Contractor vs. employee is not as huge a logistical nightmare these days if you are confident you really want to pull someone in and they're amenable, you can a

Contractor vs. employee is not as huge a logistical nightmare these days if you are confident you really want to pull someone in and they're amenable, you can always pay companies like remote.com to be the employer of record and handle the international stuff for you. It's expensive but not egregiously so compared to tech salaries, and they really do handle most of the time-consuming and messy stuff involved. You are still going to be constrained by the more or less business-friendly laws that various countries impose, in terms of it potentially being difficult to fire people, having long notice periods, various taxes and benefits that are mandatory, etc., but at least you don't have to actually incorporate. I definitely agree re: language and async headaches. I won't work with shops that route all comms through a PM anymore, that usually means that the devs don't speak much English and the code quality is going to suffer due to poor naming conventions and lack of quality tech documentation.