salary is often huge by local standards and more than makes up for the overhead of running yourself as a business. Some countries even incentivize this. In Slovenia for example (where I started my career with this exact model), your effective income tax is 5% if you’re a solo business making under $100k/year. Typical local engineering salaries are $30k by comparison.