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Ask HN: What prevents a company from hiring remote employees internationally?
I've been looking at remote opportunities and realized that a huge portion of companies hiring remotely requires you to be in certain regions (US, EMEA, APAC) — fully international remote is rare. Personally, I'm interested in "remote ok" startups (YC-backed & otherwise) but I'm outside of their specified regions and hesitant to reach out because of that.
It's puzzling to me because I've been successful in previous fully international remote roles (& have lots of experience building remote workflows), so I'd like to understand the motivation behind why and identify potential solutions to enabling it, as a thought exercise driven by curiousity.
From my perspective, there are a few barriers to this:
- Timezone. This is a huge one when it comes to synchronous communications, especially if you're in the driver's seat (as a team lead etc.) Disparate timezones between team members can break a team's velocity if you're not built to be fully asynchronous from the ground-up, which IMO requires a cultural shift in communications (moving towards async comms where meetings are kept to bare minimum and/or only used for social face time). What can we do to make the switch to async comms easier?
- No "human" touch. Socializing is critical because humans have an innate desire to connect; nothing can replace real-world connections. This is why off-sites exist for remote companies. They're way easier to arrange when your team isn't spread across continents, and arranging for international off-sites can be cost prohibitive as a startup. I believe there is nothing we can do to replace that human touch (not even the metaverse), so what can we do to make travel planning for companies easier and/or less costly?
- Difficult to figure compensation scale. Remote roles typically peg compensations to CoL (Cost of Living). The typical setup I've seen is applying a CoL multiplier to the base comp. for the role and tacking on +/-20% for competitiveness (or as an "error correction"). How can we help them make these decisions easier?
- Lack of legal presence. Having no legal entity in the country you're hiring in is a non sequitur, and setting up a legal entity per-country-per-hire is not scalable (beyond setting up the entity itself, you need to be aware of local labour laws, your tax obligations, insurance, etc.) I think Deel (https://www.deel.com/) has already solved this.
- Compliance & regulations. The company may be handling sensitive data and/or has PCI/HIPAA compliance obligations. Or it may be a government organization where security/background checks must be performed. Systems/data access may also need to be scrutinized in situation of audits and documented ahead-of-time. Not much we can do here and I think it's a question of risk, so no international remote is probably for the best.
I'm sure I'm missing something important. What do you think?
(edit: formatting)
(edit2: fix typo & re-phrase)
(edit3: typo)
- ohadron 4y agoI think you listed most of the important issues. From a company standpoint, being fully-remote is already a non-conservative approach and minimizing risks by only hiring in a certain region makes sense. Your talent pool will stop being a constraint anyways so why add more complexity. One more thing I'll add to this list is culture and language. Even if on paper everyone speaks English, communication is much easier when everyone speaks the same accent / dialect / local non-EN language.
- jstx1 4y ago> One more thing I'll add to this list is culture and language. Even if on paper everyone speaks English, communication is much easier when everyone speaks the same accent / dialect / local non-EN language. Accent consistency isn't the case even if you're hiring from only one country. The level of English is a legitimate concern but expecting everyone to speak the same accent is weird.
- badpun 4y agoThere are probably also legal risks. The company does not want to hire lawyers to figure out the contract and copyright laws in a foreign country. But, it also does not want to find out that he retained some right to the code he has written and may have some valid claims to it after being let go etc. This can also hurt due diligence when selling out or having the next investment round. For example, I was once working remotely in a US startup from Poland and they promised me stock options, but later rescinded it, citing the lawyers as the reason (I got a raise instead).
- j16sdiz 4y agoLocal Tax and Employment law
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jbn 4y agotaxation, one needs to have a local entity that is the employer of record and pays all local employment taxes (either that, or the employee establishes a one-person local company that sells services to the remote company). Each country will want to collect its taxes (and sometimes the remote country will also want to collect taxes). Each country is different, and tax treaties vary between each pair of countries..